How to rite Killer Fiction (13 page)

The first half of the book consists of preparation for trial, the second half of the trial itself. This is a common feature of courtroom novels now, but today's thrillers add a lot more personal baggage to the lawyer-hero and often put her in dire jeopardy over and above winning or losing the case.

At the trial,
things go wrong. Witnesses
lie and deny they ever told the lawyer a different story. The judge rules against the lawyer, keeping out lines of questioning or barring witnesses that she needs to win the case. Just when things look blackest, a witness comes forward, or a previous witness changes her story and tells the truth, and our hero makes a stunning summation to the jury and wins the case. Justice prevails even against institutionalized corruption.

John Grisham added a major new twist to the genre with
The Firm.
Here the lawyer wasn't engaged in other people's troubles; he was trying to save his own life. There was no courtroom drama; the entire story unfolded outside of the court system and involved a very nasty law firm's machinations to keep a renegade young lawyer from telling all to the authorities. Law, in fact, played very little part in the story. The tale could just as easily have been set in a bank or a multinational corporation or a police department; any organization capable of being totally tainted by Mafia connections would have done as well.

Instead of the hero-lawyer engaged in a symbolic duel with his counterpart on the other side of the legal divide, Grisham's hero stood against a vast array of conspirators with immense, shadowy power. He never knew when he was speaking to someone with connections back to The Firm, and even the FBI couldn't be trusted to protect him and to treat him with decency. In the end, a small outlaw band turns the tables on The Firm and manages to escape the clutches of both the bad guys and the so-called good guys.

Writers like John Lescroart and Steve Martini use the legal thriller to explore complex psychological relationships and legal-political machinations. Their defense lawyer heroes fight for justice for their accused clients, while prosecutors star in Chris Darden's Nikki Hill series and in NancyTaylor Rosenberg's legal thrillers.

Crimes and Capers_

One final branch of the suspense tree is the novel written from the point of view of the criminal. These can be psychological studies (James Ell-roy's
Killer on the Road,
Donald Westlake's
The Ax),
step-by-step accounts of intricately planned crimes that depend on nerves of steel and split-second timing (
Void Moon
by Michael Connelly), or slice-of-life glimpses into the lives of low-level criminals with colorful vocabularies (books by Elmore Leonard, Carl Hiaasen).

The difference between these novels and the usual suspense read is that this time our sympathy is engaged on behalf of someone who isn't innocent. We like the crooks in
Get Shorty
better than the so-called honest citizens of Hollywood, and we root for the gangs that couldn't shoot straight because they make us laugh. In the lighter side of this subgenre, humor softens the suspense edge, but the structure is the same as in the spy novel. Many characters with different goals and separate paths step onto the road of life and by the end of the book, all the paths will collide, all the characters will interact in surprising ways, accidents will happen, and no one in the book will emerge unscathed by the experience.

Reading a well-written caper novel is like watching those guys who used to balance spinning plates on the
Ed Sullivan Show.
Your eyes dart from one plate to the next, watching one wobble and then sighing with relief as the juggler balances it again.

Whichever subcategory of the suspense novel you prefer, the key is to give the reader the roller-coaster experience of intense highs, deep lows, terrifying twists, and a satisfying conclusion to the ride.

ONCE UPON a time, there was a girl named Snow White. She was as good as she was pretty, but her father married a woman who was jealous of Snow White's beauty. The Wicked Queen who was her stepmother tried several times to get rid of Snow White, and she finally sent the girl into the woods with a huntsman who had orders to kill Snow White and bring her heart back to the Wicked Queen.

Now there's a suspense tale! Our innocent heroine, who has no idea why all this enmity is directed at her, steps into the dark, unfriendly woods with a professional animal slaughterer against whom she has no weapons at all. How can this end well?

No weapons except her innate goodness, and the beauty that is the outward manifestation of that goodness. Her goodness wins over the Huntsman, who kills a deer instead of Snow White, and brings the deer's heart back to the W.Q^ as proof that Snow White is dead at last.

Snow White, meanwhile, is still in the deep, dark woods with no shelter and no friends, no coat, nothing. What will happen to this innocent heroine? Who will help her?

Seven dwarfs, of course. Again, her goodness prevails over their grumpy resistance to taking her in (Disney gave us one Grumpy; the Grimms had all the dwarfs acting pretty inhospitable at first). She wins them over with her cheerful willingness to cook and clean for them, her singing and her love of nature.

She's safe at last, hidden from the Wicked Queen who thinks she's dead. Right?

Wrong. The W.Q. is a secret weapon in the form of the traitorous Magic Mirror. "Mirror, mirror on the wall/Who's the fairest of them all?"

"It's still Snow White and she's hiding in the woods with seven little bearded guys, so if you want to be the fairest, you'll have to knock her off."

This time the W.Q. is too smart to trust any huntsmen because she sees that they'll be blinded by Snow White's beauty and goodness, so she goes to the woods herself, disguised as a kindly old lady, and takes a poisoned apple for her stepdaughter to eat.

I was a kid when the Disney version came to my town; the Wicked Queen was my first movie villain and I still remember that apple. It was half-red and half-green and it seemed to shine from the screen like a Christmas bauble. The entire kid audience shouted, "Don't eat it!" when Snow White reached for it, only she didn't hear us, so she took that apple and the kindly old lady morphed into the Wicked Queen and there were probably a few wet beds in Toledo, Ohio, that night.

See, that's my theory of suspense: that it all begins in fairy tale, with the very first stories we ever learned. And those stories weren't cleaned up and politically corrected when I was five or six; they were the hard-core Grimm stuff with hearts ripped out of bodies and pure evil trying to crush pure innocence.

Rites of Passage _

All fairy tales are rites of passage, mystical handbooks teaching us how to change and grow, how to travel to a new place in life, how to prevail over the forces of darkness within and without. They all have certain elements in common, no matter what cultural background they come from.

There is a problem, usually caused by some turmoil within the home. A woodsman marries a second wife who wants his children dead, a young girl's father remarries and the new wife brings wicked stepsisters into her life, a mermaid falls in love with a prince who walks on two legs.

The fairy-tale hero is cast out and alone. She finds helpers and guides along the way. The birds guide Hansel and Gretel back to their home; mice become coach horses for Cinderella's carriage. Ants help Psyche separate seeds from sand. Elders such as the seven dwarfs or the old woman who lives in the stilt house guide the hero to new ways of thinking.

The middle of the story involves tasks and tests, lessons and learning.

Snow White first "tames" the huntsman whose mission is to kill her, and then she "tames" the dwarfs by bringing the joys of domesticity to their cabin. Hansel twice finds ways to guide himself and Gretel back home, failing only when the birds eat the trail of breadcrumbs the third time. Then he and Gretel fool the old witch into thinking Hansel is losing weight by substituting a twig for Hansel's finger, and Gretel passes the ultimate test when she tosses the old witch into her own oven.

Death is confronted directly. The still-beating heart of the deer in the huntsman's hand is a graphic reminder to Snow White of what might have been. Gretel's casting the witch into the flames meant to cook her brother, Sleeping Beauty's long deathlike coma, Snow White's seeming death from the poisoned apple—all are symbolic of the death of the immature being and the rebirth of the new, mature, tested hero who has traveled to a new state in life.

The marriage at the end of so many fairy tales is described by scholars as a Sacred Marriage of the masculine and feminine within a single human being. Looked at this way, the Prince Charmings are more than door prizes, they represent the state of readiness for adulthood and the new strength the heroine gained by undergoing the tests.

The pure-evil villain forces the hero to change and grow. But for all those wicked stepmothers, our heroes would stay at home with Daddy, never venturing out and testing themselves, never maturing from girl to woman.

What does all this have to do with suspense fiction written by and for adults? Let's look at one writer who has captured the essence of fairy tale in her suspense stories and see how closely the elements conform to a classic tale.

A Cry in the Night,
Mary Higgins Clark

Once upon a time, there was a little mermaid who lived under the sea. She met a handsome prince and fell in love with him, but he was a land-dwelling creature and couldn't live in her world. So she made a bargain with a magician who promised to change her from mermaid to woman: she could have legs and breathe on land, but she would lose her voice and be unable to speak.

She made the deal and won her prince, but she didn't live happily ever after, not in the Hans Christian Andersen original. The prince treated her badly and she couldn't go back to her home in the sea because she'd given up that part of herself for him. So she wasted away, and her statue looks out over Copenhagen Harbor as a reminder to all women to keep the essence of who they are and not sacrifice everything for love of a man.

Once upon a time in Manhattan there lived a single mother with two children. One day while taking her kids home from day care, wearing an old sweater, she met Prince Charming, who wore a camel's-hair coat and silk scarf and had Viking good looks. He fell in love with Jenny McPart-land at once and began showering her with gifts, which the young mother appreciated because she was an orphan twice over, having lost her parents when she was a child and having just buried the grandmother who raised her.

This part sounds a lot like Cinderella, doesn't it? Now comes the Little Mermaid part.

The prince woos the young woman in a whirlwind courtship and marries her, whisking her away to his hometown in the Midwest, creating what she calls a "magical transformation" of her life. Instead of old clothes and cheap sweaters, she has all the designer outfits she can wear. Instead of her children wearing hand-me-downs and going to day care, they can ride horses and have her company full time, and what's more, the prince loves them so much he wants to adopt them and put their feckless father out of their lives for good.

Oh, there are a few little signs and portents, but in true fairy-tale fashion, our heroine talks herself out of seeing anything wrong, which is very much a part of the early stage in the mystical transformation from unaware child to aware adulthood.

What are the signs and portents? The prince's extreme jealousy of our heroine's ex-husband, for one thing. He actually throws away a perfectly good meatloaf our heroine wants to serve for dinner because the ex touched it. (The ex doesn't like the prince either, but we tend to discount that because our fairy-tale-raised hearts want to believe that the prince is a prince and not a huntsman.)

Still. A perfectly good meatloaf. And that's not all—our prince has a way of throwing quite childish tantrums when things don't go exactly his way. And then we learn that the prince was married before, that he has a painting of his dead wife that is almost an icon, and—here comes the biggie—
he
wants the heroine to wear his dead wife's nightgown on their wedding night!

Are we getting the feeling our mermaid made a bad deal when she left her nice comfortable ocean to be with this guy?