Women enjoy reading about the brutal murders of other women “at a safe distance” and particularly like it if the killer is also female, leading crime writers told a literary convention.
Crime fiction sells around 21 million books annually in Britain, and the audience of Bristol CrimeFest heard that the genre is getting increasingly gory.
Val McDermid, whose characters inspired the ITV series Wire in the Blood, said that “women are better at scaring us”. She added that women authors could write about violence from the inside instead of the men writing about it from the outside.
Crime writer and historian Ruth Dudley Edwards told the audience that the “stereotypical consumers of violent, cruel fiction are young women”. Jessie Keane, author of the Annie Carter series, set in gangland London, said: “Young women find it fascinating.”
“Maybe they feel they can examine violence in a safe way: they are seeing it at a safe distance.”
