People
Character from Suspense
Mark Billingham
I have been asked many times over the years – at events or during creative writing workshops – how a crime writer goes about creating suspense. There was a period when, in answer to this question, I would talk about what I considered to be the tricks of the crime writing trade. I would bang on about the importance of the cliffhanger, the twist and the ‘reveal’. Such devices remain hugely important, but I have come to realize that the answer actually lies in something far more basic, something that should be central to the writing of any piece of fiction: the creation of character.
All the techniques mentioned above are, of course, vital weapons in the mystery writer’s armoury and, as such, components of the genre that readers of crime novels have come to expect. They are part of the package; the buttons that a writer has to push every so often. When a crime writer thinks up a delicious twist, it is certainly a good day at the office, even if the ‘office’ at that particular moment happens to be the shower, the car or the park in which you’re walking the dog. Time to relax and take the rest of the day off.
I do think that it can be overdone, however.
There is a particular strain of crime and thriller writer who believes it is his or her duty to throw as many curveballs at the reader as possible. To twist and twist again. These are what I think of as the ‘Chubby Checkers’ of crime fiction and, while I admire the craft, I have come to believe that a superfluity of such tricks and tics can actually work against the creation of genuine suspense. Put simply, I find it hard to engage with any book that is no more than a demonstration of technique. I am not invested. A character dies, but why should I give a hoot when I know this particular writer’s stock in trade means that the character in question is almost certainly not dead at all? The cop or private detective or amateur sleuth has caught the killer, but is that the end of it? No, you can bet your boots it isn’t, because there are still three chapters left and I don’t have to be Hercule Poirot to work out that they have got the wrong man.
Make no mistake, this kind of intricate plotting can be hugely important and the success of writers who perennially give their readers a corkscrew ride is testament to its enduring popularity. But I don’t believe that in terms of creating suspense, it is necessarily the only way to go.
The ‘reveal’ remains a very effective technique, and one with which I am very familiar from my time as a stand-up comedian. It may sound surprising, but, having made the move from stand-up comedy to crime writing, I quickly discovered that a joke and a crime novel work in very much the same way. The comedian leads their audience along the garden path. The audience allow themselves to be led, because they know what’s coming, or at least they think they do, until they get hit from a direction they were not expecting.
My grandfather died recently. He just slipped away … sitting in his chair. He went very peacefully … unlike the passengers on his bus.
Or:
My wife and I have a very spontaneous love life. The other day we just took our clothes off and did it on top of a freezer! I don’t think they’ll let us back into Sainsbury’s again.
Old gags such as these show exactly how comics reveal their punchlines. The readers of crime novels are an equally willing audience, who can just as easily be blind-sided.
The best example I can think of from the world of crime fiction is in the wonderful Thomas Harris novel, The Silence of the Lambs, the second outing for the iconic Hannibal Lecter. Towards the end of the book, a SWAT team have the killer cornered and are approaching his house. At the same time, Clarice Starling has been dispatched to a small town many miles away to tie up a few loose ends. A member of the SWAT teams ring the killer’s doorbell. We ‘cut’ to the killer’s ghastly cellar from where he hears the doorbell ring. This is the moment when the ‘dummy’ is sold and the reader buys it completely. The reader stays with the killer as he slowly climbs the stairs, butterflies flitting ominously around him in the semi-darkness. We know he has a gun … we know what he is capable of … He opens the door, and …
It’s Clarice Starling! Boom-tish! The SWAT team are at the wrong house, she is at the right house and she doesn’t know it. It’s the perfect reveal and it is sublimely timed because it happens at the precise moment that the reader turns the page. The best crime fiction is full of heart-stopping moments such as this. They, too are punchlines, pure and simple, albeit rather darker than the ones you might hear trotted out at the Comedy Store.
But the reason that Harris’s reveal works so wonderfully is not just because of its exquisite timing. It works, above all, because of the character of Clarice Starling: a young woman the reader has come to know well over the course of the novel; to care about and to empathize with.
Ultimately, this is where I believe that the key to genuine suspense is to be found.
This revelation happened a good many years ago when I was reading a novel called The Turnaround by the American writer George Pelecanos. Pelecanos is happy enough to call himself a ‘crime writer’, or ‘mystery writer’ as they are more commonly known in the US, but he is not one of those writers overly concerned with the sort of tricks already described. There is usually an episode of shocking violence and there is often an element of investigation in its aftermath, but his books are not traditional mysteries by any means. What he does do, however, as well as any writer I know, is create characters who live and breathe on the page. As I read his novel, I realized I had come to know some of these people so well that the idea something terrible was going to happen to them – and I knew it most certainly would – had become almost unbearable. I was turning each page with a sense of dread and it dawned on me that here was the best and most satisfying way to create suspense. That it had been staring me in the face all along.
These are crime novels, after all. The reader has seen the jacket, read the blurb and knows very well what they are in for. Yes, there may be redemption and resolution of a sort, but there will also be suffering and pain, grief and dreadful loss. You know it’s coming, but not when or to whom.
The tension is real and terrible, because you care.
So, by all means throw in a thrilling twist every now and again, but not so often that they lose their power to shock. Time those ‘reveals’ to perfection to give your reader a punchline they will remember for a long time.
But above all, give your readers characters they can genuinely engage with, who have the power to move them, and you will have genuine suspense from page one.
Cops and Criminals, Contrast and Comedy
Bill James
My criminals display good as well as bad qualities and my policemen (Detective Chief Superintendent Colin Harpur and Assistant Chief Constable Desmond Iles in particular) blur the boundaries between good and evil. This gives me more material to play around with. The contrasting qualities in character mean, I hope, that they’re more interesting. It certainly makes them more interesting to me.
I’d like to think I have a comic view of society and mankind in general and that I sometimes get this across. Yes, sometimes the humour is meant to come from the sight of people struggling towards an objective, even an ideal, and, of course, making a muck of it.
I introduced Harpur and Iles in You’d Better Believe It, which I wrote as a one-off. There were quite a few rewrites and there was some difficulty in selling it at the beginning. I wasn’t altogether confident about it. And it didn’t get many notices at first. But I wrote another book about the same characters, The Lolita Man. And that got enormous coverage and reviews. And that, I suppose, then prompted me into thinking I must stick with this for a while, at least. And so then I went on and wrote Halo Parade, and the series grew from there. It’s now been running for more than thirty novels, published at a rate of roughly one a year.
I think that it was Len Deighton who said that he likes to get something on every page that makes the reader smile or possibly laugh. It’s a continual job. You’ve got to keep on making the book amusing page by page, not overall.
I like aggressive humour. The kind that quite often comes, on the police side, from upending order. And on the crooks’ side, the humour springs from their aspirations to be businessmen: serious, sometimes even moral people. The way they talk is at variance with how really they are. The humour in that contrast usually works well and suggests what I’m always trying to suggest: that we’re on the edge of chaos all the time.
Iles is the more complicated of the two lead characters. He’s basically a good cop. But very basically. He never takes money; he’s not bent in that sense. He’s ruthless in what he does, and sometimes acts in the way the criminals act in order to catch the criminals. In some ways, he’s also weak. He’s unattractive to his wife, who has an affair both with Harpur and one of the other cops, Francis Garland. And Iles knows this and it drives him berserk.
Harpur represents the proper, nose-clean side of policing – most of the time, although he will take short cuts. Iles constantly mocks him for being too conventional and too timid. But quite often Harpur is the one who gets things put right, who actually runs the place behind Iles’s back to some extent. He neutralises Iles. And he appears to work his own way, and sometimes actually does work his own way, and succeeds where Iles’s methods might not.
Somebody asked me, in an interview in France, if I was Harpur. ‘Oh, no!’ I said. ‘I’m Panicking Ralph!’ I understand people who get scared, which he does. I understand people who have crazy kind of ambitions. He wants to turn his rather seedy club, The Monty, into something like the Athenaeum in London, which is preposterous. But, we all have those ambitions and they are in some ways poignant and in some ways comical, so that I can get a fair number of laughs out of Ralph and similarly out of the other big dealer, Mansel Shale, who pretends to a kind of social style.
The technique of the books is to give qualities to people that are a surprise in them. Harpur and Iles work, if they do work, as fiction characters because they are not sergeants and constables, they are extremely high-ranking cops who don’t always play by the book. So there is kind of a shock element in that. Of course, I’m not the first or only crime writer to show a cop (or cops) with faults. Perhaps Iles drifts closer to the outrageous, though, and he is always beautifully dressed – uniform or civvies.
Making Characters Believable
Marjorie Eccles
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a crime writer possessed of an idea for a novel must be in want of characters.
All right, so we have our basic idea. What has triggered it off? Where has it come from? That perennial question, often as unanswerable to writers as it is to the readers who invariably ask it. To which the response has to be, who knows? Anything could have given birth to it: an intriguing incident that’s been squirrelled away for further use and suddenly raises its head with possibilities; the unexpected recall of an atmospheric place; a niggle that’s been buzzing around in your subconscious. It may be a new, exciting snippet of news that’s sparked off possibilities for a story; it may have lain dormant for a long time; but now the seed is there, ready to germinate.
And here too are the shadowy figures in the wings, waiting to put flesh and blood on the skeleton idea. No problem, one would imagine … it’s relatively easy to put together a few random people to carry the story through, isn’t it? Maybe, but the tricky bit lies in making them come alive enough for the reader to recognize and identify with, to care enough about.to want to turn the pages and reach the end of the book. They have to be realistic, recognizable and believable in an imaginary world in which chaos, crime and violence exist, or which will certainly intrude; a world most people will hopefully never encounter.
In an ideal situation, there would be a convenient recipe handy, a formula for creating such characters, but I’ve never been able to find it. In the end, I believe it has to be largely intuitive, relying on one’s own experiences and observation of how people speak, think and act. Human nature doesn’t change. The human race continues to possess the same propensities for good or evil, intelligence or ignorance, kindness or cruelty, love or hate, the same capacities for jealousy and revenge as it always has. But how readers will see the characters you have envisaged in the way you wish needs a good deal more thought.
How much does physical appearance matter? To begin with, readers need to be given a general but not necessarily lengthy picture of the sort of character you are envisaging when they are first introduced. Appearances being notoriously deceptive, something about them, the sort of first impression we get when we meet someone for the first time, is probably a better option than a detailed description at this point. We can leave it to the reader’s imagination to do the rest, to build up their own impressions as the book progresses and more of the character’s traits are revealed through their speech and actions.
It may be advice that’s been given too often, but it’s not a bad idea to try to get under the skin of one’s characters. Look at how actors do this, stepping into the life of a role and being that person – and then look at how successfully they handle characters when they turn their hands to writing, be it novels or plays. Live, eat, breathe with these as-yet-imaginary people. Try to understand just how they will respond in any given circumstances (not least when they are under stress), learning everything about them, their idiosyncrasies, their habits, good or bad, as well as you know your own (some of which you might never have suspected you possessed). You can’t help but bring them to life.
As writers, we should know far more about the characters we’ve brought into being than ever ends up on the printed page. Like an iceberg, the ninety per cent mass below the surface supports what shows above the water. It can be self-defeating to give too much chapter and verse, slowing the pace if the story is mainly one of action; or worse, boring the reader. Better to allow for some speculation about them and their role in the puzzle that is a detective novel: why they have acted in such a way, what has motivated them. The satisfaction of working it out for themselves is after all is one of the things readers of crime novels enjoy.
Having said that, it’s worth remembering that if the book is not set in the present day. attitudes and opinions are bound to be influenced by the times in which people live. I have written crime fiction set in the past, ranging from the early Edwardian age to the 1930s, all in all a period of incredible social change. The holocaust of the First World War, beginning in 1914, turned the world upside down and afterwards, for most of the people who had lived through it, life was never the same again. Working men who had experienced the horrors of trench warfare and fought alongside those previously thought to be their betters had gained different attitudes towards social class. Women who had shown themselves capable of taking on men’s jobs during the war now sought independence and careers of their own. A million young men were amongst the countless number who lost their lives, leaving behind a spinster generation: the maiden ladies who later turned up in so much post-war fiction. Writing today, we must beware of attributing modern mores to characters who lived fifty or a hundred years ago, or vice versa. How someone thought and behaved about racism in, say, the Twenties or Thirties might not – probably wouldn’t – be how that same character would react today.
I am often asked if my characters ever take over and begin to take the story in another direction. Well, if such a thing should seem to be happening, I would take a good hard look to find where I’ve gone wrong. Maybe the character doesn’t fit in and should be part of another story altogether, but it’s more likely that they have stepped out of character in some way. They are not acting consistently with how they have been presented until then. It is sometimes necessary to ask readers to suspend disbelief, but not to overlook aberrations of character. As writers, we have to hover over our creations with a coldly critical eye. Consistency is vital, and unconvincing deviations jump off the page and take away any belief in the person you have so far created. If I find one of my characters persists in acting as they shouldn’t, they have to be put firmly in their place, or summarily dispensed with.
That isn’t always so easy. These people are your creations, your darlings, and you have learnt to like if not to love them … even the baddies – vices being more interesting than virtues. Villains can be great fun to create and to read about. We may smile and admire their cheek while deploring what they’ve done. Conversely, someone who is too nice for their own good can be at best irritating or worse, dull. But in an effort not to bore the reader, it’s sometimes too easy to fall into the trap of creating grotesques, caricatures rather than characters, or another Frankenstein monster … all best avoided, unless it happens to be your deliberate intention to feature such in your novel. I suppose, if we’re being honest, most of us are rather dull in real life, but this is not to say your characters should be. Nor do they have to be larger than life, although they can be believable if you believe in them enough, and consistently show in credible ways that you do.
Of course, creating the principal character is always the main concern. When I wrote my first contemporary detective novel, I had no idea that Inspector Gil Mayo was to feature in another twelve. Crime fiction was a new venture for me and I had no way of knowing whether such a book would succeed or not. I knew from writing my previous books that my central character had to be not only someone whom the reader could recognize and identify with, care enough about to want to read to the last chapter; but also someone I strongly believed in. So, when Mayo finally became established in my mind, he was an expat Yorkshireman, living and working in the Midlands, on the edge of the Black Country. Plain-speaking, down-to-earth, shrewd, occasionally bloody-minded, but basically soft-hearted. The sort of person I was surrounded with as I grew up, and knew well.
Unless he was to be a cliché, a stage Yorkshireman, he had to have other qualities. I was naive enough at the time to have no idea that showing him as particularly unusual or quirky, even outrageous in some way, was considered a good thing. I settled for the man as he first appeared to me. He didn’t carry any emotional baggage, he wasn’t a loner though he was a widower with responsibilities for his teenage daughter. At that point his love life didn’t exist, though that was soon to be remedied when he met Alex Jones, a fellow police officer. He enjoyed walking holidays in Scotland, his favourite tipple was a single malt and his passion was music, mostly classical. He was logical, persistent and a demon for work, and I did allow him a strong streak of perceptiveness, that indispensable gift to all fictional detectives, which must happily get them there in the end.
The so-called Golden Age of crime novels, where the focus of the story lay on the amateur detective, with the police a barely acknowledged presence, had by then long been left behind. With the detection of crime becoming more and more a matter of police officers working as a team, the police novel needed more than a detective inspector and his sergeant or sidekick to get to the heart of the mystery, solve the puzzle and apprehend the murderer. Inspector (later Superintendent) Mayo had to acquire assistants.
Detective Sergeant Martin Kite was younger than Mayo, impulsive and good-natured, a locally born, married man with a young family, willing to work hard but not ambitious enough for promotion if it meant moving his family away. The temperaments of the two men were not in any way alike but they worked well together. I have found that the influences of background and environment are useful tools for adding other dimensions to a character and I think it helped in this instance that Mayo and Kite had their roots in similar backgrounds, areas of historical significance in the Industrial Revolution. The tough character and typically dry, self-deprecating humour of the people of the Black Country is something very akin to that of people living in the north of England: an inheritance in both cases from the harsh times in which their forebears were forced to exist.
The possibilities of a career for an ambitious woman in the police was something which had interested me for some time. As the only woman so far in Mayo’s team had been Jenny Platt, a young WDC, I felt the time had come for more balance. Hence the arrival of a new assistant for Mayo in the person of Sergeant Abigail Moon. Abigail was young, university-educated, a high-flyer who had been through the rapid promotion process. She was everything the rest of the team, including Mayo, was not and therefore provided a good contrast and another dimension to spark off the other members of the team. She lived alone and was highly ambitious, and achieved inspector status before long.
What all this amounts to, of course, is that characters are only formed through the filter of the writer’s mind; there can be no set rules to follow, except learning to develop an eagle eye for inconsistencies and a ruthlessness in correcting them.
Sitting alone all day, over-caffeinated, making up stories and lies about imaginary characters on a word processor in the hope that someone will have the courage to publish your efforts is a cross that writers have to bear. But if and when someone does … well, like childbirth, the agony of producing it is soon forgotten. And meanwhile, who is that new character, hovering in the wings?
Characters, Relationships, and Settings
June Thomson
Whether reading or writing it, I admit I prefer crime fiction to any other form of literature.
Crimes take many very different forms. Theft? Espionage? Fraud? Blackmail? Manslaughter? Or Murder? It’s a broad range, and that in itself is interesting, especially to us – people who on the whole are not guilty of any of these transgressions but are emotionally moved by reactions that are unfamiliar and therefore intriguing. We want to know more about these responses. In other words, their effect on us can be a new experience in itself, which we find tantalizing.
This can affect our attitude to the crime novel. As ordinary, normal people we are, in short, nosey, and we want to know what happened, in reality or imaginatively. The crime novel, at its best, can supply the answers to these questions.
For me, firstly and most importantly a crime story gives the opportunity to explore a small circle of characters and the relationships between them. Statistics prove that murder is most often committed in such an intimate group or family setting. The random homicide is relatively rare despite publicity given to such cases by the media. Most killers and their victims are known to each other.
This gives the crime writer a fascinating and challenging opportunity. The permutations of relationships within such a group, and also within the even more tightly closed circle of the family, offer the chance to examine a whole cross-section of emotions and motivations. Jealousy, fear, revenge, hate and greed – all reasons for murder – are the basic stuff of human interactions, which have fired the imagination of such classic writers as Shakespeare and Dostoevsky. And in order for murder to be committed, two other factors are implied. Firstly, the relationship is usually long-standing but has reached the point of irrevocable breakdown; a far more interesting state of affairs to write about, in my opinion, than a romantic love affair where the intimacy has only just begun. Secondly, in real life – or real death – murder knows no social barriers. It is committed within all sections of the community, and this also gives the crime writer the opportunity to choose characters from widely differing social and economic backgrounds.
For the reader’s sake, the number of characters has to be limited. I usually try to keep mine to about eight at most. If there are more, I feel the reader can’t get to know them as intimately as I would like.
Mine are chosen from the ordinary men and women whom the reader might already know in real life. Murderers are not, generally speaking, depraved monsters. They are husbands and wives, sons and lovers, friends and colleagues – people who, apart from this single aberration of murder, are often decent law-abiding citizens. I like to feel the old adage ‘There but for the grace of God go I’ applies to them.
In my contemporary novels, I choose my backgrounds from those I am also familiar with – the rural Essex communities where I grew up and which can still be found in that particular south-east corner of England. In these close-knit villages and small towns, the local people know one another intimately. It’s here where tensions and jealousies can develop and where old resentments and bitternesses that have built up over the years may suddenly explode into violence.
At the end of the books, I aim to show the effect that murder can have on these communities. Even when my Detective Chief Inspector Finch (renamed Rudd in the UK to avoid any risk of confusion with Margaret Erskine’s Inspector Finch) and his sergeant, Tom Boyce, have successfully solved the case, not all the threads are neatly tied off. In real life, people’s lives are affected, sometimes shattered, by violence happening in their communities and nothing is ever the same again.
This rural background allows me describe the type of countryside which I find particularly attractive. It is not spectacular; it contains no mountains or waterfalls. It is agricultural land, worked by generations of farming families, and to the casual observer could appear unromantic. But its small woods, full of primroses and bluebells in the spring, its flat fields of wheat and sugar-beet and its wide skies give it a low-keyed beauty which has its own appeal.
As regards plotting, one important rule I always try to follow is this: the writer must be fair to his or her reading public. Although it’s permissible to lay false trails and to keep the reader guessing, I like to include in my books some small clue – sometimes only a phrase or a comment made in the course of a conversation – which can be picked up and used as a pointer to the identity of the murderer. I prefer, when the denouement is reached, that the reader doesn’t feel cheated and that the thread, which has been there the whole time, has led through the book to its conclusion.
Writing a crime story gives the author a broad choice of time and context. When did it happen? Who was involved? You can, if you wish, make it a real murder case which took place in the past, using the past as your material, making sure that such details of the people and the events are correct. This makes less of an imaginative demand upon the author. Both the events and the people have been based on reality.
An alternative approach is the story based on your choice of the when, why and who of the event. For example, do you take on the personal ‘I’ role and describe the events from that point of view? If this is your choice, you may wish to create a second person who you can share the case with. This personalises the story, but the second character needs a specific role to play.
This is a method used in many novels, the relationship between the two characters making the plot material much easier to use. It’s one I’ve used in novels such as the Finch and Boyce books. In recent years, I have moved away from this approach because although you can fill in a great deal of detail with discussion of the events, the demands of an official police inquiry can complicate the construction of the plot.
In recent years I have written stories featuring that classic relationship: Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson. I find that this allows me greater freedom with both the characters and the plot itself.
But whatever form you prefer, it is important to have a setting and a plot that will catch the attention of your readers. Descriptions are valuable, as long as they aren’t overused. Too many adjectives can slow up the plot and spoil the excitement of the story, which should be puzzling to the characters and, most of all, to the reader. The aim is to give him or her the thrill of the final explanation – the ‘of course’ reaction which creates the perfect response to your story.