Sleuth, page 7
As a Virgo, I’m not a fan of stream-of-consciousness writing, but if you want to hear your character’s voice this exercise is surprisingly effective.In one of my early novels, I had a character who was a sociopath. I read a few articles about sociopaths, but nothing clicked, so I turned on my computer and started writing my character’s autobiography. It didn’t take long before I heard her voice. “My name is Maureen Gault. I was born on February 14th. My mama always said I was her little Valentine.”
That was all I needed. When neighbours and teachers warned her mother that Maureen was doing some very bad things, her mother ignored them. After all, Maureen was “her little Valentine.” And one day, when her mama was too busy looking out for her little Valentine to see the truth about her daughter, Maureen killed a man.
Not only did this exercise give me her voice, but also it explained the role her mother played in shaping Maureen into the person she became.
Discovering the formative experiences in your characters’ lives will give you valuable material to work with. Sharing these experiences with your readers will lead them to deeper understandings of your characters’ psyches.
Make sure each of your characters talks in a distinctive fashion. Choose diction that fits the character: too consciously cool, deliberately provocative, pugnacious, pompous, seductive, hypermasculine, butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth, et cetera. Which actor would you choose to say that character’s lines? For Maureen Gault, I chose the voice of the actress who played Heather Chandler, the meanest of the mean girls in the 1988 classic Heathers.
Give your character a particular haunt—a place that somehow defines her.
Allow your character to change in some fundamental way in the course of the novel. The change doesn’t have to be as dramatic as Ebenezer Scrooge’s 180 degree reversal on the meaning of Christmas, but revealing a glimmer of humanity in a seemingly unredeemable character will keep him from being a cutout figure. Conversely, showing a character flaw or a moment of weakness in an otherwise exemplary character will humanize him.
Avoiding Authorial Intrusion
Michael Connelly says “One telling detail will take you further than a page of description.” Three examples: a character who can’t pass a mirror without anxiously checking his or her reflection; an estranged parent who sends a child a birthday gift that reveals the parent has no knowledge of who his child really is; and a father who goes around to his dead son’s friends at the gravesite thanking the young people for coming and apologizing for his broken English. Each of these telling details packs a real emotional wallop.
Let your reader come to know your characters the same way we come to know people in our lives: by their words, by their actions and reactions, by what they say and what others say about them. Give your readers the gift of getting to know your characters on their own.
The point of fiction is to give the reader for a few hours the chance to be somebody else, to broaden and deepen his understanding of himself and the strangers among whom he has to pass his days. The best novels do this now as they have always done it. It is a noble thing.—Joseph Hansen, author of the Dave Brandstetter mystery series
Reliable Sources, Sidekicks, and Villains
A note to the reader: Joanne Kilbourn Shreve is hardly in the Holmes/Wolfe league, but as a writer you might find it helpful to see how a writer who is not Conan Doyle or Rex Stout struggles to put her own stamp on these conventions.
The repertory characters surrounding a sleuth who is not a member of the police force has a number of stalwarts. One is the reliable source, the person—perhaps a police officer, a private investigator, or a friendly journalist—who gives the protagonist access to inside information about cases.
When it comes to reliable sources, Nero Wolfe is blessed. In addition to the incomparable Archie Goodwin, Wolfe has a number of private detectives on whom he can rely. The most valued of them is Saul Panzer. The words Wolfe uses as he introduces Saul to a client show his regard for this PI, whose fees are robust but who is worth every penny. “That is Mr. Panzer, there at the end of Mr. Goodwin’s desk,” Wolfe says. “If he ever wants to know anything about you, tell him; you might as well.” Wolfe and Inspector Cramer, head of the nypd Homicide Division, have a grudging respect for one another. Cramer bristles at Wolfe’s high-handedness, and Wolfe considers Cramer a plodder, but they collaborate on many cases.
In the Sherlock Holmes series, the Baker Street Irregulars are a group of street urchins led by an older boy, Wiggins, whom Holmes pays to collect data for his investigations. The rate is a shilling a day plus expenses with a one-guinea bonus for a vital clue. Holmes calls Inspector Tobias Gregson “the smartest of the Scotland Yarders,” but because Holmes holds Scotland Yard detectives in low esteem this is faint praise. The two men work cooperatively on cases, and like Nero Wolfe and Inspector Kramer they regard each other coolly but with respect.
In my mystery series, the relationship between Debbie Haczkewicz and Joanne’s husband, Zack Shreve, is both professional and personal. He is the mayor of Regina, and she is the chief of police, but they’ve known each other from the days when he was a trial lawyer and she was a police officer. Debbie likens their previous professional association to that between the orca and the great white shark, fierce natural enemies. The relationship changed when Debbie’s teenage son, Leo, was in a motorcycle accident that left him a paraplegic. Determined to die, Leo lashed out at everyone who offered help. In desperation, Debbie went to Zack, and, after a month of often physical battles with Leo, Zack got through to him. Debbie characterizes her ongoing relationship with him this way: “Zack will always be a great white shark and I will always be an orca, but we’ve learned to cherish the times when we’re able to swim side by side.”
A first glance at the pantheon of mystery protagonists reveals that, more often than not, the sleuth has a sidekick. A second glance reveals that sleuth and sidekick are invariably polar opposites, but each has a skill or a quality that the other needs.
Exploring the relationships between the following sleuths and sidekicks will, I think, open up some possibilities for your own writing. Take a good look at the sleuth you have created. What skill or characteristic does he or she need that a sidekick might offer?
A Sherlockian friend sent me the following post she found online. She thought I would be interested, and I am. The question online was this: “In the relationship between Holmes and Watson who has the greatest need for the other?” Here are the question and the answer that intrigued my friend:
Where would Holmes have been without his biographer and sounding board? Sherlock comments in The Hounds of Baskerville something to the effect that “some people see the light, others are conductors of the light and you John—you are a conductor.” Watson was an integral part of Holmes’ thought process, and he also acted as a counter balance, softening out the hard edges at the perimeter of Holmes’ complex personality. Without Watson, I argue that Holmes would have been incomplete.
Nero Wolfe famously loathes working, and the idea of stepping out of his comfortable brownstone on West 35th Street is anathema to him. “I rarely leave my house,” he says. “I do like it here. I would be an idiot to leave this chair, made to fit me.” The Wolfe household is expensive to run, and when the household coffers are empty Archie Goodwin has to nag Wolfe to get back to work.
Wolfe is a man of thought. Goodwin, who narrates the stories, is a man of action. When they work together on cases, Nero does the thinking, and Archie is the legman. Again we see that opposites attract. As Nero introduces Archie to a client, we see again how the principal sleuth and the trusted assistant complete each other: “This is Mr. Goodwin, my confidential assistant. Whatever opinion you have formed of me includes him of necessity. His discretion is the twin of his valor.”
The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.—Carl Jung
Readers are very protective of Joanne Kilbourn Shreve, and when in The Last Good Day she meets, falls in love with, and marries paraplegic, hard-driving, hard-living, trial lawyer Zack Shreve after knowing him for only five months I received a great deal of mail. Not much of it was congratulatory.
However, I had a sense that, as a couple, Joanne and Zack would be good for the series and good for each other. They have proven to be both. Zack is forty-eight and Joanne fifty-two when they fall in love. His doctor and poker partner tells Joanne that he’s glad she’s come along because Zack has been living like an eighteen year old with a death wish and that, if he keeps living at that frenetic pace, that death wish would come true.
The Last Good Day is the tenth book in the series, and I knew that both the series and Joanne needed the narrative possibilities that introducing her to the winner-take-all world of trial law would bring. I also suspected that readers would be interested in watching Zack, a man whose previous relationships with women seldom made it to breakfast, adjust to the realities of life with a wife and family.
Judging by my mail, Zack’s conversion to doting family man has brought readers almost as much pleasure as it has brought me. Joanne and Zack are deeply in love. Their marriage is not an easy one, but it’s a good one because, like the best of protagonists and sidekicks, they complete and transform each other.
In her 2002 book Evil in Modern Thought, Susan Neiman does not define what evil is; instead, she focuses on the effect evil has. Calling something evil, she writes, “is a way of marking the fact that it shatters our trust in the world. Evil is both harmful and inexplicable, but not just that; what defines an evil act is that it is permanently disorienting for all those touched by it.” When it comes to creating your fictional villain, remember Neiman’s explanation. As writers, it’s important never to lose sight of the spoor an evil act leaves behind it.
James Lee Burke suggests “Crime fiction has come to replace the sociological novel of the 1930s and 1940s. It’s a way of talking not only about the underside of America, what Michael Harrington called ‘the Other America,’ [but] it’s a way of talking about larger society as well.” Burke also notes:
You meet only two or three kinds of villains in [my] stories and novels. You meet the run-of-the-mill miscreants, the people who get into trouble, but are still like the rest of us. Then you meet the second group, sociopaths. They are in the minority. The third group, the ones that Dave Robicheaux and Billy Bob Holland have the most trouble with, [are] those who have insinuated themselves into the mainstream of society. They’re not legally criminals, but they do far more damage than people like Buchalter.
There are three distinct perspectives on evil. Understanding them will help you to identify the kind of villain that will best embody what you want to say about the presence of evil in the world.
First, evil is inherent in all human beings; in other words, it is a character problem. George Bernard Shaw used to say that some unfortunates are born without a thumb, whereas others are born without a moral sense. This perception that evil is inherent in all human beings suggests that evildoers are not monsters but ordinary people who, because of circumstances, are guilty, for a time at least, of monstrous behaviour. The old cartoon, Pogo, said it best: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”
Second, evil is a social problem, created by institutions that diminish or destroy the poor, the alienated, and the powerless. Much American crime fiction in the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century has been driven by the premise that, in an unjust and deeply flawed society in which humans and institutions are untrustworthy, individuals can combat evil only by trusting their instincts and remaining vigilant.
Third, evil is both inherent in who we are and susceptible to growth in a society whose citizens don’t take their moral obligations to one another seriously. This belief is central to the work of many Canadian crime writers, including me.
And now, with a twirl of the Snidely Whiplash moustache, the villains!
As a writer, I loved hearing that Conan Doyle introduced the brilliant mathematician, crime lord Professor James Moriarty, as a device to get rid of Sherlock Holmes (of whom Conan Doyle was tiring). Readers rebelled. So, while Holmes was forced to flee across continental Europe to escape Moriarty’s retribution, and while the pursuit did end on top of the Reichenbach Falls, where both Holmes and Moriarty appeared to fall to their deaths, appearance was not reality. The readers triumphed. Holmes lived on.
Crime lord Arnold Zeck is Nero Wolfe’s Moriarty. He appears in only three Wolfe novels, but his relationship with Wolfe is riveting. Like Wolfe, Zeck is mysterious, brilliant, and arrogant. He’s a formidable opponent for the man who occupies the specially built chair in the luxurious brownstone on West 35th Street, and Wolfe respects him. It’s a battle of the titans, but in the novel In the Best Families Zeck goes too far. He intercepts a package of expensive sausages destined for Wolfe and puts tear gas in their place. The scale is tipped. Zeck must be defeated, and Wolfe takes drastic steps. He leaves the brownstone, puts it up for sale, and disappears until he has put the pieces for the end game in place.
Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.—Carl Jung
With the exception of three sociopaths, the murderers in the Joanne Kilbourn series are not monsters. They are ordinary people who find themselves in circumstances that, in their minds, justify the taking of a human life. Their very ordinariness often allows these murderers to slip beneath the radar, but Joanne’s skill at detecting the darkness in others is finely honed. By nature a person given to rigorous self-examination, Joanne has come to understand the darkness in her own life. She is not quick to judge, but she is intuitive and logical, and when her intuition and logic suggest that someone could be guilty of murder she follows through.
In 12 Rose Street and What’s Left Behind, the villain is a megacorporation called Lancaster Development ruthlessly extracting everything it can from Regina and the farmland that surrounds it. When I was writing these two novels, Carl Hiassen’s unforgettable gang of land rapists, crooked investors, corrupt politicians, dishonest developers, and garden-variety crooks was never far from my mind. His writing life has been devoted to protecting Florida, the state Hiassen loves. Although his villains are fictional, their real-life counterparts walk among us. Hiassen is never overtly didactic and always fun. If the villains in the novel you plan to write are like those mentioned above, then Hiassen is the writer to emulate. He has a light touch, but he can deliver a lethal uppercut when he needs to ensure that his bad guys are down for the count.
Minor Characters
I love the tradition of Dickens, where even the most minor walk-on characters are twitching and particular and alive.—Donna Tartt
The difference between fiction that works and fiction that doesn’t work can often be explained in two words: missed opportunities. In Middle English, some characters are known as “local characters” because their existence is limited to a particular place. The sole function of these characters is to deliver information or pick up a sword and then disappear from the narrative. Don’t clutter your work with minor characters who simply pick up swords and walk away. Make your minor characters work for you.
First, engage your minor characters in a subplot. This can involve an on-again, off-again romance; efforts to derail the plans or the lives of the principal characters; or a mysterious figure who, like a figure in a Fellini movie, gains significance by appearing unexpectedly, then vanishing only to reappear, disappear, reappear, and disappear again.
In my novel The Brutal Heart, a street person never without her backpack filled with abandoned, dirty, and worn Care Bears repeatedly appears in the courthouse to yell threats at a client of Zack’s law firm. The woman is dismissed because clearly she is a disturbed person off her meds, but in the end Joanne’s sense that the woman has information that can bring a killer to justice leads to the novel’s climax.
Subplots take the pressure off the central plot. They allow you to detour but keep the atmosphere tense without having to inject obviously contrived moments of suspense. If, at the end of your novel, the subplot can feed into a resolution of the central plot, then you’ve got yourself a winner.
Second, use minor characters to cool the emotional temperature. Murder is a dark subject, and your readers will need a respite from the tension and shadowy suspicions. Give your readers and your protagonists a breather by bringing in minor characters that lighten the mood while keeping the plot moving.
Third, minor characters can shed light on protagonists by revealing their histories, by acting as foils, or by showing a side of the protagonist that would otherwise not be evident. In Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn uses two minor characters to shed light on her protagonist, Nick. A search party has been organized to look for his missing wife, Amy. His quick sketch of one of the volunteers brings the woman to life and reveals his overheated libido: “She had an unnecessarily loud voice, a bit of a bray, like some enchanted, hot donkey.” His description of a male character deftly reveals the man, but it also gives readers an insight into Nick’s own psyche: “Desi seemed the definition of a gentleman: a guy who could quote a great poet, order a rare Scotch and buy a woman that right piece of vintage jewelry. . . . Across from him, I felt my suit wilt, my manners go clumsy. I had a swelling urge to discuss football and fart.”
Fourth, minor characters can illuminate your theme. In 12 Rose Street, the need for Joanne to forgive the friend who betrayed her illustrates the novel’s theme that the only thing harder than forgiving is not forgiving.
Remember that every human being is the hero of his or her own story. Give your minor characters their day in the sun.
