Clarice Starling, anyone? Fortunately, the mistaken rookie is oft-saved by the well-timed arrival of her older male colleague. She solves the case, but at some point her naivety and headstrong ways put her in the hands of the killer. She’s twenty years younger than the rest of the squad and graduated magna-cum-laude from Harvard, but she’s childless, single, and her disregard for union working hours and nosy-parker attitude just rub people the wrong way.
The woman who runs upstairs doesn’t exist, and not solely because 80% of the US population live in urban areas and therefore have a neighbor to call to for help-the woman who runs upstairs is a symbol of how the male gaze perceives a certain sort of woman-often young, always pretty-to be childlike, ditzy, and helpless. Little kids get to run upstairs without provoking my derision. No one is a) that lacking in common sense, and b) that ignorant of the horror film rules learned in Scream. Remember Lawrence Block’s Matthew Scudder, whose “intriguing” backstory features accidentally causing the death of a seven-year-old girl? A female hero, to point out a double standard, could never be so problematic without being seen as “unlikeable.” Hitting your ex-wife or killing someone is not, and never should be, an interesting character flaw. Even worse is when a male character otherwise written as “charming” has a murky incident of domestic violence in his past. “He cheats on his wife, but he has a heart of gold.” No he doesn’t. Have you ever met a guy in real life who cheated on his wife and had a heart of gold? It’s inauthentic boohockey and it must be stopped.
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I mean, is it plausible that every female police officer working a serial rapist case has a history of past abuse? And can’t we make one crime drama without an alcoholic detective? While I know cutting as we understand it in writing doesn’t require an actual knife, there are some sexist crime tropes that deserve to be put to a sharp and violent end.ġ: The lead male detective who is deeply troubled, but who we, the reader, are supposed to love. Yet still, certain tropes and stereotypes that smack of a more machismo past persist perhaps part of that DNA or at least hard to wash out, like blood on a motel mattress. Meanwhile the investigators who will eventually become the heroes of the piece are no longer the usual line-up of white, middle-aged males, although a pair of female police detectives is still hard to find. These narratives arguably make women central to the story, allowing for feminist discussions of rape that acknowledge subtler forms of assault as well as the most violent.
While rape has always been present in crime fiction, now rape, particularly stranger rape, BDSM-like torture, and domestic violence, has become central to the plot of many contemporary works of crime fiction. The genre’s DNA has evolved in the last five years, perhaps knowingly, in reflection of this audience. I am most certainly guilty of being a tiny slice of that statistic, devouring what likely amounts to thousands of hours of crime books, podcasts, television dramas and procedurals over the course of my adult life, as well as writing crime fiction. It’s no mystery that crime fiction readers are more likely to be women than men (by 57% compared to 39% according to a 2010 Harris poll).