Given that she writes regularly about gangland executions, domestic violence, child prostitution, torture and murder, Martina Cole’s novels are clearly not for the faint-hearted. But that has hardly been an impediment to her career. In fact, last year, Cole was the United Kingdom’s biggest-selling hardback fiction writer, after years of epic sales. Her most recent novel, Close, is based on rival criminal gangs battling it out in the East End of London. ‘I write about what I know,” she tells me, ‘about the people I grew up around in the East End. I’ve had that life; known people who have gone to prison.”
Cole isn’t the only woman making a killing from crime fiction. More than half of all novels in the genre are written by women, and their books are most popular with a female audience — which is useful for the authors, since women read considerably more books than men. Last year, a survey in Woman & Home magazine bolstered the notion that women nowadays prefer blood and guts to hearts and flowers. Half of the respondents said the crime thriller was their favourite fiction genre, with science fiction and romance the least popular.
Female crime writers are no less brutal than their male counterparts. Mo Hayder’s The Treatment, for example, features a deranged killer who forces a man to rape his own child; Red Dahlia by Lynda La Plante is a story about the torture, murder and dismemberment of several young women, and Two Women, the book that catapulted Martina Cole to international success, contains some of the most graphic scenes of domestic violence I have ever read.
Given my work as a feminist activist and writer, you might expect me to hate the crime genre. I have spent the whole of my adult life fighting male violence, and much of my work involves researching topics such as rape, child sexual abuse, pornography and murder. I talk regularly to women who have survived sex attacks, and have had to look at crime-scene photographs showing mutilated corpses of women who have been raped, tortured and murdered. It was as a direct result of the hideous brutality of a serial killer — Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper — that I became a feminist in the first place. Yet, when it comes to fiction, the serial-killer genre is my favourite.
As one of Britain’s bestselling crime writers, Val McDermid believes that reading and writing violent fiction is about admitting the existence of inhuman cruelty, and examining its causes and consequences. ‘Women are far more in tune with violence than men,” she says. ‘As a result of 24-hour news, we are more aware than ever before of the atrocities that are happening to women all over the world, and, to make sense of what is going on, we turn to art and fiction.”
Many writers I interviewed for this article were critical of what they called the ‘pointless violence” they often find in crime novels written by men. ‘I draw a particular distinction between violence that is gratuitous, and violence that is meaningful,” says McDermid. ‘In some crime novels [by men], the victims are one-dimensional characters who merely exist to be slayed.” McDermid writes to entertain, but also hopes that her books will, in some way, open the readers’ eyes to how and why the atrocities she describes have occurred.
Denise Marshall deals regularly with tales of extreme abuse in her daily life, running an organisation that helps women to escape domestic violence and rape. But after years of reading violent fiction, Marshall decided to write her own story, based on the prolonged torture and murder of a child.
‘Reading violent fiction affirms absolutely what I do as a feminist to challenge sexual violence,” she says. ‘Good female writers provide us with the opportunity to feel the awful effects of such abuse, and to empathise with the victims.”
New crime writer, Tana French, whose forthcoming novel In the Woods is a dark psychological mystery, believes that women make good crime writers because we ‘are made aware of the constant threat of violence in a way that men are not … From childhood we know that there are people out there for whom [our sex] is enough to transform us from a person into prey.”
As a female author, says French, it makes complete sense to write crime novels, as they are a way of understanding the danger that lurks around us ‘every time you walk home alone at night, every time a stranger asks you for directions on a deserted street, every time you’re home on your own and there’s a strange breeze moving through the curtains”.
Then there’s the fact that, as Jo-Ann Goodwin points out, ‘women have historically done the dirty jobs, wiping the blood, snot and mucus of the wounded, sick and dying”. Goodwin is the author of the novel, Sweet Gum, which focuses on a serial killer who targets lap dancers. ‘We simply have stronger stomachs out of necessity, and far closer contact with the secrets of the body. Women can’t faint at the sight of blood. They would spend several days a month on the carpet.”
For her part, Cole believes that one of the reasons why women love her books is that they often feel excluded from the predominantly male world of organised and violent crime. ‘Women are usually on the periphery of the criminal underworld. I take them into the middle of it.” There is a 96-year-old woman who comes to her book signings each year, who tells her: ‘You give me criminals and prostitution from the comfort of my own home.”
Some readers enjoy crime thrillers because they offer guaranteed comeuppance for the villains. Patricia Holmes, who has worked with female victims of sexual abuse for almost three decades, is an avid reader of violent fiction. ‘I see such books as validating my reasons for campaigning against male violence,” she says. ‘These books are written by women who understand the dynamics of male violence, so there is no excuse or cover-up.”
But when real life and fiction meet, it can be uncomfortable. Hayder’s breathtakingly gory debut novel, Birdman, published in 2001, was based on the hunt for ‘the millennium ripper”. In a storyline with frightening similarities to the current case in Ipswich, the ripper is behind the murder of five prostitutes, whose bodies are unearthed beneath the rubble of a landfill in east London.
‘In the light of the Ipswich murders, I do worry that reading about women being raped and murdered is voyeuristic,” says Holmes, ‘whereas I am often reassured that at least what I am reading about in these novels is worse than what happens to women in real life. Worse does happen though, unfortunately.”
It seems that violent fiction can be an odd sort of comfort to many female readers. McDermid was told a story by a librarian, about an elderly woman who came to visit her each week and would leave with a heavy armful of violent crime thrillers. One day she asked for a romantic novel instead.
When the librarian asked why, she replied: ‘My husband died last week. I don’t need those books any more.” It seemed she had been channelling her anger towards her husband into the books. ‘Perhaps reading them stopped her from killing him,” notes McDermid. Wouldn’t that be ironic? —