Killers Who Refuse to Die

Sandra Parshall

Oh, how I hated to see Nicole Wallace go. She was such a bitch, and evil right down to her toes. I loved her.

Nicole, played by the wonderful Olivia d’Abo, was the only villain who’d ever outwitted the brilliant Bobby Goren on Law & Order: Criminal Intent. And Bobby was the only man who ever wandered into this poisonous spider’s web and lived to tell about it. They were perfectly matched. She should have gone on forever, making well-timed return appearances in Goren’s world. But last Sunday night she died, in a peculiarly unsatisfying fashion – not in a confrontation with Goren, but offstage, at the hand of another twisted soul who thought he was doing Goren a favor. Since we didn’t actually see her die, and we all know that on TV shows DNA results aren’t necessarily final, I hold out hope that we haven’t lost one of the crime genre’s creepiest and most fascinating recurring villains.

The majority of crime novels and all of television’s crime dramas are built around recurring heroes or heroines, but the villain who refuses to die and keeps popping up again and again seems to have fallen out of favor with most writers. The few authors who attempt such characters don’t always handle them well.

The most famous recurring villain in mystery fiction is Professor Moriarty, who tested Sherlock Holmes’s skills many times, and disappeared over Reichenbach Falls while locked in combat with the great detective. That was supposed to be the end of both of them, but readers wouldn’t let Arthur Conan Doyle get away with it.

Hannibal Lecter was a charismatic recurring villain until his creator decided to explain what made him the way he was. In the novel Hannibal, we were asked to believe that seeing enemy soliders make a meal of his little sister awakened Hannibal’s own appetite for human flesh. In fiction as in real life, there is such a thing as Too Much Information. I have no interest in ever reading about Hannibal again.

Chelsea Cain has created a female version of Hannibal in Heartsick and her upcoming book, Sweetheart. Her beautiful serial killer, Gretchen Lowell, is in prison, and Detective Archie Sheridan is the one victim who escaped before she got around to cutting out his heart, but he can’t shake off the psychological hold she has on him any more than Clarice Starling can rid herself of Hannibal Lecter.

On TV, Gil Grissom of CSI spent a couple of seasons pursuing a killer who created miniature replicas of her crime scenes before she actually committed the murders. An intriguing premise, but the killer, when she was tracked down, was sadly disappointing and unworthy of the long buildup.

The Joker in the Batman stories finally got an actor capable of playing him in all his twisted glory when Heath Ledger took on the part for The Dark Knight. Ledger’s performance is the only thing worth watching in that film. He made The Joker sick and menacing and genuinely scary, and his future portrayals of the character are among the many brilliant performances we will never see from this talented man who died too young.

One of my favorite recurring killers in crime fiction was the female contract assassin pursued by Lucas Davenport in a couple of John Sandford’s Prey novels. She wasn’t Lucas’s equal – who is, after all? – but she came close, and I was sorry to see her die.

Patricia Cornwell was quite a bit less successful in creating her own recurring villain. The French “werewolf” who bedeviled Kay Scarpetta (she insisted on calling him le loup garou) was alternately laughable and disgusting, but never believable. Without believability, a killer isn’t going to be frightening.

James Patterson did somewhat better with the determined killer who went after Alex Cross and his family more than once, but the overall quality of the stories wasn’t high enough to allow the character to shine.

There are a few more, but even the complete list of continuing villains in modern crime fiction is sadly skimpy. Why don’t more writers attempt to write recurring villains? Are they afraid to show their heroes and heroines as fallible beings who don’t always close the case? Or have they simply bowed to the marketing notion that every book must be self-contained?

Bad Company

Sandra Parshall

In general, I don’t enjoy the company of serial killers.

I mean the fictional kind, of course. Like most writers of crime novels, I’d be scared witless to encounter one in person.

Literary serial killers often seem more focused on their relationships with the police and FBI than on murder itself. They’re heavily into bet-you-can’t-catch-me games and prone to writing jokey, taunting letters to their cop pals. When they’re finally caught at the end of the story, they often crave praise from the cops for their cleverness. I was good, wasn’t I? There's something almost sexual about it, and not in an enjoyable way.

Before we reach that point, we're likely to get lots of scenes in which the killer cackles maniacally as he plots his next crime and savors the shock he’s about to deliver not only to his victim but to the cops and FBI. It also seems essential in fiction that every serial killer be given a snappy nickname, so the writer dreams up a “trademark” that will spawn one. If the killer writes messages to the cops on sticky notes and attaches them to his victim’s foreheads, he can be The Sticky Note Killer and everyone in the book will begin to suspect friends and co-workers who leave sticky note reminders on desks and refrigerator doors and calendars. This adds tension.

From what I’ve read about real-life serial killers, they’re a sad, sick bunch, immersed in the darkness of their own minds and souls, and focused obsessively on satisfying an urge that most of us can never understand. Killing is what matters to them. The clever killer who taunts the police and revels in the chase is rare in reality.

A lot of mysteries and thrillers are utterly unbelievable, but if I’m entertained I usually don’t care. However, most serial killer novels are dead serious, if you’ll pardon the expression, and they’re supposed to “entertain” by scaring us. To be scared, I have to believe that the threat could be real, that I could encounter it in my own life. So when I open a novel to find a detective and a serial killer carrying on a warped version of courtship, I’m inclined to mutter Give me a break and close the book. Writing in the killer’s voice, and making him scary rather than ludicrous, is especially hard to pull off. Few writers have done it convincingly.

Which brings me to Jeff Lindsay and Dexter.

Why do I like Dexter so much? He’s not especially handsome or charming or witty (although the Dexter books drip with black humor). Dexter was bent forever when his mother was slaughtered in front of him and he, a small child, was left to sit in her blood for days before being rescued by the cop who became his foster father. He feels an urge to kill, but he gives in only when he comes across someone who genuinely deserves his attention. He dispatched a hospital nurse who was trying to euthanize his foster father. He murdered a priest who had molested children. He kills other killers who prey on the innocent. His victims are carefully chosen. He rids the world – let’s be honest here – of the scum we all occasionally wish we could bump off. Dexter doesn’t play cat and mouse games with the cops. He works with them as a blood evidence analyst, and he’s deeply afraid of being found out. Now and then he yearns to be normal, to really be the person he pretends to be, but he knows that normalcy would bore him out of his mind.

Usually I try to avoid serial killer novels, preferring instead stories of ordinary people driven to extremes by some upheaval or betrayal in their lives. Dexter is the only serial killer I’ve been able to read about repeatedly without becoming totally repulsed. (I lost interest in Hannibal Lecter long ago, and don’t get me started about Patricia Cornwell’s French werewolf.) On the whole, I like the Showtime series based on the Dexter books, but only the written word does full justice to the character.

I don’t know how long Lindsay can keep Dexter's story going, but if the author remains faithful to the character and doesn’t slip into the cliches that mar so many serial killer books, I’ll continue to enjoy Dexter's company.