Some do the deed with many tears,
And some without a sigh:
For each man kills the thing he loves,
Yet each man does not die.
Oscar Wilde
What makes a serial killer kill the thing he loves? Oscar Wilde’s quote from The Ballad of Reading Gaol came to mind when reading Gill Perdue’s novel
When They See Me, the second book in the Shaw and Darmody crime
series. Is the obsession with his victim or the very act of killing itself? They hunt their prey, like a love object, only to destroy it. But why? This paradox is at the heart of Perdue’s novel as she reminds us, the prey they seek is a person, and their obsessive fantasies result in murder. She takes pains to humanise the killer’s quarry, refusing to allow her readers to lose sight of them as people, retaking the power that the killer tries to steal from them in his warped imagination.
She also humanises the detectives in the story. Shaw and Darmody as not superwomen, they don’t have to be. Detective Laura Shaw has just had her second child, and has to navigate the feelings of anxiety, guilt, and exhaustion that most mothers deal with, in addition to juggling a demanding job. But what is different about Perdue’s observations, is that she doesn’t just glaze over this fact, she thoroughly investigates it and lays bare the gritty reality of motherhood. Leaking breasts, tops soaked in breast milk, post-postpartum sex, it is all there - fearlessly real.
Our second narrator, Detective Niamh Darmody is still adjusting to living with her girlfriend, with all the newness and social manoeuvring that that entails. There is pressure to lose weight, conform to beauty standards and be more refined and elegant - a version of femininity that is ironically so appealing to this particular killer. When she speaks openly of getting her period, a colleague makes a complaint that she is being too intimate with him. But isn’t that the reality for many women? Why must there be silence around the female body and how it functions? This is a key when understanding the psychology of the book’s third narrator, the nameless killer, but if we are honest, in today’s world one does not need to be a psychopath to be repelled by the female body.
The theme of misogyny is faced head on when Darmody confronts an assailant using her feminine physique having been forcibly silenced. Here, Perdue gives voice to the millions of women who just want to live, breathe, walk, and work in safety. The book is very much of our time and worth reading for this cathartic moment alone. What is so memorable about this scene, and in the book in general, is how the plot turns on the undeniable truth that women’s bodies are a source of power. Lactation, menstruation, giving birth, menopause, are all processes that society tends to ignore. Perdue weaves this idea through her narrative asking her readers: isn’t time that we rethink how society views the female body and the lived female experience?
This book, in no small way, is waving a fist at society saying, enough is enough! Women are not perpetual victims, we are powerful, and we can have it all. We have come a long way since the days of Jane Austen and Emily Brontë, when novels written about the lives of women only spoke in hushed tones of their heroines being ‘indisposed’ with a baby, or taken to their beds,‘suffering a headache.’ Perdue’s clear-eyed realism has no time for such niceties and even delights in the complex nature of the female body. It is wildly refreshing.
When They See Me is a gripping crime thriller, but it is also a study of societal misogyny, the innate power women possess, and the importance of supportive female relationships. I can’t wait to read the next novel in the series, The Night I Killed Him, which is out now in all good bookshops.
