Why are women presented in such undesirable ways in violent/crime/thriller literature? And why am I allegedly a massive, righteous feminist for asking this question? For anyone reading this who doesn’t know me particularly well, my research focus for my PhD is a critical discussion of how the female gender is employed and manipulated in violent literature. For anyone reading this who doesn’t follow me on Twitter (and therefore doesn’t receive my weekly updates on what book I’m reading at the moment), I’ve recently finished Philip Kerr’s A Philosophical Investigation, and in a lot of ways, it was a good book. The novel is focussed around an alternative future (or at least, it was the future at Kerr’s time of writing; if memory serves right the setting is actually 2013), in which a Lombroso-inspired programme has been set up to identify men who are predisposed to violence - this is all done in the name of avoiding future ‘gynocide’ (the murder of females). The concept intrigued
Writing about writing, or trying to at least...