How to rite Killer Fiction (11 page)

I always think of
M*A*S* when
this topic comes up. Remember the episode that focused on the dreams of the regular cast members? Hot Lips Houlihan, who was always searching for love, dreamed that she was a bride—only her white dress was covered in operating room blood.

Klinger, who longed to return to his home town of Toledo, Ohio, dreamed he was on a train going home—only every place in town he wanted to see was boarded up and closed down. Each dream took each character far inside himself, and each dream was understandable and moving because we had known these characters for so long. The thirty-minute episode could go as deep as it did because it followed several years of character exploration.

The same can be true of series characters whose tests become more meaningful when we've seen them through earlier crises. Nancy Pick-ard's detective heroine, Jenny Cain, solved mysteries about other people's troubles in the early books.
Dead Crazy
brought
us
face to face with mental illness, and we learned for the first time that Jenny's mother had a mental problem. Not until
I.O.U.,
the seventh book in the series, did Jenny directly confront that past issue, and by that time, we'd seen her grappling with ever-darker social problems. In a sense, the first book in the series
(Generous Death),
which introduced us to Jenny and her world, was Arc One of the meta-novel. All the six books leading up to
I. O. U.
constituted Arcs Two and Three, in that Jenny honed the investigative and emotional tools she would need to excavate the truth of her mother's life and death. Had Pickard even been able to write
I. O. U.
as the second book in the series, it wouldn't have had nearly the impact upon the reader that it did as book seven because we weren't as invested in Jenny early on.

Multiple Protagonists and the Meta-Novel

Elizabeth George uses five main characters as protagonists, which would be far too many for the reader to handle if she didn't allow some to shine in the foreground and the others to recede into the background of each book. For example, in
A Traitor to Memory,
Lynley and Havers are in the forefront, while Helen and St. James are used sparingly. Other books center on St. James and Helen, with Lynley and Havers as lesser characters, and
Deception on His Mind
takes Havers away from London into an adventure all her own.

S. J. Rozan alternates between her two protagonists, Bill Smith and Lydia Chin. The first book in the series,
China Trade,
was told in Lydia's first-person viewpoint. The second,
Concourse,
used Bill as its protagonist and told the story in third person. This device allows us to see the meta-arc of their developing relationship through two different pairs of eyes.

Reginald Hill gave Sgt. Wield a personal subplot and one of the pleasures of his Dalziel-Pascoe series has been the evolution of the stoic sergeant from walled-off character with a deep secret to a warmer, more open human being. Carole Nelson Douglas says of her Midnight Louie series that it will ultimately consist of twenty-seven books with overarching story arcs of nine books each. Earlene Fowler s quilt series often brings characters from previous books back into detective Benni Harper's life, as does Abigail Padgett's Bo Bradley series.

Starting a mystery series means thinking beyond book one. It means creating characters compelling enough to pull readers along through many adventures and rich enough to deserve a loyal following.

WE LOVE to be scared, whether it's on a thrill ride or at a scary movie. Suspense novels add a human dimension to the basic excitement of being scared on purpose in a controlled environment. When we read a book by Mary Higgins Clark, Tom Clancy, or John Grisham we identify with the main character, whose life is thrown into turmoil by forces beyond his control, and we experience all the emotions that character feels, whether good or bad. We're afraid when he's afraid; we're confident when he's confident. We go along for the ride, secure in the knowledge that when the ride is over we'll be back on level ground, exhilarated and safe.

The Roller-Coaster Effect _

It doesn't matter whether you love, hate, or fear them: you know what it means to ride a roller coaster. Your heart pounds, your palms sweat, your body tenses and then relaxes, your mouth opens and screams come out. You fear for your life one second, then laugh with delight the next as you remind yourself it's only a ride. You clutch frantically at the person next to you, and you sigh with relief when it's all over—then buy a ticket and stand in line for the next trip.

The thing to keep in mind about a roller coaster is that it's a manufactured experience. Trained engineers carefully plan every hairpin turn, every death drop, every slow-down and speed-up to produce the precise effect you're leeling
as
vou hurtle along.

Just as the engineer plans the roller-coaster rider's thrills, so, too, does the suspense writer calculate and produce the effects her writing induces in her readers. Some writers dislike being reminded that they're in charge of creating the reader's experience. They prefer to think of the characters as taking over and writing the story, or they like to believe that an unseen hand reaches in and makes the story work.

Perhaps when you've written eight to ten books, your subconscious mind
can
take over and produce a state-of-the-art thrill ride of a novel, but I think letting your unconscious write your books is like asking a group of nine-year-olds to design the next roller coaster at Disney World. The kids know what they like, but only a real pro can create that experience for them.

A Little Suspense History_

If the mystery genre has one parent in Edgar Allan Poe, then suspense fiction has both a mother and a father. The mother of suspense fiction is the gothic novel best represented by Charlotte Bronte's
Jane Eyre,
and its father is the spy novel, early examples of which are Erskine Chalders's
The Riddle of the Sands
and W. Somerset Maugham's Ashenden stories.

Gothic Roots

Before Bronte there was Mrs. Radcliffe, whose
Mysteries of Udolpho
figures in Jane Austen's gothic parody,
Northanger Abbey.
The early goth-ics featured ghosts, haunted houses, and mysteries from the past, and were heavy on atmosphere and passion. The heroine was a woman alone, without family to help her, and she was in love with a man whose cryptic cruelty toward her only fueled the flame of her desire. The emphasis was on the personal and the emotional, the setting was a single house with a troubled past, and the heroine's bravery often earned her the love of the unavailable man at the heart of the mystery. Wilkie Collins's
The Woman in White
and
The Moonstone
are at heart gothics with elements of police procedure (which was very new at the time) thrown in.

Espionage Roots

The spy genre took a very different approach. The problem presented wasn't one of a single woman and a single man in a single house; it involved the fate of the entire free world. Like the gothic heroine, the spy never knows whom to trust, but unlike her, he's been thrust into a larger world and must operate within the customs of various countries. Even though there's one protagonist we care about, there are usually several other characters whose viewpoints we see and whose plotlines we follow until they converge for the final confrontation/crisis. Personal crisis and individual emotion were very far down on the list of priorities in this kind of book—until John Le Carre wrote
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.

Suspense Today

Most of today s suspense novels arise out of one or the other of these traditions. Romantic suspense, relationship suspense, romantic intrigue, suspense with supernatural overtones all derive from gothic forebears. Thrillers, whether medical, techno, political, or international intrigue, are all variants on the spy genre because they involve issues larger than the emotional lives of individuals. One hallmark of both strands of the suspense skein is the ordinary person thrust by forces beyond her control into a larger world that she doesn't understand.

Descendants of the Gothic Tradition_

Just as the modern category known as "Regency Romance" follows the template laid down by Jane Austen in
Pride and Prejudice
, the classic gothic mirrors
Jane Eyre.
A young woman comes, alone, to a big house in a remote and very picturesque location. She is a governess, a poor relation, a servant, a ward—someone powerless and without friends or family to turn to.

The owner of the house is a mercurial man with oversized moods. The girl dislikes him, fears him, slowly grows to like and then love him, and all the time mysterious events have her wondering what evil lurks in the house. If there are children, her duty is to protect them from this man, and from the dread secret he hides.

Dread secrets will be revealed. The man will confess his love and explain why he can't return her love even though he has feelings for her. She will bring light into this dark place and free him from his past. He will raise her to his own social level. Sunlight will pour through the narrow gothic windows of the old house and the shadow will be dispelled forever.

You think this genre died in 1945?

Think again. Victoria Holt, Barbara Michaels, and Ruth Rendell writing as Barbara Vine have done very well with it, adapting the classic form to more modern times yet retaining its emphasis on atmosphere and setting.

Romantic Suspense

So strong is this subgenre that while I was waiting for a plane, I walked into the airport bookstore and found that eight out of ten of the best-selling titles were essentially romantic suspense reads. A woman comes home to a small town from the big city for some reason: lost job, divorce, widowhood. She finds a place to live and meets friends, but mysterious, disturbing things begin to happen. She's threatened and she doesn't know why. Her presence has stirred up old ghosts. Menacing phone calls, strange sounds in the night, people she thought she knew making cryptic but clearly hostile remarks—and she has no idea why.

In most romantic suspense, the writer gives her protagonist a choice of two (at least) men vying for her attentions. One is considerate, respectable, helpful, supportive, kind, and available. The other is argumentative, disreputable, obstructionist, contrary, rude, and withholding.

Guess which one is Prince Charming?

You've got it: Mr. Rude Guy is her knight in shining armor, the one who is really on her side even if he acts like he's not. Mr. Nice Guy turns out to be the bad guy, the one who's trying to drive her out of town, the one whose daddy killed her daddy back in the past, or the one who's cheating her out of her inheritance.

Our heroine not only has to show her moxie by sticking around in a dangerous situation and her cleverness in unraveling the secrets and lies, she has to prove her ability to judge people by (finally) realizing which of her suitors is really meant for her.