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?

Realism? Who needs it?

Sandra Parshall

“That one error ruined the whole book for me.”

“I was enjoying the book until the protagonist did that. It was so unrealistic.”

This kind of declaration is pretty common from mystery readers. They want realism, they want factual accuracy, they want to be able to believe the story.

Yet all crime fiction – including police procedurals – is inherently unrealistic. If we took it as a reflection of real life, we’d have to believe that legions of hairdressers, cooks, booksellers, and antique dealers are out there every day, solving murders the cops are too dumb to figure out. We’d have to believe that every homicide detective routinely has a life-or-death confrontation with a killer before he can make an arrest. We’d have to believe that private detectives spend virtually all their time on murder cases (again because the cops can’t solve them).

Let’s get real. My hairdresser is a smart lady, but I doubt she’ll ever bring in a killer. Private detectives spend most of their time on tasks that would read like drudgery if they were dramatized, and they’d be in plenty of trouble with the cops if they interfered in murder investigations. As for homicide detectives, theirs is a reasonably safe line of work – most will go through their entire careers without firing their guns in the line of duty or being attacked by a suspect.

Some of the most popular crime novels being published these days are praised for their gritty realism, which might give the impression that the events described could happen in real life. Michael Connolly’s Harry Bosch does things no real cop could get away with, but he’s still on the job and still having those perilous armed confrontations with crazed killers. Nevada Barr’s Anna Pigeon is the Jessica Fletcher of the national park system – if this woman shows up at your campsite, I’d strongly advise you to pack your gear and head home before it’s too late. John Sandford’s Lucas Davenport novels – I love them, but realistic? Please. Any crime novel that has the familiar, dramatically satisfying elements readers want will fail the plausibility test at some level.

So where does the insistence on “realism” come from? If readers can accept, say, a wedding planner as a crack detective, why do they scorn a book that has inaccurate forensic details? If a hairdresser can solve murders, why does it matter if the cops accept a piece of evidence from her with no proof of where it came from? Why is research even necessary for crime fiction writers? Why can’t we simply make it all up?

Maybe readers – and I include myself among them – want all the supporting details to be accurate so we can accept the central fallacy, which is the amateur sleuth’s involvement in a murder investigation or the pro’s flaunting of regulations or laws. Maybe if the story seems anchored in real life, suspension of disbelief will be easier.

I’m still not sure this is fair. I’m not sure fiction has to be anything more than an entertaining fantasy. But fair or not, readers demand the illusion of reality even when the basic premise of a crime novel is totally unbelievable. An author can push the unreality quite a distance, but beyond a certain point the reader refuses to follow – and that point may be different for every reader. The writer has to aim for a level of plausibility that will appeal to the largest number of readers.

I know what my breaking point is. Can you define yours? How much will you swallow before you refuse to take another bite? What books have disappointed you with unrealistic details?

Can Women Write Thrillers?

Sandra Parshall

“A testosterone-fueled thriller!”

How many times have you seen those words in a book review or ad?

And how many times have you seen a book described as “an estrogen-fueled thriller”?

Female authors who are accepted as thriller writers are still relatively rare. One reason may be that publishers, knowing a lot of men won’t read women authors, try to direct marketing of those authors’ work toward female readers. If a man writes an action-packed crime novel with sex in it, the book is called a testosterone-fueled thriller. If a woman writes an action-packed crime novel with sex in it, the book is likely to be labeled romantic suspense, guaranteeing that the majority of male readers won’t touch it with a barge pole.

I have no hard data to support this claim, but I’m going to say it anyway because I’ve seen it happen often enough to make me believe it’s true: agents, editors, and readers apply different standards to men’s and women’s books. A friend of mine wrote a thriller that was filled with action, murder, and plot twists. The protagonist was a strong female who knew how to protect herself and take out a bad guy when she needed to. Agents who read the manuscript either didn’t find the character’s actions believable or felt the book should be more interior, with bigger doses of the protagonist’s feelings. You know, more of a woman’s book. “I’ve considered rewriting to make her a man,” my friend says, “but then what would I do with the cute priest who’s the love interest? Make him a nun?”

Does a real difference exist between thrillers written by women and those produced by men? If you put a male name on a book, as some women writers do when they opt to use pseudonyms or their initials, will anybody be able to guess the author’s gender from the text? Do women overload their books with romance and family life? Do they use a softer tone and eschew graphic violence? Do their books focus only on female characters and their peculiarly female concerns?

If you think the answer is yes to all of the above, I have only this to say to you: P.J. Tracy. That’s a pseudonym for not just one woman but two, a mother-daughter writing team. I see a lot of similarities, beyond the Minnesota setting, between the Tracy novels and John Sandford’s Prey series, but I’m willing to bet that some male Sandford fans won’t read “Tracy” because they know the authors are a mother and a daughter.

While I’m naming names, consider Tess Gerritsen. True, her cop (Jane Rizzoli) and medical examiner (Maura Isles) are women, but Gerritsen also includes the viewpoint of Rizzoli’s husband, FBI agent Gabriel Dean, and her two women are as tough and businesslike as any male characters you’ll ever encounter. She doesn’t shy away from violence either. I wonder, though, how many men have never tried Gerritsen’s books because a woman’s name is on the covers and the two main characters are female. The fans she already has are enough to put her books on bestseller lists for a while. But the thrillers that make it onto the lists and stay there week after week, sometimes month after month, tend to be those written by men. The thrillers that get the most review attention are, with few exceptions, the “testosterone-fueled” kind.

Is this a holdover from the time when men ran the world and women were expected to smile and bake cookies? Or does something basic in human nature resist the idea of women writing about the darkest side of life? Why is it that some men simply cannot be entertained by a book if they know it was written by a woman?

I recently confessed that I avoid reading crime novels from foreign countries. I vowed to make more of an effort, because I realize I’m missing a lot of entertaining books. Men who won’t read thrillers by women are also missing some good stuff. If I thought any of those men were reading this blog, I would encourage them to be adventurous and give female thriller writers a try. The danger of estrogen contamination has been greatly exaggerated.