3 de juliol del 2016

After Agatha Christie … female crime writers delve deep into women’s worst fears

[The Guardian, 3 july 2016]

Sarah Hughes

As Hollywood brings out two biopics of Agatha Christie, we examine the rise of ‘domestic suspense’ thrillers


From Raymond Chandler’s mean streets to Lee Child’s hardboiled tales of revenge, crime fiction has often been the preserve of lone men battling betrayal and seeking justice. In recent years, though, the genre has changed with the rise of the “domestic suspense” novel – the many “Girl” books with their unreliable narrators, creeping sense of unease, twisting plots and sly insistence that the home isn’t a haven but rather a place where anything and everything can go wrong.

Crime fiction, it seems, is increasingly a woman’s game. The year’s most eagerly awaited crime novels are written by women – from You Will Know Me by Megan Abbott to The Trespasser by Tana French; the bestselling debut hardback of 2016 so far is The Widow by Fiona Barton; and the forthcoming film adaptation of The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins, starring Emily Blunt, is one of the most anticipated movies of the year.
At the same time the grande dame of the genre is being given a fresh Hollywood outing with two rival biopics of Agatha Christie in development, with two of cinema’s hottest young talents, Emma Stone and Alicia Vikander, being lined up to star. And after the BBC’s adaptation of Christie’s And Then There Were Noneproved so successful last Christmas, the team behind that production are reuniting to film her much-loved legal thriller Witness for the Prosecution.
“It’s certainly a very healthy time for female crime fiction, but it would be wrong to suggest that women writers only discovered their dark side five years ago,” says Erin Kelly, author of The Poison Tree and co-founder of female crime-writing collective Killer Women. “Current stars such as Gillian Flynn and Paula Hawkins have their antecedents in Nicci French in the 1990s, Lois Duncan and PD James in the 1980s, Ruth Rendell in the 1960s and Patricia Highsmith before that.”
What’s happening now, Kelly argues, is that the publishing world has finally caught on to the idea that female crime sells. It is an argument the industry itself acknowledges.
“Readers of crime fiction are statistically more likely to be female,” says Sam Eades, senior commissioning editor at Orion imprint Trapeze. “So it’s no surprise that publishers invest heavily in female writers – who is better placed to explore the darkest fears of the female reader?”

Sabine Durrant, whose novel Lie With Me is out now, agrees. “When you go to crime festivals or bookshop events there are far more women then men,” she says. “Roughly 21 billion crime books are sold a year and 80% of those are bought by women.”
Yet away from the bottom line something interesting is happening: female-led crime fiction is taking the paranoia of our age and applying it to the place we should feel safest, the home.
“Crime fiction by women started to ascend post-2008 when the economy crashed, society cracked, people’s lives became unmoored and the post-9/11 feeling of togetherness and thinking there could be global order began to crumble,” says writer, editor and critic Sarah Weinman. “And I do think it will remain the case, though the psychological suspense stories have to be so outstanding to get attention.”
Megan Abbott agrees: “The business answer might be that women buy the most books, but I also think there’s a feeling among women that finds its echoes in current crime novels. These books are speaking to a growing refusal to be victimised and a need to explore the politics of the household.”
It is also true that the best of the current crop of female crime writers – Abbott, French, Cathi Unsworth, Attica Locke – are adept at creating a sense of unease from the most ordinary of situations. In Abbott’s latest novel, You Will Know Me, a Hawaiian-themed luau cook-out attended by the local gymnastics club feels pregnant with dread. Unsworth’s Weirdo taps into a small community’s fear of the outsider, while French’s Broken Harbour spins horror out of an Irish ghost estate, and in Locke’s The Cutting Season the heroine is haunted by the hungry ghosts of America’s slave-owning past.
These are crime novels but in a similar way to Flynn’s Gone Girl they are also imbued with a strong gothic strain, a sense that nothing can be contained and that horror is bleeding into all walks of the protagonists’ lives.
“What you’re seeing is a return to the psychological gothic,” says Ruth Ware, whose second novel, The Woman in Cabin 10, published this month, deliberately nods to Christie and the golden age of crime. “You can see Daphne du Maurier’s influence in so many of these novels – the lushness of writing, the emotion, the rollercoaster ride the narrator goes through. That is as much the focus of the novel as the mystery at its heart.”
Abbott agrees. “A fan of gothic romances would be entirely at home reading The Girl on the Train,” she says. “There’s an almost nightmarish quality to it. The narrator is so unreliable that everything takes on this strange almost Hitchcockian quality.”
There is also, she argues, a sense of an almost uncontrollable anger and fear under the surface. “It’s that idea that you feel so trapped you almost cry with frustration and pain.”
So do women make such good crime writers because their response is so visceral? Laura Lippman, the author of the bestselling Tess Monaghan series, whose latest standalone, Wilde Lake, is out this month, believes so. “Women think about crime in a very different way to men,” she says. “Most men don’t worry much about being crime victims whereas women think about crime in a very personal way. They know what it’s like to walk down a street at night and have to make a snap judgment: am I safe? Thinking about crime is very personal for women because they know what it’s like to be prey.”
Perhaps because of that, female crime novels are rarely concerned with likeability. “Women don’t try to write cool characters, more often than not imperfect characters are what appeal,” says Icelandic writer Yrsa Sigurðardóttir. It is a sentiment that found its echo in a recent article in the Atlantic which argued that women crime writers were successful in part because they had no need of heroes.
Certainly it is true that while even the most stoic male anti-heroes have softness at their core, female crime writers from as far back as Christie have not been bothered by how their leading ladies are perceived. Dorothy L Sayers spent much of Strong Poison dissecting the likeability or otherwise of her main female character, Harriet Vane, while one of the most striking things about the BBC’s adaptation of And Then There Were None was the way in which it reminded us that Christie was rarely cosy.
“For a long time it was fashionable to be dismissive of Christie,” says Lippman. “That’s largely based on a misconception that her stories are 1920s and 1930s versions of Murder, She Wrote. It’s a way of suggesting that women write silly, trivial stuff. The reality is that a Christie mystery is extremely difficult to execute well. It’s pretty easy to write about a serial killer cutting the left arm off every prostitute on the full moon but a close-circle mystery is much harder because the suspense is not will the killer act again but will they be caught?”
Although psychological thrillers remain in the ascendancy, Eades believes that a return to intricate Christie-style plotting is on its way, having recently signed Lara Dearman whose debut novel The Devil’s Claw is inspired by the grande dame. “Publishers have seen a resurgence of cosy crime novels, in part as a reaction to the popularity of the British Library crime classics series but also perhaps to cater for those readers who are growing tired of psychological suspense,” she says. “There’s something satisfying and comforting when we recognise the hallmarks of the great Agatha Christie novel. That’s why she’s endured.”

SIX CLASSICS

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926) / Agatha Christie
Christie’s masterpiece is a tightly plotted and tricksy novel with one of crime fiction’s best final twists.
In A Lonely Place (1947) / Dorothy B Hughes
Hughes’s elegant noir is a taut and gripping examination of masculine frailty and surprising female strength.
The Talented Mr Ripley (1955) / Patricia Highsmith
Highsmith’s likeable sociopath has you rooting for him even at his worst in this chilly tale of aspiration and death among the golden set.
A Dark Adapted Eye (1986) / Barbara Vine
Writing under a pseudonym, Ruth Rendell strips the female psyche bare in this dark tale of a woman hanged for killing her sister.
The Secret History (1992) / Donna Tartt
The original literary fiction/crime mash-up, Tartt’s tale of Greek students gone bad remains with you long after the final page.
Gone Girl (2012) / Gillian Flynn
The book that sparked the whole “Girl’”phenomenon, Flynn’s tale of marriage gone sour remains the one to beat.





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