Nine out of ten best-selling novels in the UK have one thing in common: the murder of a woman | books

Nine of the ten best-selling books in the UK this week have one thing in common: the murder of a woman.

Novels appearing in this week’s Sunday Times bestseller list include The Secret of Secrets, Divorce, Names, A Family Friend, The Widow, Impossible Fortune, The Marked Man, My Husband’s Wife and Pauline the Unfaithful.

While the titles range from historical fiction, domestic noir, and police procedural, each focuses on the death of at least one female character.

Only the novel “The Correspondent”, which talks about the art of writing letters, breaks this pattern.

The trend was highlighted on Instagram by author Wendy Jones, who wrote: “So 84% [sic] Among the books people bought and read in the UK this week included a woman being murdered for entertainment. What’s going on here?”

The focus of currently popular narratives on femicide may be striking, but it is not a new literary phenomenon. From the gothic suspense of Daphne du Maurier to the psychological thrillers of Gillian Flynn, the murdered woman has long been one of fantasy’s most enduring plot devices.

Flynn’s Gone Girl, published in 2012, helped propel novels centered around murdered or endangered women into one of the most commercially successful genres, with publishers spending much of the next decade searching for the next sexy “girl” novel.

But why does commercial fiction keep coming back to the same story? Critics say that repeatedly turning women into victims threatens to normalize violence against them. However, the irony of the genre is that women are also its biggest consumers, with some seeing its appeal as a way to address real-world concerns.

Crime writer Mel McGrath has written that the genre has, in some ways, moved on from the time of male authors like Raymond Chandler and Mickey Spillane mainly killing women so that the men who investigate their deaths can become heroes. “Reading crime novels written by women remains a powerful feminist act,” she said.

Crime writer and critic Laura Wilson has explained that domestic noir is so popular at the moment because it reflects “some very real fears.”

“Female homicide victims are much more likely to be killed by people they know, such as intimate partners or family members, than male homicide victims, who are more likely to die at the hands of strangers,” Wilson said. “Every survey ever conducted on the subject indicates that women account for the majority of crime novel sales.”

Novelist Denise Mina traced this appetite to 18th-century London newsagents, who found that made-up crimes sold copies as long as the victim bore a certain profile. “The trope of the dead woman, especially the beautiful, virtuous white woman, has sold stories for centuries,” she said. “Fake stories always show this kind of victim.”

But Mina resisted reading appetite as evil. “This is what people want to read about, but perhaps not because they want to hurt such characters, as much as they want to save them. The narrative thrust only works if the reader cares deeply about what happened.”

American criminologist Scott Boone, author of Why We Love Serial Killers, has made a similar argument about true crime. Boone said many women told him they listened to true crime podcasts and documentaries to get “tips on how to protect themselves from attacks by strangers” as well as “how to spot red flags of sociopathy” in potentially dangerous men.

For crime writer Lori Rader Day, the genre’s function is closer to therapy than titillation. “Crime novels are the social novels of our time,” she said. “Although violent crime may be at its lowest levels in recorded history, crime novels make us worry about the state of the world somewhere to go safely.”

The traditional crime novel ends in less than 400 pages with the mystery solved and order restored, “not at all like an actual death,” which is exactly why it’s so comforting, Rader Day said. She said craft and culture explain why the victim is often a woman.

“Most readers, most consumers, are women too, so if a writer wants to expose anyone’s fears, casting a woman is a good choice — the worry of becoming a victim themselves,” she said.

But she was more forthcoming about what the victim often looked like. “A beautiful woman. Thin. Blonde or redhead. Madonna or sex worker. The beautiful dead girl is a stand-in for the innocent victim, without the bother of having to turn the victim into a person. It’s a kind of reductionism that works in large part because of all the garbage we’re still stuck in our belief system, like racism and misogyny.”

Not everyone agrees that this species needs defense. The Stanch Award, launched by writer Bridget Lawless, aims to reward thrillers in which “no women are beaten, stalked, sexually exploited, raped or murdered.” But it was met with anger from authors within the genre.

Val MacDiarmid said she was “dismayed at being lumped in with the rude, incompetent and violent pornographers”, while Sarah Hillary described the award as “the least pro-feminist thing imaginable”.

For crime writer Sophie Hannah, avoiding violence altogether misses the point. Writing in The Guardian, Hannah said that brutality “is not the same as writing about brutality. If we cannot prevent human beings from viciously harming each other, we need to be able to write stories in which this harm is exposed to psychological and moral scrutiny, and is punished.”