Have you ever noticed the preponderance of dead naked ladies in fiction?  I'm talking television, movies, books, graphic novels, the whole shebang.  If it's aimed at adults, it probably has a dead naked lady in it.  This goes extra for any work of mystery or suspense.

Just as a random example, where would CSI and all its clones be without dead naked ladies?  I wonder what CSI: Miami would look like, if its producers decided to challenge the writing staff by banning dead naked ladies from the scripts.

I began pondering this recently as I was reading Stieg Larsson's runaway global bestseller The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.  What started out as a fairly intriguing mystery at one point (not to give anything away) suddenly devolves into a collection of dead naked ladies.  How disappointing.

We get to see how it is that they came to be dead and naked, of course.  You always do.  It's not enough to just say "this lady is dead and naked," you have to get the long lush panning shot across the scene.  If not a flashback to the actual events.  This kind of titillation is key to the use of dead naked ladies in fiction.

As a general rule, the dead naked lady probably attempted to fight back, but was ultimately overpowered by her attacker.  His flesh will be found beneath her fingernails; most likely, this is how he will be caught.  

Why is it always the fingernails?  It's never her car keys or the edge of her daily planner.  Much less - heaven forbid - the bruised skin of her knuckles.  Nope, always the fingernails.  Dead naked ladies never keep their fingernails trimmed short.  It's like one big weak kitten catfight out there.  Always with the scratching.  

Just once I wish we'd find a dead naked lady who clocked her killer with a left hook.

Or hey, how about NO dead naked ladies?  That's a thought, eh?  I mean, the world is full of mysteries.  Mysteries aching to be solved.  Mysteries in which women are not killed in order to further the plot.  Their dead naked bodies shoveled into the engine of the fiction machine, like coal being shoveled into the boiler of a locomotive.

I just spent about an hour staring into space, racking my brains to think of mystery fiction that doesn't have dead naked ladies in it.  Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time comes to mind.  A lot of episodes of "Burn Notice" don't have dead naked ladies.  Um… yeah, I'm drawing a blank!

A subset of this question is, why are the dead naked ladies almost always young, white, and pretty?  Yes, I ask this with tongue firmly planted in cheek.  

The dead naked lady who drives the plot is never a middle-aged portly Indian woman, or an elderly black woman with a skin condition.  City morgues are chock full of the corpses of women who are not young, white, or pretty, but I guess no one cares enough about them to investigate their deaths.

Photo credit: Flickr/alancleaver_2000