The Evil That Men Do: What Villains Reveal About Their Creators’ Personalities

Peggy Ehrhart

Psychologist Sam Gosling could teach Sherlock Holmes a thing or two. In his book Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You, Gosling lays out the principles of snoopology. Its premise is that our possessions, and their arrangement, offer a window to our souls.

Gosling demonstrates his powers of deduction when he concludes from a tube of skin cream, a hairbrush, a CD, and a photo of a bathroom sink that the bathroom in question belongs to a young, gay Asian man.

But what really got my interest was Gosling’s discussion of personality types. After all, if we’re to understand how snooping can illuminate personality, we have to understand what constitutes a personality. So Gosling introduces the “Big Five”--key traits that blend to make us what we are: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.

The first two interested me particularly because they seem opposites--though Gosling insists that none of the traits cancels another out. But people who score high on openness tend toward liberal politics, are suspicious of absolutes, and question convention, while people who score high on conscientiousness tend toward conservative politics, value order, and have a strong sense of moral obligation.
It struck me that just as one’s stuff can reveal personality, so can one’s writing—-not a revolutionary idea, I know, but since I’m high on the openness scale and like to play with ideas, please bear with me.

Since mysteries celebrate the triumph of order, one might expect mystery writers to score high on conscientiousness. In its simplest form, a mystery pits a sleuth who’s a paragon of goodness against a villain who’s a paragon of evil, and goodness conquers.

Arthur Conan Doyle borrowed a page from nineteenth-century melodrama to give Holmes a nemesis so completely evil as to strike us, now, as laughable. And remember Dick Tracy? We might call the strip a graphic novel these days--a police procedural with a straight-arrow hero and villains whose grotesqueness signals their moral depravity.

Even modern mysteries--police procedurals and thrillers especially come to mind--show us worlds in which good and evil seem absolute. And I suspect the writers who create these worlds score high on the conscientiousness scale.

But when mystery edges further toward the literary, things become less black and white. Sam Spade, the ur-sleuth in the noir tradition, reveals considerable moral ambiguity, and Hammett’s bad guys, while not exactly well-rounded, are so entertaining that it’s hard to see them as evil incarnate. John Le Carré’s villain, Karla, ultimately proves to be as complex and human as Smiley.

Then there’s John Harvey’s excellent police procedural series--which I’ve just discovered. His sleuth, Charlie Resnick, is a square peg in a round hole. He’s an overweight divorced jazz-lover who is insensitive to the needs of the women in his life and keeps his flat tidy by waiting till the balls of dust and cat hair get large enough to be picked up and deposited in the trash. And Harvey’s villains aren’t people who set out to do evil, but rather people pushed into evil acts by thwarted love.

Thus we come around to something we might already have suspected. Maybe mystery writers don’t have to rank high on the conscientiousness scale--or if they do, it’s counterbalanced by high openness. Openness correlates not only with distrust of absolutes but also with imagination and creativity, qualities possessed by all writers.

Just like great novels, the best mysteries don’t paint the world in black and white terms. Rather, they show us people struggling with their humanity, trying to do what’s right but sometimes doing wrong. And the most admirable sleuths are those who empathize with the fallen humanity in the evil-doers they unmask. There but for the grace of God . . .

Subjecting my own writing to this analysis, I realized that my villains are just what one might expect from somebody with a high openness quotient, somebody who finds it hard to see the world in terms of absolutes.

Only one of my Maxx Maxwell mysteries, Sweet Man Is Gone, is out so far, but the sequel is sitting on a shelf in my study, and several prequels are lurking there too--most in need of major surgery but with plots worth salvaging. In looking back at them, I see that often the murderer is a person with the ability to love intensely but whose love turned to hate when it was rebuffed. Thus my villains tend to be people pushed to the extreme of murder by desperation--people who, given different circumstances, might have been heroes.


Peggy Ehrhart is a former college English professor who now writes mysteries and plays blues guitar. Her blues mystery, Sweet Man Is Gone, is just out from Five Star. Visit her at www.PeggyEhrhart.com.

Why Men Are Different from Women

Elizabeth Zelvin

Peggy Ehrhart, whose debut mystery, Sweet Man Is Gone, will be out this summer from Five Star, wrote in a recent issue of First Draft, the Sisters in Crime Guppies newsletter, that she attributes male writers’ more confrontational approach to literary critique to evolution. In prehistoric society, she points out, men had to attack and rout rivals to achieve dominance in the gene pool, while women insured survival of the species by bearing and nurturing their young.

It’s a good explanation, but not the only way to arrive at the conclusion that men and women differ on the score of competitiveness vs cooperation, or, let’s say, autonomy vs connection. (And if you don’t agree that men critique more caustically than women overall, please join the discussion by leaving a comment.) Feminist psychologists first figured out about thirty years ago that what had hitherto been considered the norm for human personality development, as conceptualized by such influential thinkers as Freud and Erik Erikson, was in fact a description of male development. Women, they observed, develop quite differently, and they proceeded to back up this novel idea by studying thousands of growing girls (conspicuously absent from most previous studies) over the next three decades.

To put it simply, boys have to separate from their mothers in order to claim their identity as males. Girls don’t: they find out who they are by realizing they are “same as” rather than “different from” mom. So boys develop psychologically through a process of separation, while girls grow through an evolving gift for connection. That’s why boys have baseball card collections and girls have best friends. It’s why you can put a random group of women in a van on a three hour trip—say, to a mystery conference—and by the time they arrive they will know all about each other’s past and current love life, hormonal idiosyncrasies, and relationship with their mothers. Would an analogous group of men embark on such a conversation? No way.

I majored in English in college. But when I took Psychology 101, I learned about the Oedipus complex—or more accurately, the Oedipal crisis—that had to be resolved for a child to develop normally. Anyone who’s raised a son knows this must be true: little boys between three and five go through a phase of pushing dad away from mom. (I remember my own son at five saying, “No kissing! I’m the cop!”) But things got fuzzy as soon as someone, usually a woman, said, “But what about the girls?” The professor mumbled something about a comparable Electra complex. But it failed to convince. Thanks to some brilliant theoreticians (the best known is Carol Gilligan) of what’s called relational psychology, we now know why. Girls don’t have an identity crisis at the Oedipal age. They have one at puberty, at the age of eleven or twelve, when they have to separate a little from their female friends and (for the most part) turn to boys, so that—back to evolution and survival of the species—they can mate and reproduce.

This fundamental difference at the core of personality may account for men’s preference overall for the novel of action—the thriller—and women’s for the novel of relationship—the traditional mystery. Of course there are exceptions. And of course we acquire to some degree the traits of the other gender, because we need both autonomy and connection to function in human society. But if you’ve ever wondered what it is that causes exasperated women to say, “Men!” and equally exasperated men to say, “Women!”—there is a reason.

A Night at the Fillmore

Peggy Ehrhart (Guest Blogger)

I moved to the Haight-Ashbury in January of 1967.
I had applied to the creative writing program at San Francisco State College and came to San Francisco half a year early because I had just broken up with a boyfriend. My apartment, for which I paid seventy-five dollars a month, was three blocks up the hill from Haight Street and one block over from Ashbury.

Shortly after I moved in, my neighbor, a Stanford dropout with a blond Afro, invited me to a concert at the Fillmore Auditorium.

Everyone by now is familiar with the poster art that grew out of Bill Graham’s Fillmore concerts. On these posters, swirling designs melt into undulating figures seemingly inspired by Hieronymous Bosch or the pre-Raphaelites, all rendered in eye-popping colors. And if you can actually make out the lettering--difficult because it too swirls and undulates--you realize that at one time or another, almost every significant blues, rock, or jazz musician played at the Fillmore--and often several on the same night.

The Fillmore experience itself was as mind-altering as the posters implied it would be. I realized immediately on stepping into the lobby that I had not dressed suitably for the occasion. I was wearing a navy-blue suit with broad white stripes, double-breasted, mini-skirted, and very Mod. I would have fit right in on the King’s Road in London. But this wasn’t London.

All around me--well, not literally around me because I was standing and they were lounging on the floor smoking marijuana--were people who looked like beings from another universe. Everyone had long hair, men and women, and most of the men had beards. None of the women wore makeup. If you recall the look of the early sixties--big hair, lots of eyeliner, even false eyelashes, you’ll realize how revolutionary a bare-scrubbed face and free-flowing hair would appear.

None of the clothing looked like anything you’d find at that time in a conventional store. Many women wore long skirts; both sexes wore wide-legged pants made of gauzy fabrics or velour, or jeans that looked like they’d seen years of hard living. A fringed leather vest might top off a ruffled shirt with long, funnel-shaped sleeves. A nearly transparent tunic might reveal that the wearer had sworn off bras. The color combinations were similar to those on the concert posters: orange, purple, chartreuse, swirling paisley designs, or Indian-inspired prints. And, yes, there were beads, strands and strands of them, all colors and shapes, on both sexes. Other smells competed with the smell of marijuana: incense--and patchouli oil, a flowery, spicy scent that eventually came to perfume nearly the entire city of San Francisco.

Beyond the lobby, the auditorium itself was dark, except for a few lights illuminating the band, and a remarkable phenomenon that I had never seen before or even imagined: a light show. A huge screen filled one wall, and on the screen blobs of color--red, yellow, blue, orange--separated and coalesced like giant amoebas. Light shows were in their infancy then, but somehow the light show, with shapes throbbing in time to the hypnotic rhythms produced by the band, seemed the perfect visual accompaniment to the music.

The music was like nothing I had ever heard before--songs that merged into one another with no beginning or end, riffs repeated again and again until they became wordless mantras, a dense, fuzzy guitar tone that seemed to reach into the soul. I eventually became quite familiar with the style during my time in San Francisco. It was acid rock, pioneered by Eric Clapton’s band Cream, but accessible to any group with electric guitars and big enough amps.

Writhing forms moved in the dark room. There might have been seats around the edges of the auditorium, but Fillmore concerts were actually dances, though people didn’t dance as couples. Anyone who wanted could launch him- or herself into the crowd and move as the spirit dictated, people do-si-doing as if engaged in a crazy psychedelic square dance. There was one distinctive style, though, that evoked a kind of Dionysian frolic: arms were thrust in the air, where they undulated like strands of seaweed in the ocean’s current, while hips swayed in one direction, upper body in the other.

I’m not sure most concert-goers showed up because of any particular band on the program. The experience itself was the attraction. In fact, I can’t remember who was playing that first night--or on any of my subsequent visits.

Peggy Ehrhart's memories of life in the Haight-Ashbury in the mid-sixties, especially the music, were inspired by the Summer of Love exhibit at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. Peggy’s blues mystery, Sweet Man Is Gone, is due out from Five Star in 2008.