imagine...: Season 31, Episode 3

31 - 3: Serial Killers - The Women Who Write Crime Fiction

Alan Yentob explores the enthralling world of female crime fiction in the company of some of its best-selling authors, including Patricia Cornwell, Val McDermid and Paula Hawkins - the newcomer whose The Girl on the Train was the breakout hit of 2015. While these writers stand on the shoulders of giants such as Christie, Highsmith, Rendell and PD James, their dark imaginings are more likely to have been nurtured at newsroom crime desks, in mortuaries, piecing bones of murder victims back together and in the bedrooms of modern marriages, where dark thrillers are sparked not by strangers in alleyways but by anxieties and paranoia much closer to home. Why are we so willing to be scared out of our wits, and why are women in particular so attracted to the thrills and comforts of crime fiction?