This is a difficult post.
The Globe and Mail newspaper this morning mentioned that Stig Larson died on this day in 2004. I mentioned this to a man I know who is a reader - a man I like and respect - and he said, "I really liked his books." This brought about a discussion that has gotten me thinking.
Now, as you may recall, the writing community was quite split on Larson's book 'The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo' when it first came out. Most authors I know, at the time, thought it needed severe editing. But others were more concerned with aspects of the content.
I remember being at the bar of the Drake Hotel in Toronto, a notorious hangout for crime writers like ourselves, and hearing the following from a well-known male crime writer sitting beside me. "Stig Larson was one sick puppy."
I asked him to elaborate. After all, he was a male thriller writer of some note. Here's what he said:
"That graphic torture scene of a young woman? We all know how long it takes to write a book. He would have been weeks writing that chapter. What kind of sicko could spend that much time devising ways to describe that kind of horrific torture?"
His words really hit home with a lot of us, all of whom were published crime authors.
Another male author at the table said, "He glorifies violence against women."
I write mainly heists and capers. My Goddaughter series is about a mob crime family, so I'm not exactly a cozy writer. In my short stories, I can go quite dark, but never to the point of torture. I can't write grim novels - I simply can't spend day after day in a dark world. It affects me mentally.
Violence is absolutely at the core of a lot of crime fiction. It's not the topic of violence that was at issue here. What my male author friends at The Drake were commenting on was the stunning increase in graphic description of heinous acts in fiction. It's not offstage in any way, in these books. But I think what bothered me today is the following: my fellow reader friend didn't even remember the torture scene that has haunted me for years. ( I won't go into details here.) His memory of the series was that of a woman getting her own back. Fair enough.
So I asked him: "Would you be able to read a scene in which a child is tortured in that way?"
He said: "No, definitely not. I'd have to put it down."
Telling, isn't it? And that of course is the issue that haunts me today. Those books of Stig Larson - and some like it that are extremely graphic in their abuse and murder of women - have done well. Readers seem to accept it as a means to advance a plot in which - hopefully - justice will be done in the end. (One could argue that if you are a woman killed in a horrible way, there is no justice, but that's a topic for another post.)
The end justifies the means now, so to speak. Or is it deeper than that? Does this reflect a deeper societal desensitization, nonchalance, or fatigue when it comes to the topic of violence against women?
My friend is not the only one. At some point, and I think it took off with the publishing of the Stig Larson books, the fiction reading society moved to embrace a more graphic description of violence against women as entertainment. And I have to admit, this bothers me.
Comments welcome. I'm struggling with this one and could use others' insights.
Melodie Campbell writes about the mob in Hamilton Ontario, with tongue firmly in cheek. You can get her books at all the usual suspects.