This story is a couple weeks old, but I was just reminded of it again when someone checked out The Girl Who Played With Fire. I read The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo over the summer, and certainly wasn’t surprised when I learned that the original Swedish title is Men Who Hate Women.

The most interesting part of reviewer Jessica Mann’s resignation is her assertion that women crime writers are the worst offenders in terms of sexist violence. She’s British, though, so she says it in a much more polished way: “The trend cannot be attributed to an anti-feminist backlash because the most inventive fiction of this kind is written by women,” she claims.

She started her column this way:

When a female corpse appeared on the jacket of a crime-writing colleague’s new book, she pointed out to her publisher that the victim in the story was actually a man. Never mind that, came the reply, dead, brutalised women sell books, dead men don’t. Nor do dead children or geriatrics.

Huh. Cheers to Jessica Mann.