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“What is going on here?” asked the author Wendy Jones last week on Instagram. She was referring to the fact that nine out of 10 books on that week’s best-selling paperback fiction list in The Sunday Times featured a dead woman – or in Jones’s words “a woman being murdered for entertainment”. Only Virginia Evans’s The Correspondent, the winner of this year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction, was a dead-girl-free zone.
Is this a crisis? Should we be clutching our pearls in horror at the way the publishing industry continues to exploit the voyeuristic thrill of the dead woman trope in crime fiction in particular? Not exactly. Certainly the response from the crime world itself was distinctly muted. “Stupid,” wrote the crime author and The Traitors star Harriet Tyce on Instagram.
“Some weeks the list skews to thrillers, other weeks are more eclectic,” argues the thriller author Lisa Jewell. “To look at one week’s chart out of context is meaningless.” Others pointed out that, whatever point Jones was making, it didn’t take into account the fact that six of the nine books were written by women, and that crime fiction continues to be read much more by women than by men.
Some crime authors argue that crime fiction has moved on, dictated by trends and shifts in public opinion as much as by anything else – and by female authors who are determined to reflect the reality of gender violence on their own terms. “I always found the titillation of mutilated female bodies in Scandi noir very depressing and not very interesting,” the crime writer Ann Cleeves told me during an interview for The Telegraph in 2024. “Suddenly everyone was writing that sort of violent stuff, and it became very fashionable and every agent wanted you to write it. Now, thanks to Richard Osman, everyone wants a Christmas crime novel featuring a blazing fire.”
However, the unavoidable truth is that the dead woman trope is as ancient as literature itself. One of the first significant deaths of a young woman in the Western canon appears in Euripides’s final extant play Iphigenia at Aulis, first staged in 405 BC. The virginal Iphigenia, believing she is to be offered to Achilles as his bride, is instead sacrificed by her father Agamemnon in order to raise sufficient winds to allow the Greek troops to sail to Troy: his decision kick-starts the cycle of domestic carnage in Aeschylus’s revenge trilogy The Oresteia. If Helen’s face in Homer’s Odyssey launched a thousand ships, Iphigenia’s demise arguably helped launch thousands of young beautiful fictional female characters doomed to die in the service of a male protagonist’s (however brief) heroic story.
Yet Greek tragedy has another legacy. Crucially, the murderous horror at its heart often takes place within the home, be it Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex or Euripides’s Hippolytus and Medea. Clytemnestra avenges the death of Iphigenia, her daughter, by killing her husband Agamemnon in the bathroom. Such plays may draw, too, on the bloody havoc of war, but it’s the domestic battlefield that wreaks the greatest moral chaos. Similarly in many crime novels from the past 15 years or so, the murderer is not a random stranger or foam-mouthed serial killer but the very ordinary boyfriend or the husband – a reflection perhaps of the fact that 62 per cent of female homicides in the UK occur at the hands of a former or current partner. “Readers can more readily relate to domestic crime novels,” says veteran editor and crime author Maxim Jakubowksi.
“And 90 per cent of crime novels these days are by women and feature husbands who are not what they seem to be.” Nor, indeed, are many of the wives and girlfriends in the current glut of tricksy crime novels, which are often predicated on unbalanced psychological states, and spearheaded by the success of Gillian Flynn’s 2012 novel Gone Girl.
Throughout history, the image of the murdered woman in popular culture inevitably reflects the anxieties, tensions and biases of the age that produced it. One constant, however, is that it also invariably rams home the invidious idea of the passive voiceless woman. Bluebeard – one of literature’s earliest serial killers – keeps his dead wives hanging from freezer hooks, eternally preserved in eerie silence. Snow White and Sleeping Beauty are both beautiful young women condemned to languish in protracted deathly slumber after coming into contact with the folkloric equivalent of the date rape drug – a poisoned apple and a poisoned spindle, respectively. (In a mark of the sophisticated complexity of the fairy tale form, both “drugs” are administered by monstrous women.).
But it was the male artists and writers in the 19th century who really went to town on this idea, attaching an erotic frisson to the motif of the dead woman in their art and poetry. Through the male gaze of these artists, female suffering – no longer necessarily through violence but ideally by suicide or through elegant diseases such as consumption – became elevated into something almost desirable, as exemplified in Edgar Allen Poe’s now infamous statement that “the death of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world” in his 1846 essay The Philosophy of Composition. Poe was writing in defence of grief, but he was not the only man to exalt his own melancholy by objectifying the cause: the pre-Raphaelite artist DG Rossetti’s 1872 painting Beata Beatrix, inspired by the loss of his wife Elizabeth Siddal, depicts Dante’s dead Beatrice in a state of luminous physical perfection or, as Rossetti put it, “spiritual transfiguration”.
This idea of women perfected through death – particularly in association with water; think of Tennyson’s lovely Lady of Shalott, sent down a river to her doom – has had long lasting cultural resonances. One can draw a line between John Everett Millais 1852 painting of the drowned Ophelia – resting prettily in a stream, surrounded idyllically by equally miraculously preserved flowers – to the icily perfect face of the brutally murdered Laura Palmer (the ultimate modern dead girl), who is found wrapped in plastic and washed up on the shore of a lake in the cult 1990 TV series Twin Peaks. (One can’t help but also think of the grave of Princess Diana, located on a small island in the grounds at Althorp, the Spencer family estate.)
Elsewhere, death serves as an explicit expression of moral or religious purity. Think Helen Burns in Jane Eyre; Little Nell in Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop; Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Match Girl, whose spiritually consoling demise appears to obviate the grinding social inequities of her short wretched life. Think, too, of the women conversely punished because of their sexual power, from Medusa to Hardy’s 1892 novel Tess of the D’Urbervilles and perhaps most significantly Nancy in Oliver Twist – a supposed “fallen woman” (Dickens implies she is a prostitute) with whom we immediately empathise and who, in one of literature’s most shocking murder scenes, is brutally killed by Bill Sikes.
Yet Nancy’s murder was hardly an anomaly in an era with an unhealthy thirst for gory quasi-sexual spectacle. The Victorian era’s profound unease over female bodies found further expression in the feverish theatrics of the Gothic and the lurid excesses of the Penny Dreadfuls. The real-life murders of Jack the Ripper, meanwhile, mix sex and death in the most tawdry way possible, and continue to exert a prurient grip on the public imagination (I once saw original newspaper reports of the murders, featuring hand-drawn depictions of the women’s mutilated naked bodies, on the walls of a Shoreditch pub; indeed they might be there still.)
A similar unease arguably lingers on in some of today’s recent more explicit voyeuristic screen dramas, from films such as 1995’s Seven to TV shows such as Gillian Anderson’s The Fall (2013-16). Such examples don’t hold back from graphic depictions of mutilated female corpses, no doubt because the female body is physically more vulnerable and therefore such sights are, for some, perversely more thrilling. “There are clearly higher stakes around the idea of a woman being harmed because of social conditioning,” points out Jewell.
However, a close look at the Sunday Times list shows that most of the books featured do not serve up a dead woman for explicitly prurient entertainment at all. Philippa Gregory’s The Boleyn Traitor, a historical novel about Anne Boleyn’s sister – features the death of a woman presumably mainly because the historical record demands it. In Florence Knapp’s The Names – not a crime novel – the female death in question happens off stage. A woman has certainly died horribly in JK Rowling’s latest Cormoran Strike novel, The Hallmarked Man, but the novel opens with graphic descriptions of a man’s mutilated corpse. In John Grisham’s The Widow, the dead woman in question is 84.
It seems that Lisa Jewell is leading the sea change. “There are eight dead women in my latest book about a serial killer,” she says. “But there are no dead women at all in the book I have just finished writing for next year.”
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