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(Guest blogger Pamela Ridley)
Pamela Ridley is an author who has published three novels: Between Tears, Lies Too Long, and Another Memory. Readers fall in love with the depth of characterization, the fast-paced writing style and the surprising plot twists entrenched in every story. Her body of work also includes short stories and flash fiction published through various e-zines.
Villains need camouflage in order to keep their nasty little secrets. The key question is what allows a villain to walk among regular folks largely unnoticed? The answer: aspects of their personalities that people find appealing or useful.
In 2005, The American Film Industry compiled a list of noteworthy villains. The top five? Hannibal Lecter, Norman Bates, Darth Vader, The Wicked Witch of the West, and Nurse Ratchet.
This is not exactly a group to hide their light under a barrel. I took my own poll and asked people how those five characters managed to get away with so much before they were stopped. Here’s a sampling of what I got back:
Hannibal Lecter, like a cobra, is seductively and hypnotically brilliant.
Norman Bates may be a psychotic gynophobe, but he’s also a lost young man, who appears harmless. It probably helped that the Bates Motel wasn’t located on a major highway.
Darth Vader is power-hungry, and at the same time sympathetically dutiful.
The Wicked Witch of the West is grumpy, covetous and cruel. Not much camouflage there, but like Norman, the place she lives is hard to get to.
Nurse Ratched is a vengeful, repressed megalomaniac, but from the distant view of the hospital administrator’s office her ward looks well run. Even the most recalcitrant patient seems to “settle in” after a while.
Most villains have some redeemable traits or certainly they can have if a writer paints them with finesse; a stroke of this, a bit of stippling here, some blotting there. With the correct shading, texture, and perspective, our villains spring to life with a job in addition to murder in our fictional worlds.
A brilliant person with at least minimal social skills can develop multimillion dollar enterprises from scratch. Throw in seductive and hypnotic and all bets are off—whatever she/he undertakes is doable. This person can be an author, run a string of funeral homes, or create a one-of-a-kind legacy like Hannibal Lecter.
An overprotected and dominated character could also be a gentle, unassuming person, who smiles a lot while working at the tollbooth, as a CPA, or in the hospitality industry—until she/he snaps and turns into a Norman Bates. You just never know.
Someone who thinks a job title gives them power to execute directives, facts notwithstanding, could be a police officer, a CEO, or a Darth Vader.
A no-nonsense, tough-minded person who advocates the desired values of the day could be the go-to community organizer, the chairman of the chamber of commerce, or she could be The Wicked Witch.
Someone who recognizes her worth, refuses to be taken advantage of, and struggles to suffer people who continuously defy her wisdom could be a presidential candidate, the coach of the soccer team, or she could be a Nurse Ratchet.
I have a particular villain on my mind these days, and this is a spoiler alert. If you’ve got Lies Too Long on your To Be Read pile, or it’s likely to end up there shortly, and you hate knowing who the villain is, you might want to skip the rest of this blog, and go directly to checking out my books at my web site.
That villain on my mind is a manipulative, narcissistic control freak, but that just means she’s insightful, wants things done right and she needs to be seen in the best light while doing them. All the characteristics that make her a great car salesman also make her an awesome event planner. Her events always feature vengeance.
She is the type of person who clogs up a former boyfriend’s tail pipe and adds cream of tarter to a classmate’s dish during cooking class just to be the one who always comes out on top. And, oh yes, she has a personalized plate that says 1GRl2NV. (One girl to envy.)
How does she get away with all of this? She’s slender, light-skinned, and has long straight hair. Capitalizing on her looks and intelligence, she worked her way through college, got connected with the “right” boyfriends and the “right” social network and the “right’ job with the good income. She’s successful selling cars and she’s the president of her sorority – the post graduate chapter, and she's on the lookout for the "right' man. All she needs to complete the picture is a couple of “less than” underlings, women who are less than she is and will be certain to appreciate her.
She adapts (being the person others need her to be when it suits her purpose); she survives (refusing to take crap from anyone) and she takes matters into her own hands even when it means she has to do some remote control mischief, using other people to do evil deeds for her.
I think that, given the right set of circumstances, most people could commit evil. Can’t I perform “morally bad” things if I’m protecting my life, family, home or country? What if there is no other means for me to gain justice? My villains, in their minds, have a justification for what they do. Their rationales are outside of what the judicial system allows, but they are always heartfelt. Does their kind of thinking cross the line separating the sane from the insane? I don’t know.
It’s two sides of the same coin. The same negative aspects that make a villain memorable, also benefit her. Cloaked in a deceptively functional job, your villain can, literally, get away with murder.
Showing posts with label Villains. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Villains. Show all posts
Saturday, February 6, 2010
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
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?
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?
Saturday, August 23, 2008
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.
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.
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
What would make you kill?
Sandra Parshall
I’m baffled by people like Scott Peterson, who think murdering a spouse is the easiest way to end a marriage.
I always look for more, thinking the simple desire to get out of the marriage can’t be all there is to it. Surely some dark and twisted story remains to be told, surely secrets will emerge that might make the murder understandable, if not justifiable. But no. In many cases, the husband – or the wife – just wants to be free and doesn’t want to bother with a divorce.
I couldn’t write about such a killer, because the motive makes no sense to me. The person who kills in a fit of rage is easier to understand than these bland people who plot and carry out murder for the flimsiest of reasons. There’s simply nothing there to explore.
Equally off-putting are psychopathic serial killers. Judging by the popularity of this type of book, I’d say mental illness makes good drama for a lot of people, but I can only stay interested in a serial killer novel if the people investigating the crimes are compelling, with their own fascinating stories. A mentally ill murderer’s motive is imaginary, unconnected to the real world, and for that reason, it bores me.
Strange as it may seem, I need a killer I can identify with. Someone I can understand. And that forces me to ask: What is worth killing for? What could make me take another person’s life?
Not an easy question for someone who is basically a pacifist and a physical coward. I seldom see any justification for war. I might get mad enough to say, “I could strangle her!” but I’d never do it. As a kid on a farm, I was always horrified by the casual way adults wrung the necks of chickens. When I find bugs in the house, I usually pick them up and put them outside. But... I kill spiders. I leave them alone if they’re in the yard, but any spider that’s in the house or even hanging around outside a door or window will be mercilessly dispatched. And I’m sure that in some circumstances I could kill another human being.
Self-defense – most of us probably take it for granted that we would kill rather than be killed. Even if the thought of taking a life repulses us, we know the instinct for self-preservation would kick in.
I would kill to save a child, any child. Could I do it to save an adult? I have to admit I’m not sure. The most honest answer: Depends on who it is and what he or she means to me. But I wouldn’t hesitate to inflict grievous bodily harm, at the very least, to stop the torture of an animal.
To create a killer I can write about convincingly, I have to find that dark place where my own murderous impulses hide. I have to pull them into the light, examine the forces that created them, and weave my character’s heart and soul around them. I have to understand my killer’s behavior, and at some level I have to empathize with it. I hope I can also make the reader feel a spark of pity for this person who has been pushed by life into the role of killer.
Writing with these goals isn’t easy, and it makes for some treacherously complex plotting, but working with a simplistic killer would be so boring that I would probably give up long before I could finish the book. Same goes for reading about killers with motives that seem ridiculous to me. If a character is going to commit murder, he’d better have a darned good reason.
How do you feel about this? Do you want fictional killers to have understandable motives that arise from their unique situations? Do you ever feel empathy or pity for a killer?
And what would make you kill?
I’m baffled by people like Scott Peterson, who think murdering a spouse is the easiest way to end a marriage.
I always look for more, thinking the simple desire to get out of the marriage can’t be all there is to it. Surely some dark and twisted story remains to be told, surely secrets will emerge that might make the murder understandable, if not justifiable. But no. In many cases, the husband – or the wife – just wants to be free and doesn’t want to bother with a divorce.
I couldn’t write about such a killer, because the motive makes no sense to me. The person who kills in a fit of rage is easier to understand than these bland people who plot and carry out murder for the flimsiest of reasons. There’s simply nothing there to explore.
Equally off-putting are psychopathic serial killers. Judging by the popularity of this type of book, I’d say mental illness makes good drama for a lot of people, but I can only stay interested in a serial killer novel if the people investigating the crimes are compelling, with their own fascinating stories. A mentally ill murderer’s motive is imaginary, unconnected to the real world, and for that reason, it bores me.
Strange as it may seem, I need a killer I can identify with. Someone I can understand. And that forces me to ask: What is worth killing for? What could make me take another person’s life?
Not an easy question for someone who is basically a pacifist and a physical coward. I seldom see any justification for war. I might get mad enough to say, “I could strangle her!” but I’d never do it. As a kid on a farm, I was always horrified by the casual way adults wrung the necks of chickens. When I find bugs in the house, I usually pick them up and put them outside. But... I kill spiders. I leave them alone if they’re in the yard, but any spider that’s in the house or even hanging around outside a door or window will be mercilessly dispatched. And I’m sure that in some circumstances I could kill another human being.
Self-defense – most of us probably take it for granted that we would kill rather than be killed. Even if the thought of taking a life repulses us, we know the instinct for self-preservation would kick in.
I would kill to save a child, any child. Could I do it to save an adult? I have to admit I’m not sure. The most honest answer: Depends on who it is and what he or she means to me. But I wouldn’t hesitate to inflict grievous bodily harm, at the very least, to stop the torture of an animal.
To create a killer I can write about convincingly, I have to find that dark place where my own murderous impulses hide. I have to pull them into the light, examine the forces that created them, and weave my character’s heart and soul around them. I have to understand my killer’s behavior, and at some level I have to empathize with it. I hope I can also make the reader feel a spark of pity for this person who has been pushed by life into the role of killer.
Writing with these goals isn’t easy, and it makes for some treacherously complex plotting, but working with a simplistic killer would be so boring that I would probably give up long before I could finish the book. Same goes for reading about killers with motives that seem ridiculous to me. If a character is going to commit murder, he’d better have a darned good reason.
How do you feel about this? Do you want fictional killers to have understandable motives that arise from their unique situations? Do you ever feel empathy or pity for a killer?
And what would make you kill?
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
The Invisible Villain
Sandra Parshall
“I knew who the killer was the first time I saw him.”
That’s probably the most common complaint I hear about crime fiction, and it’s often followed by either “It ruined the story for me” or, even more alarming to a writer, “As soon as I knew whodunnit, I stopped reading. What was the point of going on?”
I don’t fully understand this attitude. I figure out who the villain is fairly early in at least 75% of the crime novels I read, and it never ruins the story or makes me stop. I read for a lot of reasons, and the puzzle factor is last on the list. “Why?” intrigues me much more than the simple “Who?” ever will. Twisted reasoning, long-buried secrets, hidden rage that’s simmered for decades before boiling over – that’s the stuff I love, and even after I’ve figured out “who” I will stick around to learn the whole story behind the killer’s actions. Meanwhile, I enjoy knowing that the hero or heroine is misjudging this person. I like seeing the villain wiggle out of potentially disastrous situations, all the way up to the ultimate unveiling. Knowing who the killer is adds another, almost always enjoyable, dimension to the book for me.
Still, I realize most mystery readers want to be surprised, and I’m sure most writers fully intend to keep the villain’s identity under wraps until the end. So why do they often fail? The most likely answer is that writers are too close to their stories to see the flaws. An author thinks the villain is cleverly concealed and can’t see the obvious give-aways. (We might ask why an editor doesn’t spot the problem, but we’re not likely to get an answer.) Whatever the reason, authors make the same mistakes again and again.
Ask any mystery reader about the “new boyfriend” cliche and you’ll get a groan and a roll of the eyes. If the crime-solving heroine has a new love, and the guy does nothing but stand around being supportive or getting in the way, you can bet he’s the killer. (Linda Fairstein did a nice, wry twist on this theme in one of her books, but I won’t give the title and spoil it for anyone who hasn’t read the novel yet.) The same goes for any other character – if this person has no real reason to be in the story, just hovers around the edges or tries to insinuate himself into the investigation, he or she probably did it.
Many writing teachers advise authors to cast suspicion on the killer early on, then clear him or her in a convincing way so the reader will rule out that person as the villain. But today’s mystery readers, with their devious minds, have little trouble spotting this ploy. A guy’s been cleared before the story is one-third over? He must be guilty, and at some point his alibi will turn to dust and blow away.
Steering clear of PPS (Purposeless Character Syndrome) is the easiest way for a writer to avoid painting “I did it!” on the killer’s forehead. The villain who is hard to spot has a job in the story from the beginning. He’s can be touched personally by the crime or play a role in the crime-solving – but he’s not on the murder scene before anyone else shows up and doesn’t find supposedly valuable evidence, he’s not the one and only person who receives phone calls from the killer, he’s not obviously trying to misdirect the investigation. When the camera shifts to him, there’s a good reason and it seems to move the story forward.
But there aren’t any hard and fast rules. Concealing the villain’s identity until the end is tricky, no doubt about it, and what works on one reader may point a neon arrow at the killer in another’s mind. One story that had me fooled all the way through is P.J. Tracy’s Monkeewrench, and I thought the authors (a mother-daughter team) did a great job of misdirection. Usually, though, I don’t care if I guess the killer early. I can enjoy the book anyway.
Is this an important issue for you? If you guess the killer’s identity, do you feel deflated and enjoy the book less after that point? If any books have kept you baffled until the end, I’d love to know the titles. I’m always looking for something good enough to satisfy the merciless, bloodthirsty bunch in my mystery discussion group. Hasn’t happened yet, but there’s always a first time.
“I knew who the killer was the first time I saw him.”
That’s probably the most common complaint I hear about crime fiction, and it’s often followed by either “It ruined the story for me” or, even more alarming to a writer, “As soon as I knew whodunnit, I stopped reading. What was the point of going on?”
I don’t fully understand this attitude. I figure out who the villain is fairly early in at least 75% of the crime novels I read, and it never ruins the story or makes me stop. I read for a lot of reasons, and the puzzle factor is last on the list. “Why?” intrigues me much more than the simple “Who?” ever will. Twisted reasoning, long-buried secrets, hidden rage that’s simmered for decades before boiling over – that’s the stuff I love, and even after I’ve figured out “who” I will stick around to learn the whole story behind the killer’s actions. Meanwhile, I enjoy knowing that the hero or heroine is misjudging this person. I like seeing the villain wiggle out of potentially disastrous situations, all the way up to the ultimate unveiling. Knowing who the killer is adds another, almost always enjoyable, dimension to the book for me.
Still, I realize most mystery readers want to be surprised, and I’m sure most writers fully intend to keep the villain’s identity under wraps until the end. So why do they often fail? The most likely answer is that writers are too close to their stories to see the flaws. An author thinks the villain is cleverly concealed and can’t see the obvious give-aways. (We might ask why an editor doesn’t spot the problem, but we’re not likely to get an answer.) Whatever the reason, authors make the same mistakes again and again.
Ask any mystery reader about the “new boyfriend” cliche and you’ll get a groan and a roll of the eyes. If the crime-solving heroine has a new love, and the guy does nothing but stand around being supportive or getting in the way, you can bet he’s the killer. (Linda Fairstein did a nice, wry twist on this theme in one of her books, but I won’t give the title and spoil it for anyone who hasn’t read the novel yet.) The same goes for any other character – if this person has no real reason to be in the story, just hovers around the edges or tries to insinuate himself into the investigation, he or she probably did it.
Many writing teachers advise authors to cast suspicion on the killer early on, then clear him or her in a convincing way so the reader will rule out that person as the villain. But today’s mystery readers, with their devious minds, have little trouble spotting this ploy. A guy’s been cleared before the story is one-third over? He must be guilty, and at some point his alibi will turn to dust and blow away.
Steering clear of PPS (Purposeless Character Syndrome) is the easiest way for a writer to avoid painting “I did it!” on the killer’s forehead. The villain who is hard to spot has a job in the story from the beginning. He’s can be touched personally by the crime or play a role in the crime-solving – but he’s not on the murder scene before anyone else shows up and doesn’t find supposedly valuable evidence, he’s not the one and only person who receives phone calls from the killer, he’s not obviously trying to misdirect the investigation. When the camera shifts to him, there’s a good reason and it seems to move the story forward.
But there aren’t any hard and fast rules. Concealing the villain’s identity until the end is tricky, no doubt about it, and what works on one reader may point a neon arrow at the killer in another’s mind. One story that had me fooled all the way through is P.J. Tracy’s Monkeewrench, and I thought the authors (a mother-daughter team) did a great job of misdirection. Usually, though, I don’t care if I guess the killer early. I can enjoy the book anyway.
Is this an important issue for you? If you guess the killer’s identity, do you feel deflated and enjoy the book less after that point? If any books have kept you baffled until the end, I’d love to know the titles. I’m always looking for something good enough to satisfy the merciless, bloodthirsty bunch in my mystery discussion group. Hasn’t happened yet, but there’s always a first time.
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