Book Marks: Women suffer to lure readers

03 May 2016 - 09:39 By Andrew Donaldson

Herron's Slough House books - this, a kidnap caper, is the third, after Slow Horses and Dead Lions - have been hailed as the best British spy fiction of the past 20 years. JOKE AND DAGGERReal Tigers by Mick Herron (John Murray)Herron's Slough House books - this, a kidnap caper, is the third, after Slow Horses and Dead Lions - have been hailed as the best British spy fiction of the past 20 years. Slough House is where disgraced MI5 agents are redeployed to push paper until retirement. Sometimes, however, even the low-level spooks get mixed up in high-risk capers and the result is a mixture of Graham Greene and John le Carré - with Ricky Gervais thrown in for comic measure.THE ISSUEJames Runcie, author of the Grantchester novels (an excellent ITV series on DStv), has come out against "a dangerously fetishised trope", the rise of "misogyny porn" in thrillers: "Crime fiction is now so popular that writers have to construct ever more outlandish plots and inventive acts of violence to get attention. Much of the aggression, as in society itself, is directed against women - and some of us have had enough."How many books and television series have to begin with an attractive but hideously mutilated naked woman? Is it entertaining or in any way thrilling, Mr James Patterson, to kidnap, rape and torture schoolgirls and then feed a live snake into the anus of one of the victims? (Kiss the Girls). Do we really need the anal rape in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo?"It's not only male writers who're at fault. Women, Runcie said, were just as hideously abused in books by Val McDermid, Mo Hayder and Karin Slaughter.The latest Grantchester book, Sidney Chambers and the Dangers of Temptation will be published by Bloomsbury next month.ANOTHER ISSUEFarewell to Jenny Diski, who died last week of lung cancer, aged 68, just as the first glowing reviews of her new memoir, InGratitude (Bloomsbury), were received. Writing in the New York Times, Dwight Garner said it's a "different kind of cancer memoir and an almost platitude-free one".When she learned she had cancer, Diski turned to her husband and said, in front of her doctor: "We'd better get cooking the meth."She immediately regretted it; oncologists were probably subjected to the Breaking Bad joke on a daily basis. "I was mortified at the thought that before I'd properly started out on the cancer road, I'd committed my first platitude." (As Garner noted: "By now it's a cliché, when writing a cancer memoir, even to make a show of fighting the genre's clichés.")THE BOTTOM LINE"None of his old comrades were with him, none of the men with whom he had waged his initial political battles. None of them survived the four decades of his rule. Some of them had died natural deaths, but most of them he had killed. They do not even have marked graves." - Enver Hoxha: The Iron Fist of Albania by Blendi Fevzui (I B Tauris)...

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