The missing woman

The missing woman has been a hallmark of the psychological suspense genre since Gillian Flynn typed ‘The End’ on the final draft of Gone Girl. In the ensuing 12 years, some of the biggest books in the genre have used the trope in innovating and twisty ways including Paula Hawkins (The Girl On the Train), Lisa Jewell (The Night She Disappeared), Liane Moriarty (Apples Never Fall), Megan Miranda (All the Missing Girls), Riley Sager (Lock Every Door), Mary Kubica (The Good Girl), and countless others.

As a Black American woman who’s a long-time crime fiction lover – domestic suspense is often at the top of my To Be Read pile – I was desperate to see characters who looked like me, my mom, sisters, aunts, nieces, and friends.

Though no one’s done a formal study on why Black women are literally missing from the suspense genre, I have my own theories. There’s the bigger issue of a glaring lack of diversity in publishing overall, but there’s also the issue of domestic suspense tropes. Elements like unreliable narrators are going to be viewed differently when it’s a person of colour.

Even with putting as much thought as you can into your book, you also must take into account that people will bring their own perceptions to what they read. Race makes people uncomfortable in ways that they may not even realize. We often hear someone claim they didn’t find the character likable or, my favourite, they just ‘couldn’t connect’ with the character.

(As another Black crime writer once told me, it’s interesting when people can connect with wizards and aliens but struggle to find ways to connect with a fellow human being.)

So when it came to crafting my own version of the classic Missing Woman novel, I factored two things in particular – culture and genre tropes.

A plot twist

No matter your background or what you’re writing, you should always aim to put your own twist on a topic. Think of your favourite book or movie. Now think about how the circumstances would be different if it happened with someone else. A grown man hitting a child is going to be a different scene than a grown man hitting another grown man. Or a man walking down a deserted street is going to behave differently than a woman – and the audience is going to perceive it in a different way. And a Black person in America might have a different respons