Changing the Focus: Feminist Responses to Dead Girls and Serial Killers in the Bystander Narrative

Crime narratives that follow the conventions of investigation and the order/disorder nexus have been criticised on feminist grounds for their focus on the crime or criminal, the exploitation of the victim and their body, and a disregard for the broader effects of violent crime on a community. A pattern of crime novels, however, is moving away from a reliance on the investigator’s point of view to prioritise other perspectives within a crime story, namely those of bystanders, victims and secondary victims to crime. This article investigates how some writers are giving narratorial priority to these typically marginalised characters, who are often women and girls. By analysing the reflective and reflexive moves at play in crime texts Before You Knew My Name and Highway 13, this article shows how the authors of these texts deliberately invoke problematic tropes in order to highlight and subvert them, identifying how writers are updating the crime genre to highlight the humanity and lived experiences of victim-survivors and those who care about them.