It’s not particularly pathbreaking of me, as a woman, to be writing crime. After all, some of the most famous crime writers in English have been women; Agatha Christie, PD James, Ruth Rendell, Gillian Flynn and JK Rowling most recently.
No, please do not swell up with indignation at my presumption, just yet. I am merely stating that I’m a woman too, like them. And since I have been asked about how it feels to be a woman writing on crime, I will say, I never really thought of myself that way while writing AKAU.
I go wherever the story takes me, and this particular one led me to a man being found inside a building lift with his head bashed in. (Is it my way of dealing with heavily suppressed rage against my neighbours? One will never know.) The uproar this murder creates, and the diverse ways it affects different residents of that apartment complex is the meat of the novel.
But now that I’ve had three paragraphs to think about it, I will say that my having approached the murder mystery genre from a human-interest angle says something about who I am and what I’m comfortable with as a writer. Why do I look at the whys more than the hows? Why do I focus on the psychology of all the characters involved rather than the make of the murder weapon (Was it a .45 colt revolver or a 24-carat gold-plated pistol of Russian make?) Why do I linger over the shattering impact on relationships rather than the velocity at which a character is thrown from the 8th floor? (Do these things even happen in ‘A Killer Among Us’? You’ll have to read it to find out.)
Could these choices be a fallout of my being a woman? There’s a chance. Though I have read a few thrillers by women which give you as much technical lowdown as your heart could desire.
I also find that compared to some (say) Nordic male crime writers, the women crime writers I have read soften their blows a little. The blood, guts, maggots, and deviancy that run riot through the pages of some books (an entertaining genre in itself if read in moderation, and meticulous in their realism) usually have masculine origins. I would much rather visualize a reader sitting curled up with a nice cup of tea and some chocolate cupcakes, smiling gently over the twists and turns of the plot, rather than gagging violently at the description of a heap of dead bodies in various states of disintegration. Again, I won’t stereotype all women crime writers as adorable little Miss Marple types, having dainty sugared biscuits and scolding their cats as they type out their mysteries. All I’m saying is, I am that kind of writer, and have consequently been told that my recent book can be called a ‘cosy mystery’, much to my delight.
What has definitely shaped my murder mystery as a woman, is the fact that I’ve made the three protagonists female. Being one myself, I can truly understand what makes these characters tick, despite the fact that they are from three different times of life and backgrounds. I am inclined to create a range of female characters who begin from flawed and annoying to truly ghastly human beings under a thin veneer of civilization. (Do you think I let out a spoiler right there? Not really.) They are a far cry from the one-dimensional, martyr-like, naturally-beautiful-but-does-not-know-it heroine, or blood-sucking, awfully evil harpy that one often encounters in popular fiction.
So, yes, on second thoughts, if my experience is anything to go by, women do write crime a little differently from men. Will that reduce the appeal of my books to a more universal audience? I don’t see why that should be! Apart from the vast readership for cosy mysteries, there are also those who need to soothe their frayed nerves after a particularly high-octane, testosterone-fuelled bout of maggoty murder mysteries.
And I shall, in the meantime, see about those biscuits and find myself a cat.
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