How to rite Killer Fiction

by Carolyn Wheat

  Use the Setting

  Each time you revisit the confrontation scenes, ask yourself if you're getting the most out of your characters, your situations, and your setting. Maybe it's the underground aspect, but one book that comes to mind when I think of great settings exploited to the max is Nevada Barr's Blind Descent. Our hero, park ranger Anna Pigeon, is claustrophobic. She's also assigned to a national park whose most famous asset is a cave. Already we have an interesting situation, and the first time Anna descends into the cave is a memorable exercise in scene setting. Because Anna is hypersensitive to the idea of being underground, she notices every detail that could possibly give rise to fear, and as a result, we the readers feel her emotional resistance to the place.

  That's the setup. We've been inside the cave, we know what it's like, and we know how much Anna hates and fears the place. So when Arc Four rolls along and Anna gets trapped in the cave with an armed killer, we're primed for an adrenaline rush of action and suspense. And we get exactly that. It's dark—which means both that Anna can't see the killer and that she can't always be seen. The darkness is both advantage and peril, and Barr uses it as both. The killer has a gun, but the killer can't see to aim it.

  There are twists and turns and odd rock formations, places to hide, curved paths that distort the sound so that you can't tell where someone else is. Someone in the cave is injured—does Anna stay with her, leave her there and go for help, or abandon her? Meanwhile, it's cold and water trickles down the rocks, making them slippery to hold onto and walk on.

  Barr milks that cave for all it's worth. She gets suspense mileage out of every nook and cranny, every stalagmite and stalactite, and that's what I'm talking about when I urge you to do the same with your chosen stand-off setting. Ask yourself these questions:

  • What is there in the setting that could be used as a weapon, either by the villain or the hero?

  • How can the setting be made even more dangerous to the hero?

  • Is the setting remote, so that outside help is unlikely?

  • Are there natural dangers that threaten the hero as much as anything the villain could do?

  • Does the setting have any other meaning in the story that takes on an ironic edge now that it's become a place of confrontation and danger?

  • Can the setting be made even more frightening by, say, turning out the lights, or cutting off the oxygen?

  You'll also notice that Barr gives the final-confrontation-in-the-cave situation three chapters from descent to ascent. That's about right for a really well-developed climax, and you'll also note that there are mini-goals and mini-arcs within those three chapters.

  Use the Characters

  We need to see the villain pulling out all the stops. The Wicked Witch of the West is as wicked as they come, and she pulls no punches in her confrontation with little Dorothy. We've been waiting for this conflict, and we aren't going to be satisfied if the Big Bad Villain melts too quickly. Whatever powers the writer gave the villain need to be put into play at the end, nothing held back. He's fighting for his very life, and he has no scruples about doing whatever it takes to win.

  But our hero by this time isn't powerless. Whatever she learned in the middlebook comes into play now. All the new skills she's mastered plus whatever strengths she started with need to be used. Any allies she made among the enemy ranks need to turn their coats now, and we need to believe in their transformation.

  Secondary characters make good interim targets. Good-guy allies die for the cause; bad-guy allies take a bullet for the chief. Turncoats pay the price. And all of this takes time. From Plot Point Two to the final mano-a-mano can take two to three chapters, and probably should. Don't run through the foreplay too quickly; we readers have waited a long time for this, and we're ready to enjoy the whole thing, nothing skipped over.

  Read John Le Carre's The Night Manager and see how he develops the Big Bad Guy character, showing his ruthlessness, his cleverness, his love for his young son, his possessive affection for his girlfriend, his egotistical power tripping—every single aspect of this man's character becomes something our hero will either suffer because of or learn to exploit as a weakness. Every secondary character also has a role to play for good or ill; they either thwart the hero or help him, and sometimes they do both unwittingly.

  When the climax arrives and our hero seems to be in an impossible predicament, the B team steps in. This consists of the spymasters back in London, who are fighting their own bureaucratic war within the intelligence establishment. Every move they make is likewise rooted in character development that Le Carre put in motion at the beginning of the story. Clues planted in Arc One about who these men are under stress bear fruit in Arc Four. Even when it seems that tables are turning, we believe because we've seen enough aspects and facets of character to make the twists and reversals credible.

  A Full Measure of Justice

  The payoff has to be worthy of the setup. If you've shown your readers blow-by-blow pictures of the suffering victims, your readers will not be satisfied if the serial killer is marched away in handcuffs at the end of the book. We want—we need—to see him suffer and perhaps die in order to experience catharsis. Even his death cannot truly balance the suffering we saw him cause, but if he suffers nothing, we are left unsatisfied. A writer who has given us less detail about the suffering victims might get away with a less powerful ending, but if the balance is off, we feel the ending has not been worthy of the rest of the book.

  In a similar vein, the villain has to be worthy of the hero's effort. The villain your hero confronts must be worthy of her ultimate efforts; he must be bigger than life and twice as dangerous. He must be shown to be dangerous, in that he wants your hero's total destruction and has the apparent means to get what he wants. The murderer in a whodunit may turn out to be a pathetic loser awakening our pity; the suspense villain had better remain a powerful force for evil if your hero's struggle is to have meaning. Jack the Giant Killer needs a giant. Snow White needs a jealous queen; a mere neurotic stepmother with a narcissistic personality disorder won't do.

  The battle itself must likewise be worthy. In a suspense novel, the confrontation between hero and villain is the climax—it must last long enough and be told in sufficient detail to satisfy the reader, and it must involve ingenuity and skill as well as sheer physical strength. We need to see the hero try and fail, try and fail again, then try and succeed—only to be confronted by another, stronger enemy or strategy. When this doesn't happen, we feel unsatisfied.

  An easy, time-honored way to add suspense is to cross-cut between scenes involving the hero in peril and other scenes. It's the old "meanwhile, back at the ranch" ploy; you lock the hero in a room with the time bomb ticking away, then cut to an unrelated scene. We read the second scene as quickly as possible; we can't wait to get back to the locked room and find out how out hero is doing. He tries to loosen his bonds; he fails.

  Cut to the villain, on his way to commit whatever villainous acts are on his mind. He succeeds.

  Back to the locked room. Hero tries again; hero fails again. The time bomb is ticking.

  Read Mary Higgins Clark's A Stranger Is Watching to see how it's done. Our heroine is tied to a ticking bomb underneath Grand Central Station, in a hidden place only the homeless know. As if that weren't enough tension, there's a small child with her, and if she can't untie the two of them and go for help, not only will they die, they'll take hundreds of innocent people waiting for trains upstairs with them.

  While the clock ticks, Clark shows every movement of every muscle as our heroine strains against her bonds. We feel every trickle of sweat down her face, every rush of blood to her heart as she thinks about the consequences. The time ticks away, not just in the story, but in Clark's prose; on every page, she reminds us exactly how few seconds are left. Clark keeps us tied to this painful situation for exactly the same amount of time that our heroine is tied to the bomb, so that we're reading in real time, not speeding it up for the
sake of getting to the climax.

  Endings that Satisfy_

  Action without feeling—great for a Bruce Willis movie, deadly for a suspense novel.

  The more emotion you can pack into your final scenes, the more you will create readers who don't just like your books, they love your books and they can't wait to tell their friends all about the new writer they've discovered.

  Think I'm just being a chick here?

  Perhaps you think that what I mean by emotion-packed is people crying all over the place. No—what I mean by emotion is resonance, resolution, a sense of destiny fulfilled, of a human being living to his highest potential and reaping well-earned rewards.

  Remember how you felt when Dumbledore awarded those points to Gryffindor in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone? Remember how thrilled you were when Princess Leia, Luke Skywalker, and Han Solo were honored at the end of the first Star Wars? How about Dr. Richard Kimball knowing he's finally proved his innocence at the close of The Fugitive?

  The more the resolution of the situation matters to the hero, the more it matters to the reader. At the end of Blind Descent, Anna Pigeon hasn't just unmasked a murderer, she's faced her own deepest fear and come out stronger. At the end of Jeffery Deaver's A Maidens Grave, a world-weary, cynical hostage negotiator has a chance to renew his faith in humanity with a young deaf teacher, and the teacher has proved her own bravery to herself. The ordeal has not only succeeded in saving children's lives but in giving each of them a new life to look forward to.

  You don't get an ending like that without a lot of setting up. We can't know how much a new love would mean to the old jaded cop unless we trace his past experiences with his now-dead wife (and we do this in Arc Two, don't we?). We can't feel the strength of the young teacher's connection to this man she can only see through an upstairs window without being inside her head and realizing how lonely she's been since she lost her hearing. That setup is for nothing unless the writer gives us the full payoff, bringing these two people together at the end in a way that shows us they have a chance for happiness together.

  T. Jefferson Parker's Little Saigon brings his hero fully into the bosom of his family. The younger son, the outsider, the despised one, the boy who feels inferior to his big brother and responsible for the drowning death of his little sister, is now, at last, a completely acknowledged son of his powerful father. Where did his journey start? At a table in a Vietnamese nightclub where he felt acutely his brother's legendary status and his own marginal acceptance. Where does it end? At the family table, where his father tells him he is loved and respected.

  Endings that Let the Reader Down _

  These are some of the good endings. What are the ending-killers you need to watch out for? On my all-time top ten list:

  1. The contrived, Hollywood-style ending that depends upon a complete character transplant. The villain suddenly turns into Little Mary Sunshine; the hero who hasn't been through the fire suddenly becomes Superman.

  2. The big secret finally revealed that turns out to be not so big, and for the reader with any level of sophistication, not so secret.

  (n.b.: Everyone knows some children are sexually abused. It ain't a big secret anymore, and it's too sad to become a cliche.)

  3. The ending that depends upon information withheld from the reader until the last minute when that information really should have been delivered earlier.

  4. The missed opportunity ending, in which the author stubbornly refuses to put the real action on the page and instead does an "I just heard on the radio that Mr. Big is dead" thing.

  5. The violence-for-its-own-sake ending, in which seven people we didn't care much about in the first place are gunned down just to prove how bad the bad guy is. Prove it in Arcs Two and Three; that's what setup is for.

  6. The double ending that depends upon our believing the villain is dead, only to have him pop up again in a totally unbelievable way.

  7. The ending that depends upon a quick and "sweet" resolution of conflicts that are really too complex and thorny for easy solutions.

  8. Insufficient justice.

  9. Insufficient setup for the payoff.

  10. The outline-for-an-ending that goes through the motions without sufficient depth or detail. The ending that screams, "I was on deadline! What do you want from my life?"

  Hostage: Arc Four_

  Talley and the phony FBI guys work together to breach the house, kill the robbers, and release the kids. (This is made a lot easier by a Rift Within the Enemy Team.) The bad guys start ripping up the office in search of the disks, which Talley knows Thomas has.

  Final twist on Rift Within the Team: The Team Traitor.

  Someone on our team was on the take from the beginning, working for Benza, and if that person had managed to get into the Smith house, Benza would have gotten his disks and—

  And Talley's family would be safe. The Smiths might well have died, which would have been one more nightmare for Talley, but his wife and daughter would never have had to meet Marion Clewes.

  So by acting the professional, Talley unknowingly put himself in the position of becoming Benza's target. He's paying the price for being a good hostage negotiator, and the price is that he has to become an even better one to save his own family.

  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. Th
is 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.