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?
How about her lost voice? How does our Manhattan mermaid become unable to speak because she made a bargain with a magician to win her prince?
This book begins with a prologue showing our heroine on her way to the prince's secret cabin in the woods (okay, we're sneaking into Bluebeard territory here) to open the Door That Must Not Be Opened. She has tools with her, obviously intended to effect her entry into the cabin, and as she passes the winter-bare trees she nails bits of cloth to them for markers so she can find her way back (recalling Hansel and Gretel). As she walks she thinks about going to the sheriff: "But he would surely refuse to help and would simply stare at her with that
familiar look of speculative disdain."
The town belongs to the prince. Any time she voices the slightest doubts about the prince or raises a question about the dead wife, she's met with the same blank stares, the same robotic assurance that there's nothing wrong. As far as making herself heard, she might as well have no voice because nothing she says is listened to or acted on. (Of course, being from Manhattan makes her doubly suspect.)
The worst part is that her own daughters stop listening to her. They love their new house and new life and the horses and the kindly prince and to them our heroine begins to seem like a wicked stepmother intent on depriving them of joy.
This time the Little Mermaid can undo the bad bargain she made. Borrowing from Bluebeard's brave wife, she opens the Door That Must Not Be Opened and lets all the secrets out, and that power is what allows her, at long last, to be heard. That and one very unexpected ally: the ex-husband (just think of him as the dwarf who got away).
The Hero's Journey_
Joseph Campbell died in 1987. He's not writing movies in Hollywood, but sometimes it seems as if his spirit infuses many screenwriting classes these days. Whether it's an interior journey like the one in A Beautiful Mind or a blockbuster explosion-riddled thriller like Independence Day, we love seeing the hero's journey over and over again.
What is the journey, and how does it inform suspense writing?
Our hero begins his journey in the ordinary world. This is Cinderella's house before her father remarries, or, in T. Jefferson Parker's Little Saigon, hero Chuck Fry's world before his brother's wife is kidnapped. Some external event forces change and decision, and pushes the hero out of the ordinary world into a special world where new realities, new rules, must be learned, and where there will be tests and tasks to be mastered.
The Little Mermaid's special world is our ordinary one, because her ordinary world lies under the sea. Clark's heroine is taken from her ordinary world of Manhattan to the special world of her prince's domain; Fry's special world is that of the Vietnamese exiles. Even though they live in Orange County, California, and he makes no physical journey to find them, their world is alien to him. Accepting the adventure and crossing into the special world marks the end of Arc One and the beginning of the big bad middle.
The middle of the story is where the growth occurs. Here the hero meets allies and learns to distinguish (through trial and error) between those he can trust and those he can't. Tests and tasks abound, skills are learned, a mentor gives direction (in Little Saigon a Vietnamese elder helps Fry understand some of what's going on), and the hero moves inexorably toward a direct confrontation with evil.
Evil may reach out and harm the hero, but eventually, he must move in the direction of the evil instead of running away. Once freed from police custody, the Fugitive (in the movie of the same name) doesn't hop a plane and go to Peru, he marches straight into the very hospital where he once practiced, risking being seen and captured, in order to find the one-armed man. When the Wizard of Oz tells Dorothy to get a straw from the Wicked Witch's broomstick, she doesn't shrug and say, "I guess I can't get home then"; she sets off toward the witch's castle to do what has to be done. When Clark's mermaid finds out about The Door That Must Not Be Opened, she steels herself to open it, no matter what the consequences. The cops, the Vietnamese, and Fry's own brother and father all beg him to stay out of the kidnapping case, but he doggedly continues his quest for the truth that will free his sister-in-law.
These heroes enter the Inmost Cave, the most dangerous place they can be, the heart of their enemy's power, because they must. And they encounter death. Snow White "dies" when she eats the poisoned apple; Jenny McPartland is urged to "become" her dead predecessor; Fry faces death when he's pitted against ruthless Vietnamese gangsters.
The ultimate confrontation pits good against evil. Good wins, but we're never quite sure it's going to, and we never know exactly how our innocent and seemingly less powerful hero will find the tools and the heart to prevail.
What heroes win is the elixir, a fancy name for their new knowledge, their hard-won insights and maturity. In A Cry in the Night, it's the knowledge that our heroine, like the Little Mermaid, gave up too much of herself for her prince. In Little Saigon, the elixir is Fry's reconciliation with his family.
In some books, there's also a sacred marriage. Not only has Clark's heroine escaped her Bluebeard of a prince, but the local vet will make a wonderful real prince and he won't ask her to wear another woman's identity in order to be loved.
Well, okay, that's a chick book. How does all this fairy-tale stuff fit into a suspense novel with masculine energy?
Little Saigon, T. Jefferson Parker
Once upon a time there were three brothers, and the youngest was called Simple.
Actually, in this book there are two brothers. The older, Bennett, is a Vietnam veteran, brave and strong, his father's right-hand man, responsible and married to a beautiful Vietnamese woman. He's the hero, right?
Wrong. His younger brother, Chuck, the family screw-up, the second-best surfer in Laguna Beach (that second-best theme is going to come up again), the boy who caused his little sister's drowning, the man who lives in a cave-house and runs a tacky surf shop instead of working in the family business—he's the hero and it's his transition from aging boy to mature man that we're going to experience.
Chuck goes through the same maturation process as Jenny McPartland. He's tested by the search for his sister-in-law; he meets a mysterious woman with secrets of her own and has to decide whether to trust her or not; he's helped by an elder in the Vietnamese community, and then that elder is murdered before his eyes.
By the end of the book, he's become a man instead of a boy; he's matched his heroic brother in his ability to go head-to-head with vicious, violent killers and emerge triumphant. Without the testing process, he'd still be second best.
The Night Manager, John Le Carre
Here's a perfect example of the middlebook as training ground. The title character begins the story as the night manager of a hotel in Cairo. When someone he cares about is ruthlessly killed by bad guys, he lets himself be recruited by British intelligence. His decision to join the team is Plot Point One and his training and first tasks comprise Arc Two.
Arc Two takes the character from raw recruit status to the successful completion of the first task, which also sets up his cover for the ultimate goal, infiltrating the Big Bad Guy's entourage. Task two takes our hero from England to Canada and further away from his ordinary world. By the time he creates the scenario that allows him entry into the world of the Big Bad Guy, we believe that a man whose biggest concern used to be whether or not the presidential suite was ready is capable of bringing down the Big Bad Guy because we've seen him master smaller but still impressive tasks. He's earned the right to play the big time.
Arc Three gives us the infiltration itself. Now he's in the Cave, in this case the tropical island compound and yacht belonging to the Big Bad Guy. He's in a great position to grab up all the secrets and blow this guy's world apart, and all he has to do is not be found out because the moment he's found out, he's a dead man. Every cocktail party, every walk on the beach, is fraught because allies of the Big Bad Guy don't trust him and are working to expose him.
Then he falls in love with the Big Bad Guy's girlfriend. He's in the frying pan already, and Le Carre turns up the heat.
Psyche's Journey to Hades_
The kinds of tests and tasks the hero performs in the middle of a suspense novel resemble the ordeal a goddess of ancient Greece devised for her disobedient daughter-in-law.
Once upon a time there was a girl named Psyche. She was very pretty and nice, but she was a mortal, so when Eros, the god of love, fell for her, his mother, Aphrodite, wasn't thrilled. And when your mother-in-law is a goddess, you'd better watch your step.
In order to hide his godliness from his new bride, Eros told Psyche she was never to look at him in daylight. They made love in the dark, and Eros crept
away to sleep alone afterwards. Psyche's sisters thought this was strange, and they urged her to get a glimpse of her husband in case he looked like the Elephant Man or something. So one night Psyche crept into the chamber where Eros slept and held a candle close to his face. She was relieved to find that he was wonderfully handsome, but she stood gazing at him for too long, because the candle dripped hot wax on his face and woke him up.
Eros felt betrayed and walked out on his bride. Aphrodite told him it was no more than he should have expected, marrying an outsider. Psyche was devastated. She cried and mourned, realizing that she should have trusted her man, and she begged the gods to find a way to return Eros to her.
After a suitable period of self-flagellation, Psyche finally got Aphrodite to agree that Eros might come back to her—if and when she completed a few little tasks. Nothing too hard, mind you, just tokens of her good faith.
Task One: Separate the Seeds
The first task sounds easy enough. Psyche is given a bushel of seeds and told to separate them into poppy seeds, sesame seeds, etc. However, not only is the task difficult, but in addition, she is given an impossible time limit because the seeds are so many and so tiny. But Psyche gets help from an army of ants, who quickly divide the seeds into different piles.
The lessons of this task: the art of fine distinctions, of separating seeds, is a metaphor for being able to tell truth from lies, false friends from true. The ants are symbolic, too. Small helpers, people or things that seem insignificant and powerless, can become the best friends a suspense hero ever had.
Task Two: The Golden Fleece
"Get me some golden fleece from the golden rams," orders Aphrodite. This is a task that daunted Jason, and he had boats and men at his command. How is one woman supposed to face charging rams and get their fleece?
Answer: by thinking like a woman instead of a man. Psyche comes to see that she doesn't have to confront the rams to get their fleece. What she needs to do is put them to sleep with beautiful music and then creep into the field and take the fleece while they're unaware of her.
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