Nine of 10 UK bestselling paperbacks feature a murdered woman
I mean, yes, but on the other hand I bet anyone who could be arsed to go through the data would find this is a pretty standard week in popular fiction.
I'd also bet there are weeks when a man is murdered in every top ten book. We really like murder in our entertainment.
I can 't be doing with that any more. One of the many joys of the aussie tv show Deadloch is that men are killed instead of women. So refreshing! :D
I'm about 50/50 in my murder victim selection. Try to keep it fair.
Nine out of ten bestselling novels in UK have one thing in common: a woman is murdered. www.theguardian.com/books/2026/j...
Pretty much the same in TV drama .
Also, all the victims were wearing matching underwear.
It's why I've given up on crime drama on the telly. I used to love it, but no longer. I realised that women were getting murdered at a rate of knots and that in no time at all I'd forgotten which drama was which anyway, so formulaic is it. None of the stories stuck 1/2
A good point, last year in the UK the proportion is 58% men, 42% women!
Worse is that fact that if the women is raped and murdered she has a serious character flaw or has done something bad - if a female victim is feared abducted by a sexual predator but is 'good' she will be rescued untouched or died accidentally. Common in films too - taken is the worst
Try reading historic fiction set in England, the treatment of women is evil and although fiction you know the writer has done their research.
I feel like The Salt Oracle is pulling its weight in redressing this problem tbh Body count: high Gender bias: 100% men Sorry my dudes, I guess you just make good plot devices, what's an author to do? 🤷🏽♀️ www.theguardian.com/books/2026/j...
Look, if something bad doesn't happen to the men, what will drive the protagonist?!
Who am I to argue with the author? [toddles off and orders the book]
Gender parity of deaths in novels is a misleading statistic. Internet Ghosts Wilson, who has killed 27 million male characters, is an outlier but, tbh, should honestly be counted.