Karin Slaughter: The crime writer reveals why she doesn't flinch from extreme violence

Two years ago I interviewed Ian Rankin for this newspaper. In the middle of a wide-ranging discussion he said something he may have since come to regret. "The people writing the most graphic violence today are women," he told me, then continued, "They are mostly lesbians as well, which I find interesting."

The comments caused a furore in crime writing circles worldwide, but Rankin was not the first I had heard make this claim, he was merely the first to go on record.

"Oh, that was you," US crime writer Karin Slaughter says when I mention the comments to her. The look she gives, half-ironic, half-knowing, makes me feel like a naughty schoolgirl. Hers is one of the names raised by anonymous critics who regard relentless detail of rapes through belly buttons or with knives, or of women buried alive, as unsuitable for fiction. It is an unease Slaughter has cultivated since her 2001 debut Blindsighted with books that live up to her name, petrifying readers with every crunch of bone and spatter of blood.

Critics do not bother her, and regarding Rankin, she is magnanimous. "I don't think it is sexist [to say that]. It is just stating a fact. Women can talk about these crimes in a realistic way." But she adds that sexuality is irrelevant and reels off a list of equally unflinching straight women authors, headed by Mo Hayder. "Women are definitely getting away with more than men can get away with," she adds. "Men have had a hundred-and-something years of writing about really horrible crimes against women."

We are seated in the bar of a smart but characterless London hotel tucked between Victoria Station and Buckingham Palace. I'm finding it hard to reconcile the image Slaughter's books conjure up with the person beside me. Diminutive, fresh-faced and perky in that way only Americans can pull off with credibility, she has none of the stridency her no-holds-barred writing led me to expect. She is also more ambivalent about her subject matter than her novels imply, with their black-and-white view of law enforcement. She counters critics with a thoughtful dissection of society's abhorrence of aggressive, vengeful women.

Writers such as Val McDermid and Denise Mina, she believes, "show violence [against women] for what it is". What matters, she maintains, is context, which is why her latest novel, Fractured, published by Century early next month, kicks off with a bone-crunching description of an Atlanta housewife, Abigail Campano, fighting off the man she believes has not only just raped her daughter but smashed her face in in the process. As the story unfolds, we meet another victim, this time of childhood cruelty: the investigator Will Trent, fractured by self-doubt. The perpetrators are given a back story, but at heart they remain Bad Men whose crimes deserve punishment far more than understanding.

It is the victim's perspective that matters to Slaughter, who vividly remembers the trauma caused by the notorious Atlanta child murders, in which 29 African-American boys were raped and murdered, in her own neighbourhood, when she was nine. "I was living in this middle-class suburb really insulated from the world then suddenly my life changed and we had to check in with our parents and couldn't go down certain roads and there were all these new limitations," she recalls. "It really affected me."

Discomfort felt towards women writing graphic descriptions of sexual abuse reflects, Slaughter maintains, a wider sexism that refuses to tolerate women reacting to violent trauma on their own terms. "If you look at crime fiction in the Eighties, women were there just to be screwed and put upon," the 37-year-old observes. "They were either madonnas or whores. If they were sexually abused, the guy had to save her. When women write about violent crime the woman saves herself – or doesn't in some cases."

She cites the number of people who talk about violence against women in her books, while violence against men goes largely ignored. There is one exception however: when she wrote about a male rape in Triptych, she had men stop her in the street saying they couldn't read about it. "I would say, 'So you didn't mind reading when women were going through this?'"

Women are capable of unimaginable cruelty, she claims, whether in revenge or for sheer pleasure, a fact society finds uncomfortable. "If you study crime, women are much more sadistic killers than men," she claims, taking a sip of water and looking across at the businessmen at the next table. "I have done a lot of research into child abuse and if you talk to anyone in social services they say that they just cringe at the thought of going out on a case where the mother is abusing her kids. Men, they sexually abuse them and that is it, but women, it's the psychological abuse. Anyone who has been through an all-girl high school knows how sadistic women can be."

I wonder how much trauma at the hands of women she suffered growing up in small- town Georgia. What she does admit about her family life is that she remains the baby of the family. Her sisters "do everything for me" when she goes home. It is a stark contrast to the way her father, with whom she remains very close, raised her. "The biggest gift my father gave me is an appreciation of men and also an understanding that I can do things on my own," she explains. "He was always encouraging me to go out to the workshop with him and showing me how to use tools and encouraging me to build things. I am not one of these women who gets scared when I see a hammer. I know how to do things for myself."

Her relationship with her father explains why amid the rapists and misogynistic murderers there are positive male characters in her books, led by Jeffrey Tolliver, the police chief in the Grant County series, and the FBI agent Will Trent in the new book, the second in a series she kicked off with Triptych. Whatever accusations may be made about Slaughter's depiction of brutality aimed at women, it is not rooted in man-hating.

Another legacy of her father is storytelling. He told "all kinds of crazy stories about my relatives", she recalls. It is a Southern tradition, and Slaughter is visibly irritated at the "Hollywood view" of the South perpetrated by those who have never crossed the Mason-Dixon Line. "America has lost many wars but we don't admit it; but the Civil War is one we have to own up to and the victor always gets to write the history," she says. "Even now the South is always portrayed as extremely racist, backwards, all these things that I know not to be true." In contrast she points to the number of multinationals, led by Coke and CNN, headquartered in Atlanta, and the literary heritage of a region she claims is stereotyped as "still toting banjos and barefoot".

I wonder if there is anything she would refuse to write about. She looks surprised at the idea, so I tell her of a conversation with Val McDermid, a writer not known to flinch from graphic detail. McDermid told me that when writing Wire in the Blood, a criminal psychologist advised her that the psychopath she had written about would have cut out the victim's vagina but she decided it was too much and left that detail out.

Slaughter considers the story, then says: "I certainly wouldn't write about anything I felt uncomfortable about, but I haven't come across anything where I have said, 'No, I can't write that'." What her characters do and see is what dictates how far she goes. She refuses to be responsible for the way readers respond to the violence in her books. "Paedophiles can get off on detergent ads," she observes of censorship. By addressing what victims go through, she believes she is challenging a taboo that would leave them isolated and ashamed. "We want to think that in 2008 we can have a woman running for president and women captains of industry, but we don't want to know that [violence against women and children] is happening out there still." Crime fiction contextualises violence, contains it, and removes that taboo. As far as Slaughter is concerned, that is her ultimate riposte to those who think she should show more decorum when detailing every violation in unflinching detail.

The extract

Fractured, By Karin Slaughter (Century £17.99)

'...Her underwear and shirt had been yanked out of the way by her attacker. Teeth marks showed dark red against the white of her breasts. She was thin... There was no telling what she had looked like in life. Her face was beaten so severely that the skull had collapsed on itself, obscuring the eyes, the nose. The only point of reference was the mouth, which gaped open in a toothless, bloody hole'