It’s a man’s world, we just die in it

Christ Faust had a wonderful piece on women in crime fiction here that I’ve been meaning to post about for a long while. The whole thing’s great, but this caught my eye in particular.

[image error]

Women certainly have protective instincts, but the female urge to protect and avenge is usually more maternal than sexual. A murder victim seems helpless and childlike, qualities that have little power to arouse standard female desire. On the other hand, I don’t write about “standard” females. Since I love a challenge, I decided to see whether I could find a way to reconfigure the Jasmine Fiore story. I started sketching out the bare bones of a narrative about a sexy male victim and an obsessed female investigator.

The cop is the first one on the scene, and she can’t get the images of the violated body out of her mind. She finds herself spending way too much time in the young man’s apartment, going through his things and consumed by every little detail of his short life. She finds nude photos, even an explicit video of the young man and his new wife. The video features scenes of bondage and submission, which the cop finds especially arousing. The images of his bound body in the video become tangled in her mind with those of his corpse. Driven by guilt and shame, she works night and day on the case, determined to find his missing, possibly murderous wife and bring her to justice. To punish the killer, punishing herself by proxy.

But would anybody buy that book? Would you?

The rest.

I’d buy the hell out of that book. I’d take notes on that book. In fact, that sounds like one of the greatest books ever written, so I say all of us start begging Ms. Faust to write the damn thing right now.