Lust Murders

Carol Anne Davis

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Sex rarely features in crime novels - but I didn't know this when I started writing them. And so far no one has complained.

I was curious about the subject from an early age, probably because no one would tell me anything. At eleven the nurse gave us a little blue book about periods and told us to ask our mothers if we had any other questions. I had lots - but my mother would turn a glowing red and change the subject, whilst my father only communicated with his fists. So I turned to the library, seeking out the sex scenes in mainstream books and, for some unknown reason, westerns. When the librarian refused to let me borrow these adult books on my child's ticket, I simply read them within the library itself. Sex seemed to offer a different kind of life to the one I was living or rather enduring. People who had sex on the television looked relaxed and happy. At least they did in the few seconds before my parents exchanged horrified looks and switched off. A friend's dad left Harold Robbins style novels lying around and I read them avidly. They confirmed my suspicions - people that were good at sex were invited to parties on tropical islands and on private yachts.

At thirteen a local boy dared me to go to the indoor market and buy a top shelf mag. Worried about being challenged, I dropped some of the coins so was a few pence short but the shopkeeper gave me the magazine anyway. The boy and I went back to my bedroom and looked at the pictures. He lifted my top and immediately the room was heavy with the scent of ejaculate. I didn't fully understand what had happened but I had a feeling that I'd soon know a damn sight more than my repressed and puritanical mum. And so, when I came to write my first novel I just assumed that - amongst other things - it would explore sexual acts and the psychology behind them. Publishers said they were only taking on unusual books so I chose necrophilia as my subject. I'd always wondered why some men (and occasionally woman) desired a corpse rather than a receptive and responsive partner. After researching Shrouded I understood a lot more. The book reviewed very well - but I still met with some resistance from potential readers who seemed to think that the entire book was about sex with the dead. Trust me, I'm not fixated. One fan had a friend who refused to read it. The fan said, "Just read that section when Marjorie's having a discussion with a near stranger. Isn't it exactly how you've felt at times?" The friend agreed and read the book then went on to buy her own copy and another as a gift. Shrouded is about the legacy of abuse, about loneliness, about feeling different. The scenes set in the mortuary with Douglas, the necrophile mortician, are only a part of that.

I went on to write Safe as Houses and it also contained lots of sex - but this time it was both non-consensual and strongly sadistic. My main protagonist, David, is a sexual sadist who keeps girls captive. He's incapable of having ordinary sex with his wife. Strangely, it wasn't the extreme flagellation that upset one journalist but the masturbation scenes. "I think", she said coyly, "that some of our readers would find it difficult to read the scenes in which he has sex with himself."

My third novel, Noise Abatement, attempted to show how a rational man can be driven to kill by persistent unwanted noise. Stephen is a caring, straightforward man before he's driven mad by the neighbours from hell, so I made his sex life entirely normal. He and his wife enjoy the kind of erotic role play that thousands of long-term marrieds employ to keep their sex lives interesting. I thought that I'd made these sex scenes entirely legitimate but one reviewer referred to them as 'kinky and surreal'.

My fourth book, Women Who Kill: Profiles of Female Serial Killers is true crime and shows that fact is stranger than fiction when it comes to sex. Several of the women trembled with ecstasy whilst slowly strangling, injecting or poisoning their anguished victims. One woman undressed and sexually molested a girl during her death throes. Another videoed herself assaulting her younger female victims over several days. Those who killed as half of a couple clearly used the killings as an aphrodisiac, both during and after each deadly event.

I never want to be one of those writers who puts in gratuitous sex scenes to pad a book out. But I don't think there's anything wrong in exploring arousal within a realistic crime novel or a true crime text. Many crimes are classified as sex crimes, though the motive is usually power as well as lust. After all, in physiological terms most people obtain as much pleasure from masturbation as from intercourse. Sex with a partner is desired for all sorts of other reasons - to alleviate loneliness, to conform, to share pleasure, to feel superior to others who aren't enjoying a similar congress. Or, in the case of a serial killer, sex can be used entirely to debase the victim, which is why they prefer sodomy to vaginal intercourse.

My next novel looks at sex as a weapon and deals with an often-misunderstood type of crime.