Alison Floor recently reported on a new literary prize for The Guardian. This prize, the Staunch Prize, would be awarded to mysteries and thrillers “in which no woman is beaten, stalked, sexually exploited, raped or murdered.” I’ve been thinking this over ever since I read the original article.
At first, I kind of liked the idea. I’ve given up on most mystery and thriller authors because I couldn’t handle the violence directed at women characters for no other purpose than to give another character a hit of determination or to just top other gory authors. Some of the things I’ve read in thrillers and mysteries have left me with an unpleasant feeling of queasy weltschmerz. But then I thought, will this really do anything to solve the problem? The prize is £2,000 (about $2,800), a good amount, but I don’t know that it will tempt genre authors away from proven, strong-selling plot tropes.
The Staunch Prize approaches the problem from the wrong angle. Instead of a prize for authors, I think we need better mysteries and thrillers that ask us to confront the effects of cartoonish violence in fiction by planting important questions into our brains. One of the best books I’ve read recently (and possibly ever, but it’s too soon to tell) is Catherynne Valente’s The Refrigerator Monologues. This book contains a lot of violence and sex—but that violence and sex serves a larger purpose. Because the “victims” get to speak for themselves, we are forced to confront the very plot tropes that Bridget Lawless, the founder of the Staunch Prize, wants writers to avoid.
Pointing readers in the direction of books that are more thoughtful and better written than the books Lawless and the Staunch Prize oppose will do more in the long run, I think. Good books with profound questions to think about have a way of sticking around longer than prize announcements. After all, I can barely remember who won the Nobel Prize for Literature a few years ago. Who’s going to remember who won the Staunch Prize when we’re talking about books like The Refrigerator Monologues?