Unfortunately our team was a runty lot and, at just a little under six feet, I was easily the tallest player in the side. That meant I played centre and did a lot of jumping against giants, mostly gangling skinny guys of some small dimension less than seven feet, but you know what they say. The bigger they are…
    Naturally we were thrashed. Donny was the only one of us capable of scoring points, but over time we improved, and added more skilled players, and made our way up through the grades to C-grade. But it was at the beginning of the summer season of 1965-6, our third season (but now F-grade, having lost the final by a point in the winter) that this past-time caused a pre-feminist rebellion to arise in the otherwise conspicuously tranquil offices of The Standard Insurance Company.

She was dead.
The eyes were half-shut and her face had a curious look of resentment—resentment as if she had been taken away from something which meant more to her than loss of her life.
I could scarcely distinguish the bullet hole from the bright scarlet of her sweater.
I wrenched the sweater up and saw the neat surgical incision of the Luger bullet. There was scarcely any blood. It had crushed the left nipple. A few strands of ragged nylon from her brassiere fringed the hole. It might have been passion, not death, that stared at me. She was sitting neatly. Stein must have shot her as she sat.
    Now this really pisses me off. The hero spends the book undoing the villain and wooing the lady, the villain’s last desperate throw of the dice is to take the lady hostage and the hero goes after him, but the bad guy kills the girl before the good guy kills him. What a waste of female flesh! I hated it in the Last of the Mohicans, didn’t much like Esmeralda getting the chop in the Hunchback of Notre Dame, nor James Bond’s wife going down in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Nor here, in a very ordinary thriller called A Twist of Sand by Geoffrey Jenkins. I don’t mind a tragic ending when a goodie  deserves to die at the end, but tragedy for tragedy’s sake annoys me. Worse was the fact that the baddie shooting her in the tit proved to be the only sexy bit in the whole book, and the only bit of it I remember. I find myself outraged still. If I ever took to burning books, this one would go first. I don’t mind people breaking the rules, but if you are doing the formulaic thing—boy gets girl, boy loses girl, girl gets bumped off just doesn’t work. Or maybe it’s just my old male chauvinist protection of females coming out. Or maybe good female characters are so rare that it is a travesty to kill them off arbitrarily. I don’t know, but I’ll watch out for this trait (in them and me) in the future.