If Sarah were in this morning, Jeffrey Trachtenberg’s weekend WSJ story on Lee Child’s legions of female fans would surely be one of her lead items. Child has sold 10.3 million copies of the first nine novels in his series of thrillers starring freelance man-of-action Jack Reacher, and if the membership ranks of his fan club are anything to go by, the audience is overwhelmingly composed of women.
“Booksellers believe Mr. Child may have tapped into the same audience that has devoured romance novels over the past 20 years, a genre that in recent years has increasingly included more violence and suspense [says Trachtenberg]. They say the 9/11 terrorist attacks, coupled with the war in Iraq, have changed what women are willing to read. ‘This is not a safe, happy time,’ observes Vivien Jennings, owner of Rainy Day Books in Fairway, Kan. ‘Women say they want sensitive men, but in a violent time they don’t want men taking a pea shooter to a gun fight.'”
And Child isn’t the only one to benefit from this trend, according to the piece, which cites Barry Eisler and Harlan Coben as authors who’ve picked up more women readers despite (or perhaps because of) their violent content. “We now have as many women buying the thrillers of Lee Child and Barry Eisler as women buying the books of Agatha Christie and P.D. James,” says one mystery bookshop worker. But perhaps that’s not the most apt juxtaposition—another question might be, are as many women buying Child and Eisler as are buying Janet Evanovich and Iris Johansen? And how often are they shuttling between camps, if at all?