9 of Britain's 10 Bestselling Novels Begin With a Dead Woman. I Asked Authors, Literary Experts and a Criminal Behavioural Analyst Why

As a woman, I'm never short on frightening moments: a man turning down the same dark street as me, unexplained sounds in the night, a taxi driver playing The Everly Brothers' All I Have to Do Is Dream on repeat all the way from Old Street to Peckham (true story). But nothing has given me the heebie-jeebies quite as much as an incident in 2017.

One of those irritating "Sorry we missed you" slips landed on my doormat, and when I went to the post office to collect the mystery package, I was met with a heavy box wrapped in brown paper, my name and address handwritten—an important detail I'd think back to later—across the front.

I hauled it home, intrigued by what might be inside. I hadn't ordered anything, and I wasn't working in journalism, so there was no reason for a publisher to have my address. I tore off the paper like a rabid dog.

I don't know what I was expecting to find, but it wasn't half a dozen hardback books. I slumped back. None of them looked like the sort of book I'd pick up.

"Well, what are they about?" my partner asked after I'd bemoaned the post office trip and my subsequent disappointment.

I scanned the dust jackets and realised that, while the covers bore little resemblance to one another, every book shared one unsettling thread: a woman had been murdered.

Panic settled in. Who had sent these to me? To my home address?

I fired off texts, but no one owned up. More confusing still, although each book had been bought new, they had different publication dates, making it less likely I'd won them in some online competition (my favourite form of procrastination at the time). And then there was the handwritten address. Surely, if this had been a prize, the packaging would have been more professional? Wouldn't there have been a note inside? An email telling me I'd won?

I never got to the bottom of it, but the memory surfaces from time to time, bubbling up like swamp gas.

I hadn't thought about that mysterious parcel for years. Then, this week, The Guardian reported that nine of Britain's bestselling fiction paperbacks begin with the murder of a woman.

How the "Dead Girl" Became Crime Fiction's Most Enduring Trope

The "dead girl" is one of crime fiction's defining narrative devices. Critics have long used the phrase to describe stories in which the violent death of a woman becomes the catalyst for someone else's journey, often a male detective's or journalist's, almost never her own. From Twin Peaks' Laura Palmer to Susie Salmon in The Lovely Bones, she has become one of popular culture's most enduring crime tropes. The Guardian's bestseller analysis suggests she isn't going anywhere, either.

The statistic struck a nerve. At a time when violence against women and girls has rightly been declared a national emergency, the idea that Britain's bestselling crime novels begin with murdered women feels, at best, uncomfortable. Yet women have long been among crime fiction's most devoted readers. At Bloody Scotland, one of the UK's biggest crime writing festivals, director Bob McDevitt says the audience has been "predominantly female" throughout the decade he has run it.

Perhaps the more interesting question, then, is why the "dead girl" has proved so enduring. Is her continued dominance really telling us something about what women want to read—or something else entirely?

For Gill Plain, Professor of English Literature and Popular Culture at the University of St Andrews, the premise behind the statistic is misleading. "The issue is not how many books feature murdered women," she tells me. "It's how those books deal with the murders."

In other words, the dead woman isn't simply a shortcut to shock readers. At its best, crime fiction uses murder to examine the society that produced it. "Crime fiction is a genre that mediates cultural anxieties," Plain explains. "It deals with what is happening in the world around us." Whether it's domestic abuse, coercive control or misogyny, the genre often reflects the fears simmering beneath the headlines, sometimes directly and sometimes by transposing them into another place or time.

Criminal behavioural analyst Laura Richards of the award-winning podcast Crime Analyst believes that appeal isn't simply literary—it's deeply personal. "When a woman is murdered by a man, we all pay attention," she tells me. "We want to understand what happened to keep ourselves safe." Women, she argues, spend their lives navigating the reality of male violence, making stories about violence against women feel less like morbid entertainment than an attempt to understand a danger they already recognise.

But if crime fiction reflects our deepest fears, it also offers something reality often cannot: answers. "Some books offer the satisfactions of closure and justice," Plain says. "In a disturbing world, in which so many certainties seem to be evaporating, it is reassuring to read about detective figures... who care about justice, and who at least try to achieve answers for victims and the bereaved."

Women Aren't Reading Crime Fiction for the Dead Women

Denise Mina offers a different perspective. The award-winning crime writer argues that the "dead woman" is hardly a modern phenomenon. "The Perfect Victim and the Less Dead," she tells me, "has been omnipresent since at least the 17th Century." Rather than being inherently sinister, she suggests the trope is rooted in storytelling itself. "A victim needs to prompt a sense of indignation profound enough to make the reader want justice."

She rejects the idea that women are reading crime novels because they feature murdered women. "Women buy and read crime fiction," Mina says, "but I don't think we do it for the dead women." Instead, she believes readers are looking for narrative momentum. "Crime fiction is supposed to be a fun, propulsive read that feeds the reader's need for justice."

That desire for justice may resonate particularly strongly with women. "Women see a lot of injustice in the world," Mina says. "Maybe it chimes with what we see versus what we're told we're seeing." In a way, this echoes Plain's argument that crime fiction doesn't simply reflect violence; it creates a space where readers can confront it, question it and, unlike in real life, often see it answered.

Jane Corry, author of My Sister's Secret, who previously worked as a writer-in-residence in a men's high-security prison and later led writing workshops in women's prisons, has heard similar sentiments from her own readers. At a recent author event, women told her they rooted for stories in which female protagonists "save themselves or get back, mentally or physically, at their attacker", because they found those stories empowering. Others said that when a woman is murdered by a man, they kept turning the pages because they wanted to see justice done. "If a woman is murdered by a woman," Corry adds, "there seems to be more of a 'why?' intrigue."

Charlotte Vassell, author of The Other Half and The In Crowd, believes the answer lies in what crime fiction has always done best: holding a mirror up to society. "Crime novels are existential," she tells me. "They're about the meaning of life. They're satire. They're social commentary. They're a way of dissecting society."

From that perspective, the prevalence of violence against women is perhaps less surprising. "Violence against women is one of the biggest issues in society," Vassell says. "If you're writing about society, then inevitably it's going to feature."

But she is clear that murder is rarely the point. Crime fiction, she argues, gives readers a safe space to examine uncomfortable realities—to explore power, prejudice and injustice from the relative safety of fiction. The murder may open the novel, but what keeps readers turning the pages is everything that follows: the investigation, the moral ambiguity, the characters and the questions the crime leaves in its wake.

Which leaves one lingering question: if readers aren't demanding stories that begin with dead women, why does publishing keep supplying so many of them?

What If Publishing Has Misread Women?

One publicist I spoke to told me about an author she represents who runs a bookshop, and, frustrated by the sheer volume of stories about murdered women, removed the shop's crime section altogether.

Crime writer Saima Mir shares that unease, but not because she believes readers have fallen out of love with crime fiction. "I don't think women are necessarily drawn to stories of violence against women," she tells me. "I think they are drawn to crime fiction, and currently, they are being offered femicide more often than not. If publishers offer alternatives, then I believe women would read them."

She believes the statistic says as much about publishing as it does about readers. Her debut novel, The Khan, centres on a woman who wields power rather than simply suffers violence. It took years to sell because publishers struggled to work out where it belonged on the shelf. It later became a bestseller. For Mir, that's proof readers are more open to different kinds of stories than the industry often assumes. She'd like to see more women who are "ambitious, dangerous, morally compromised and unpredictable", rather than existing simply as victims.

Yet Mir doesn't believe crime fiction itself is the problem. "Real life is messy, and rarely brings answers or closure," she says. "Writers weave stories on the promise that there will be some resolution. Killers are caught, baddies are found out. Real life rarely offers that."

Richards reaches a similar conclusion from the perspective of criminal justice. Crime fiction, she argues, offers "a beginning, middle and end... justice and accountability that rarely happens in real life."

Maybe readers aren't looking for violence; they're looking for resolution—the rare comfort of a world where somebody asks the right questions, the guilty are found, and the story makes sense, even if real life rarely does.