For a long while now, I’ve been toying with several ideas for stories. The first was about femicide – how many murders of women have gone unreported and/or unprosecuted over the years? Around the time that I was reading Caroline Criado Perez’s brilliant book, Invisible Women, which highlights gender inequality in just about everything, from health outcomes to crash-test dummies used in car-safety research, thirty-three year-old Sarah Everard was abducted and murdered by London Metropolitan police officer, Wayne Couzens. There was a national outcry about institutional misogyny in the UK’s police force, but Sarah’s murder and the ensuing coverage of it, where female protestors were arrested during peaceful protests, only served to highlight the ongoing problem of misogyny in society and the extreme outcome of that – femicide.
The charitable organisation, Womankind Worldwide, reports that 87,000 women were intentionally killed globally in 2017. The UN Assembly has said that, ‘Violence against women and girls is among the least prosecuted and punished crimes in the world.’ Unsurprisingly then, on their website, Womankind Worldwide reports that in Latin America, for example, 98% of femicide goes unprosecuted. The problem is echoed on all continents in honour killings, death of women and girls through neglect, abuse and trafficking, as well as the domestic murder of women by male partners or relatives. As we locked down for the first time in the UK during Covid, ten women were killed by men in the very first week alone, and calls to abuse hotlines skyrocketed. I read the harrowing census of women killed by men, put together by Karen Ingala Smith, which did the rounds on social media following the deaths of Sarah Everard and Sabina Nessa (also brutally murdered by a man). I knew there was a story to be told, here, and The Silent Dead does tackle the issue of women being preyed upon by hate-filled men.
Another phenomenon garnering press attention that causes me great concern is the rise of incel forums on the internet, where sexually unsuccessful, usually young men – incel stands for ‘involuntary celibate’, for those wondering about the acronym – gather to write hate-filled bilge about women. The narrative here is that women are at once both frigid and whores, sexually rejecting these socially incompetent men in favour of gym-honed jocks, who drive expensive cars and win at life. In these forums, there is much encouragement of posting members by their compatriots to rape and kill women.
Worryingly, some of the violence that has been espoused in incel forums has seeped into real-life events, as was demonstrated by the murder of six innocent young people by incel, Elliot Rodger (he then turned his gun on himself). There followed the murder of ten people and the attempted murder of a further thirteen (mainly women) by Canadian incel, Alek Minassian, who intentionally drove a rental van into pedestrians on a busy sidewalk. In these unregulated forums full of misogynistic chat, where Rodger is revered as the, ‘Supreme Gentleman’, impressionable, lonely young men find a dysfunctional and false sense of community. What starts out as posting about their dissatisfaction with their lives escalates into something far darker and more violent and real. What are governments and those who own internet-based chat platforms doing to mitigate this contagion of hatred? Seemingly nothing.
Only last autumn, girls on the dance floors of UK college Freshman discos were being jabbed in their thighs with hypodermic syringes full of Rohypnol. The girls were passing out in front of their friends, but mercifully were generally not abducted and sexually abused. In their online lairs, incels took responsibility for these attacks, apparently motivated by the sheer joy of terrorising female students. One thing’s clear: these incel groups promote the sexually motivated terrorism of women and girls, and should be regarded as a threat to national security by whichever country in which they operate. How is a mentally ill young man, harbouring violent thoughts towards women, any less at risk of being brainwashed to devastating effect than a mentally ill young man, harbouring violent thoughts towards other religions or ethnicities, who might be attracted to fundamentalist religious, separatist or extreme far-right causes? Most governments across the globe have been rightly quick to identify ISIS and the extreme far-right as terrorists, but they need to take incels, who loathe 50% of the population, more seriously as a threat to society.
It was these elements of femicide and incel groups that gave me the basis of my idea for The Silent Dead. I wanted to combine the two connected problems in a deadly serial-killer thriller. As a woman who has been divorced and a single parent for some years, however, I also wanted to explore the extra dynamic of single motherhood. My protagonist, Detective Sergeant Jackie Cooke, finds herself alone in early middle age and responsible for two young sons and a new baby. She is constantly juggling her motherly duty with her demanding job. The first victim in The Silent Dead turns out to be a woman Jackie recognises from her school days – also a lone parent. It was the vulnerability of single mothers that I wanted to explore in the novel, as well as femicide and incel groups.
So, that is what is behind this book. It’s always a challenge for an author to inject serious themes and contemporary pressing issues into a story, yet also ensure it’s fast-paced and satisfyingly twisty for the reader. Why not take a look at The Silent Dead and see if you think I’ve managed to pull off this ambitious balancing act?
Marnie Riches grew up on a rough estate in north Manchester. Exchanging the spires of nearby Strangeways prison for those of Cambridge University, she gained a Masters in German & Dutch. She has been a punk, a trainee rock star, a pretend artist and professional fundraiser.
Her best-selling, award-winning George McKenzie crime thrillers were inspired by her own time spent in The Netherlands. Dubbed the Martina Cole of the North, she has also authored a series about Manchester’s notorious gangland as well as two books in a mini-series featuring quirky northern PI Bev Saunders.
Detective Jackson Cooke is Marnie’s latest heroine to root for, as she hunts down one of the most brutal killers the north west has ever seen at devastating personal cost.
When she isn’t writing gritty, twisty crime thrillers, Marnie also regularly appears on BBC Radio Manchester, commenting on social media trends and discussing the world of crime fiction. She is a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Salford University’s Doctoral School and a tutor for the Faber Novel Writing Course.
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