Title: Murder, she wrote | Crime fiction | The Guardian
Headings: Murder, she wrote
Crime fiction
Murder, she wrote
Julie Bindel
Many of the most gruesome crime thrillers are written by women - and lots of us love to read them too. What attracts us to these violent stories, asks Julie Bindel

Content: I write about what I know," she tells me, "about the people I grew up around in the East End and Essex. I've had that life; known people who have gone to prison." Cole isn't the only woman making a killing from crime fiction. Over half of all novels in the genre are written by women, and their books are most popular with a female audience - which is useful for the authors, since women read considerably more books than men. Last year, a survey in Woman & Home magazine bolstered the notion that women nowadays prefer blood and guts to hearts and flowers. Half of the respondents said that the crime thriller was their favourite fiction genre, with science fiction and romance the least popular. Female crime writers are no less brutal than their male counterparts. Mo Hayder's The Treatment, for instance, features a deranged killer who forces a man to rape his own child; Red Dahlia by Lynda La Plante is a story about the torture, murder and dismemberment of several young women;