Editor’s Highlights | Opinion and Analysis
19th Jun 2012
No Escape from the Beautiful Dead Girls
There are so many beautiful dead girls on TV. They’re everywhere, on every single crime drama: young, white, middle-class, blameless before they foolishly but innocently got caught up with the wrong person.
Usually the dead girl has been tortured or sexually assaulted. Sometimes one or more characters becomes obsessed with her – even falling in love with her. I don’t need to go into this in more detail, as sadly it’s a trope I’m sure you know well.
The thing is, I don’t want those beautiful dead girls – which I’ll call BDGs, just to keep things concise – in my books as well. This causes a problem for me: I like crime fiction, but rarely read it. I just can’t stomach any more beautiful corpses.
My favourite genre of crime is the lush, poetic, atmospheric thriller (note: I don’t know whether this is an actual genre, but I wish it was). If you have any recommendations in this genre, which I probably just made up, please let me know because I want to read them. I’ll start things rolling with my own stand-outs:
Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn
It’s years since I’ve read this, but it’s still etched so vividly in my mind. Camille Preaker escaped her Southern hometown to become a journalist, but a vicious double-murder gets her sent right back there to investigate.
Camille tries to deal with her emotionally manipulative mother and nymphet half-sister, while also covering the murders, but everything feels too close to home. The hot, dusty, claustrophobic atmosphere of small towns is evocatively drawn, and Camille – her body scarred with self-carved words – makes for a vulnerable but appealing protagonist.
One of the most absorbing novels I’ve ever read, with settings that feel so real I sometimes think I’ve really visited them. As a child, Rob Ryan went into the woods near his house with two of his friends. He came back; they didn’t.
Now grown up and a detective in Dublin’s Murder Squad, Rob still doesn’t know what happened that day – but when a young girl is killed near the same woods, he is determined to investigate. Beware: if you like plots threads to all be tied up neatly in a big bow, this isn’t for you.
A Child’s Book of True Crime by Chloe Hooper
This is Australian author Hooper’s debut, and it’s as erotic as it is creepy. In the former penal colony of Tasmania, Kate Byrne, a trainee teacher, embarks on an affair with an older man. The man’s wife is writing a true crime book about Ellie Siddall, murdered in the local area in 1983. Kate begins to identify with Ellie to the point where she is convinced that her lover and his wife are plotting to kill her.
The prose is dreamy, the characterisation is unflinching, and each chapter begins with an innocent-seeming chapter from a children’s novel – but these sections are the most chilling of all, exposing the darkness in childhood.
If you’ve read any of these, you may have noticed a problem: each one contains, as the victim, a BDG. With these books I am willing to overlook that for various reasons: the flawed, spiky, believable female main characters; the gorgeous prose; the mythical overtones; the way it knowingly plays on the BDG trope.
But I’m still looking for more. There must be well-written crime novels without a BDG as victim. There must, otherwise I’m swearing off the entire crime genre forever – well, after I get through Agatha Christie‘s back catalogue.
Am I just wishing for things that don’t exist? Or are there lush, poetic, atmospheric thrillers where I can get lost without fear that I’ll stumble across another mutilated girl?
Guest feature from author Kirsty Logan. Kirsty is currently working on her first novel, Rust and Stardust, and a short story collection, The Rental Heart and Other Fairytales. The issues raised in the article lead to Kirsty’s decision to write another novel, Little Dead Boys.
(Image via Michael Melchiorre)
P D James and Minette Walters spring to mind for lushness, atmosphericness and poeticism
Beautiful dead girls sell book unfortunately which is why they get published although I have heard one agent complain about the phenomenon. Scandinavian crime fiction can be more egalitarian, the excellent Woman with Birthmark by Hakan Nesser for example has a group of men being killed by a woman wreaking revenge. There are plenty more examples.
I personally find dead children, which is something that also sells books, a more distasteful phenomenon but again, it does depend how it is presented.
…would you prefer Ugly Dead Girls, then?
I hate to say it, but beautiful victims have always been more appealing both in terms of plot (eg. killer’s motivation) and to readers, possibly gaining more sympathy and intrigue. The tagline ‘She was beautiful. He was obsessed. So she had to die…’ is a lot more interesting than ‘She wasn’t anything special, she was, y’know, average. He killed her just because she happened to be in the way.’
I do understand what you mean, that you’d like to read well-written fiction that doesn;t resort to this lazy formula… but I think the problem is that you’re reading crime novels! I find the whole crime genre – writing about murders for entertainment – a bit sick and voyeuristic at the best of times, and what’s more in keeping with that than sexually depraved killers murdering beautiful girls?
… there are more choices than ‘ugly girl’ or ‘beautiful girl’.
Also, I totally disagree that beautiful = interesting. Interesting could be any one of innumerable qualities or characteristics, related to the killer or the detective or the theme of the book overall. ‘Beautiful’ is not a characteristic. ‘Beautiful’ is a description that doesn’t really go anywhere.
Becca, very few of the BDGs are killed because they’re beautiful, and often they’re killed for being in the way (for one example, see the recent US TV programme The Killing – she’s young and beautiful, but not killed for those reasons). Instead it seems to be a detail that’s used to make the death sadder. “She was so young, so beautiful, so full of potential, etc”, as if it’s somehow less sad for an average-looking person to die because they don’t have as much potential. It might be interesting if the author was using it to make a point about how we revere people after their deaths as we never do in life (as in, the woman was just normal in life, but in death she is beautiful). But this never seems to be the case.
For me, crime isn’t about murder as entertainment. It’s more about the psychology that leads someone to cross such a strict societal line, and also the psychology behind the detective or person solving the crime. I suppose crime novels are often about murders because that’s seen as the most serious crime of all, but for me the interest is not in the actual crime but in the reasons behind it, the investigation of it, and the effects on those left behind.
[...] stands for beautiful dead girl, and it’s a term I’ve just recently learned. If you think about it, lots of crime fiction involves the discovery of the body of at least one [...]