Crime fiction in 2015: the rise of the Girl that could be any of us

The blockbuster successes of Girl On a Train and Gone Girl before it underline a desire among female readers for stories that speak to their experiences

Over and over again, in Wilkie Collins’s wildly popular sensation novel The Woman in White (1859), the titular female character emerges from nowhere to place her hand on the male hero’s shoulder. This, the literary critic DA Miller calls “the primal scene” of the novel, the one it “obsessively repeats and remembers”. Each time, the gesture sends chills up characters’s spines and thus our own. We the readers are infected too.

Paula Hawkins’s The Girl on the Train, crime fiction’s breakout success of 2015, offers up a similarly potent primal moment: the recurring image of a woman outside looking in, or a woman inside looking out, through train windows, through patio doors, down into the dank mouth of an underpass. And she is always looking at another woman. Both the voyeur and the surveilled leave the encounter feeling watched, scrutinized, judged. The image repeats itself so many times, across all three of the book’s female narrators, that it begins to have a contagious effect on the reader, evoking the feeling of someone looking over one’s shoulder as one turns the pages. Watching, judging.

Continue reading...