How to rite Killer Fiction (19 page)

The irony, the irony. Yes, this is irony, which has nothing at all to do with rain on your wedding day or cheap wisecracks by late-night comics.

And it's the ultimate Rift Within the Team: the Team Traitor, who must not be revealed until the last possible moment, and
whose every action prior to the betrayal must be re-examined and found to be consistent with that betrayal even though we didn't realize it at the time.

Talley overcomes the Team Traitor and orders the arrests of the phony FBI guys. He goes to the hospital and takes the rescued Smith kids into their fathers room. This time Smith agrees to cooperate with Talley by helping him get to Benza.

Mythic heroes often have to face the same challenge more than once. They fail the first test, as Sir Percival did when he's unable to heal the wounded Fisher King. Talley confronted Smith before and got nothing; this time,
because he put the Smith children's lives above everything else
, he has earned the right to Smith's help, just as Percival earned the right to heal the Fisher King on their second encounter.

Now Talley calls Benza's henchman and starts negotiating on behalf of his own wife and child. The cop who was afraid he could never successfully negotiate a hostage situation again is faced with the toughest negotiation of his life. And he can do it now, in chapters 26 and 27, because we've seen him resolve the Smith hostage crisis. He's been tested and tested and tested, and now he has his black belt and is up against the biggest negotiating challenge he (or we) can imagine.

That's what Arcs Two and Three are for: to get our champion ready for the Big Bout, the Long Program, the Super Bowl of his suspense life. Crais showed Talley overcoming one hair-trigger robber, one psycho-killer robber, phony FBI guys, a turncoat cop, and a closed-mouthed Mafia accountant to get to this place. When he faces the baddest of the had, we sense it's an even match.

On page 345, Benza orders the murders of pretty much everyone in the book, from Talley to the FBI guys to Smith. This is how desperate the situation is; he's willing to wipe out his whole organization if he has to. Because if he doesn't, Mr. Really Big Bad Guy back east will whack him for being so careless as to let his records be exposed.

We're playing for all the marbles. And when it comes to thriller writing, anything less than all the marbles isn't worth playing for. Hold no marbles back.

The stand-off comes in stages. Talley confronts first one, then another henchman until he reaches Howell, the second in command. Then he tosses the guy one disk and says the
guy can
have the other after he sees his wife and child. He isn't, in the words of his opponent, "acting like a has-been cop who had been broken by the job and come to nowhereland to hide." (p. 353)

That was precisely what he was acting like in chapter two, if you recall. This is how far this experience has brought him, and we believe it because it's his enemy talking and
because we were there to witness his transformation.
This is the Hero's Journey come to life: Talley has gone from burned-out ordinary world to super-competence inside the special world of hostage negotiation, and now, having come through the fire, he faces the ultimate test.

Marion Clewes the fly-eater has a gun to Talley's wife's head. Talley has a gun to Howell's head. Howell has one disk; Talley has the other.

Who's going to blink first?

Whoever cares the most. And that's Talley.

So he drops his gun.

What? He just drops his gun and lets Howell have the disk?

What kind of heroic act is that?

Howell gets the disk and puts it into his laptop computer and we learn that it's
not
the second disk with Benza's information on it. It's blank.

Howell orders Clewes to kill everyone. Clewes raises his gun. He has his orders from Benza.

But instead of shooting Talley, Clewes shoots everyone else, including Howell. Which makes a weird kind of sense when you remember that Benza ordered the wipe-out of everyone who knew anything about the Smith situation because he's deathly afraid of Mr. Really Big Bad Guy back east finding out that he was so careless with his tax records.

The bad guys are on the run, only the Really Big Bad Guys won't let them run, so there is weeping and gnashing of teeth in the camp of the enemy, which is pretty much what there ought to be at the end of a good suspense novel.

Jeff Talley is no longer a burnout case. Hostage negotiations killed his soul, and now hostage negotiations have restored his soul and brought him back to his wife and daughter, who are no longer estranged from him because he has his soul back and he can show them his love. His nightmares about the blown case in the prologue are replaced by a daydream of forgiveness. He is now reconnected to life through the risking and saving of lives.

He has returned with the elixir.

Did he earn it? That's the key to the elixir thing; if we have a moment's hesitation in answering that question, we have a failed Hero's Journey. Earning is everything, and that's why Arcs Two and Three of a good thriller have to take us to hell and beyond. That's why Crais didn't let the Smith home be invaded by three stupid punks—instead, he gave us two stupid punks and a psychotic killer. That's why Crais didn't make Smith an ordinary accountant, but the accountant to the Mob. That's why Talley isn't just a former LAPD hostage negotiator who decided to move to the burbs; he's a burnout case who's barely hanging on by his fingernails.

Everything that could go to the max went to the max.

And that's what makes a thriller.

Sting in the Tail Endings_

Just as the mystery has its tradition of "double" endings, so does the suspense genre. Some of these are two-tiered, like the two-solution mystery endings, and some just put a little sting in the tail to let us know it isn't entirely over.

The famous Hannibal Lecter line in
Silence of the Lambs
about "having an old friend for dinner" is one of those stinger endings. The ostensible Bad Guy, the serial killer known as Buffalo Bill, has been caught, but Lecter escaped from prison and is still at large. He calls Clarice Starling to gloat and remind her that he's still a menace to society. He's also promising to come back in a sequel, which isn't always the point of the stinger.

Often the stinger sets an ironic tone, telling the reader that while the hero has succeeded in one aspect of his quest, he's still got a long way to go. Other stinger endings, such as the ones in Jeffery Deaver's
A Maiden's Grave
and Michael Connelly's
The Poet,
add an extra layer to the story and bring in
new dimensions.

Whether or not you use a sting in the tail ending has a lot to do with your overall worldview. The stinger is an ironic twist, a not-quite-happy ending that undercuts the traditional heroic victory over evil. So if you want that pure victory, go for all-out goodness at the end and leave out the stinger. Let everyone live happily ever after without a cloud of disillusion.

Me, I like clouds. Which is why Michael Connelly's
City of Bones
has my vote for Sting in the Tail of 2002.

What Can You Do for an Encore?_

Not so long ago, I firmly believed that series suspense was impossible. Dick Francis, who introduced new protagonists with each title, felt the same. Once you'd taken your main character to hell and back, where could you go in a sequel that's worse than hell? How many times can one person confront a fate worse than death without the writer falling into a
Perils of Pauline
disaster-of-the-month trap?

Francis wrote his second book about a character he'd already used with
Whip Hand.
Sid Halley, first introduced in
Odds Against,
had lost his hand in an accident.
Odds Against
showed him coming to terms with his disability, and when the story finished, Francis said he had no plans for a second book about Halley.

Television producers thought otherwise. They saw a series in the character and they begged for a second adventure with him.

What do you do with a character who lost his hand and his career in book one and who in the same book started a second career and overcame his feelings of uselessness? Where could Francis go from there?

When a man has lost one hand, what's the worst thing that could happen to him?

Losing the other hand, of course.

And that's what Francis did: he put Sid Halley in a position where Very Bad Dudes threatened to destroy his good hand if he didn't play ball with them.

That's what an author trying for a meta-novel has to do: figure out where to take the character after the first resolution of his story. Yes, our detective has solved
this
crime, but has he learned more about his own identity? (That's Anne Perry's William Monk series, starring a Victorian police officer with amnesia. The meta-challenge for him is figuring out who he is—or who he used to be.)

Yes, Molly Cates saved
this
busload of children from fanatical kidnappers, but will she ever get to the truth about her father's death? (
Under the Beetle's Cellar,
and yes, Molly does find the truth in
All the Dead Lie Down,
the third book in the series. The questions about the death, however, began in the first book, Mary Willis Walker's
The Red Scream.)

Or, thinking of the late great John D. MacDonald, how many of the hero's girlfriends can you kill off before readers refuse to invest their emotions in your stories?

In John D.'s case, it didn't seem to matter. Travis McGee met a new woman in every book, and if they didn't all die, a goodly number of them did, and Travis mourned for a while, but we readers were willing to follow him on his next outing just the same. One reason it didn't matter is that the books were action-adventure reads with mystery overtones. Travis McGee was a knight-errant, and knights always have fair ladies whom they don't marry and settle down with.

Dave Robicheaux, James Lee Burke's bayou detective, does get married and acquire a child, and that means that his emotional connections must be treated with more seriousness than McGee's. If one significant other dies, there must be mourning and regrouping before another can enter Robicheaux's life. Women and children are threatened in this series, but there's never a sense that they could be injured or killed without a devastating psychological impact on the hero.

Story arcs in this series involve Dave's first wife, his mourning for her and romance with a second woman, the growth and development of his adopted child. Each of these strands spans more than one book and each brings him closer to a family life, the loss of which would destroy him completely.

Burke takes us into the past as well, dealing in the eleventh book of the series
(Purple Cane Road)
with the death of Robicheaux's mother, which was mentioned in the first book,
The Neon Rain.
At the same time, Dave's daughter Alafair, named for his dead mother, is growing up and becomes a part of the story in a way she couldn't have done earlier. By waiting until book eleven to delve deeply into the mother's death, Burke adds another level to the resonance by involving the next generation.

The more you care, the more you have to lose. So one of the uses of the meta-novel is to show the character's deepening connections, his intense caring, for another person, someone who can't be replaced in the next book.

The death of significant others is becoming almost a standard plot point in the meta-novel. It's a way of taking the character to new depths and creating sympathy, while at the same time clearing the way for another relationship that will spark up a series in danger of sagging in the meta-middle. The death alone will not be enough to do this; the death must provoke change in the main character. The danger is that since the reader, presumably, already liked the main character, how can the author change her without losing what the readers liked?

As the meta-novel evolves, taking on some of the qualities of a long-running television drama series, it will be interesting to see how much suffering and loss readers can absorb without becoming saturated.