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).
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