Tuesday, September 6, 2011

INSIDE TOP SUSPENSE: Your Favorite Character

Welcome back, everyone. This week on INSIDE TOP SUSPENSE we’re talking about our Favorite Characters from a suspense, thriller, mystery, or horror novel. (Excluding our own.) Who’s yours? Why? What makes them so memorable? Hope you’ll join the conversation.


I'm a fan of John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee, John Connelly's Charlie Parker, Michael Connolly's Harry Bosch and several other series characters...But if I had to choose one favorite suspense hero, I guess it would have to be James Lee Burke's immortal Dave Robicheaux. From Black Cherry Blues and The Neon Rain all the way through to The Glass Rainbow, the series has held up beautifully. Robicheaux has lost a wife and numerous friends and lovers, been shot and stabbed and beaten and abandoned, gotten drunk and gotten sober. Through it all he's struggled to be dignified and compassionate, generally under the worst of circumstances. Hell, his wounded companion Clete Purcell is like another old friend, almost as real to me as the worn face in my bathroom mirror. As for Dave, he has become an old man now, one who still battles a horrendous temper, the urge to drink, and a wonderfully wrought, self destructive, deeply existential angst. He is an archetype and a contradiction in terms, a character who gives life to the phrase "All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for a good man to do nothing."


I’ve been racking my brain trying to come up with my favorite characters. As Harry said, there are so many memorable ones. Steve Hamilton’s THE LOCK ARTIST turned the genre upside-down with his young, mute lock-picker, Michael. And I confess to a fondness for Bob Crais’ Joe Pike as well as Ree Dolly in Daniel Woodrell’s WINTER'S BONE. All of them are people of few words (Hmm, maybe there’s a pattern here?) but a strong sense of justice and loyalty.
But I keep coming back to two characters, both of whom I never tire: Sara Paretsky’s V.I. Warshawski and Daniel Silva’s Gabriel Allon. V.I. is the kind of person I want next to me in a fight. If we don’t win, we’ll have given it all we had. She can’t suffer injustice without needing to do something about it, and yet she’s savvy and experienced enough to pick her battles wisely. I trust her implicitly, knowing she’ll always have the right motivation for her actions. Gabriel Allon is more of an enigma. He has baggage, some of which we still don’t know, but that only adds to his allure. His skill set as an assassin is unparalleled, and yet he’d rather be an artist. The combination of brutal cunning and sensitivity is incredibly appealing.

Bill Crider adds: My favorite thriller character is any first-person narrator in an Alistair MacLean novel published before 1970. You might be thinking that’s a lot of different characters since MacLean didn’t write a series, but they way I see it, all his first-person narrators are the same guy, no matter when or where they might be. He (or they) is tougher than industrial leather, resourceful, able to go without sleep for days under conditions that would kill most people, and prone to make terrible blunders that get people killed. That last one might not seem very heroic, but anybody else in a similar situation would get hundreds more killed. If not thousands. He’s often handicapped by some injury or wound, he’s clever, and (this is important for a first-person narrator) he knows how to conceal important information from the reader without cheating too much. I read many of MacLean’s books well over 40 years ago. They thrilled me then, and they thrill me now, thanks to thanks to that wonderful character.

Dave Zeltseman says: "There are so many good choices for best thriller character, but I'm going with Hammett's Continental Op from Red Harvest, The Dain Curse, and 24 short stories. Hammett's nameless PI is tough, smart, resourceful, and also persistent as all hell. He might take a beating or two, but he's going to get his man (or dame) even if he's got to steal crutches from a cripple to do so!"

Lee Goldberg says: I can’t pick a favorite…but I can give you some favorites… Robert B. Parker’s Spenser (the early books, not the last 378 of’em), Richard S. Prather’s Shell Scott, Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe, Gregory McDonald’s Fletch, and Charles Willeford’s Hoke Moseley. What makes these characters so terrific is that that they all have distinct voices and attitudes, strong and often brilliantly flawed personalities that totally shape the stories that are being told, and how they are told, whether it’s in first person or third person. It’s their voices, as much as their characters, that stick with me. I may forget the mysteries, but I can’t forget these characters.

And now, Max Allan Collins: It may be cheating a little, since I am working with the Spillane estate to complete various novels from the late writer's files, but...Mike Hammer is by far my favorite of the thriller heroes. The toughest of all P.I.s, Hammer was a post-war sensation who established a new threshold of violent response -- and sexual responsiveness -- for fictional protagonists. His vengeance-prone ways inspired every tough private eye and rogue cop who followed, as did his active libido, and it's no wonder that James Bond was first marketed in the USA as the 'British Mike Hammer.' But it's not just Bond, it's everybody from Peter Gunn to Dirty Harry, from Shaft to Jack Bauer.

Ed Gorman also weighs in: I'm going to disappoint a lot of people by saying that my favorite thriller protagonist is Lew Archer. There's dumb tough and there's smart tough and Archer is of the latter variety. And by tough I also mean perceptive and obstinate in pursuit of the truth. He found real tragedy in the everyday and wrote as well about the poor as the rich. I prefer the early novels (before the 1970s) because there's more action and less NYC-crowd pleasing (all the critical praise seemed to soften the books). I don't believe any writer has challenged him as the great psychologist of my era or as a storyteller who came closest to equaling the fine psychological novels of Simenon. If, as his critics insisted, he wrote the same book over and over again, it's a book I never tire of reading."

13 comments:

  1. I want to put in a word for Joe R Lansdale's Hap and Leonard novels; Hap Collins and Leonard Pine, an unlikely pairing but an entirely believable friendship, usually engaged in some ill-fated crusade to do the right thing for someone who needs it, and probably heading for a beating in the course of the action. The stories can get very dark, but they're also funny. Joe writes the kind of prose that makes you laugh out loud in inappropriate settings.

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  2. Absolutely. I adore those novels too, Stephen. Great stuff.

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  3. Of the non-living authors, I'd name Chandler's Marlowe as my top favorite, but Poirot, Mike Shayne, and the DKA gang - okay, not one character, but in the role of one - in Joe Gores' books. But can anyone top Holmes?

    Living authors? Cork O'Connor tops the list, but I really like Harry Stoner and Nameless.

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  4. Ever since I discovered Raymond Chandler when I was a kid, Philip Marlowe has been my number one favorite fictional character. You've got to love someone who'll talk back to anyone, regardless of that person's position or social status.

    Others I've greatly enjoyed include Richard Prather's Shell Scott, Carter Brown's Mavis Seidlitz (remember her?), Stephen Greenleaf's John Marshall Tanner, Carter Dickson's Sir Henry Merrivale, George Chesbro's Dr. Robert Frederickson--a.k.a. Mongo the Magnificent, and Lawrence Block's Bernie Rhodenbarr.

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  5. I vote with Stephen Gallagher for not only Lansdale's Hap and Leonard characters, but for just about every one of Lansdale's characters.

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  6. i vote for the Preston-Child Pendergast series. I try to end my reading for the day at the end of a chapter but often the ending is suspensive and i can't let go for the day

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  7. Good suggestions all.

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  8. I totally blanked on Bernie... BArry... good choice! Love him.

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  9. Barry, from Block I'd go with Scudder.

    Continental Op was my top choice, but close seconds were Richard Stark's Parker, Earl Drake (but only from The Name of the Game is Death--not from any of the Operation books), Karl Craven from Solomon's Vineyards, Lew Archer, and of course, Sam Spade.

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  10. Anyone have an opinion on John D McDonald's Travis McGee? I'm a sucker for the books but I'm always aware of the character as a calculated creation, a common male fantasy of the idealised self. I'm reminded of a line from a Burt Reynolds movie: "He's got everything! No wife, no kids, no mortgage..."

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  11. Raymond Chandler's Marlowe is too easy, and since I quote him incessantly, I'll pick a couple of others. I love Walter Mosley's EZ Rawlings. Rawlings is tough without being a brawler, he's smart and he is always ballancing personal problems (kids, neighbors, his love life and a real job) with the puzzle of any story. Additionally, EZ (with an assist from Mosely) seems to expose the inequality of race without ever getting preachy. In a dead heat with EZ Rawlings would be Lawrence Block 's Matthew Scudder and Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch. Both guys are vulnerable loners and quietly smart and as tenacious as bull dogs. And between them, they made me a dedicated crime fiction fan. I may have cut my teeth on Chandler and Hammett, Ed Lacy and Fredric Brown, but between Block and Connelly they concocted literary heroin.

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  12. Stephen, my only problem with McGee was that he never grew as a character. he didn't even seem to age until the last couple of books and he was the exact same guy in book one as the last one. He did seem to start getting a little more introspective towards the last couple of books, but other than that, he was just this perfect specimen, ideal kind of guy, tall, blond, ruthless if he felt like it. I was often left thinking Myer was a better rounded, fleshed out character.

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  13. I loved McGee but he doesn't hold up well, except as a reminder of that moment in history when everything changed for the American male. I found him alive and vibrant, if a tad redundant at times, since his character was a lone wolf, a knight in rusty armour devoted to his on code...and therefore not subject to change. His pensive mood in the last couple of novels saddened me, I can see some of the same things in James Lee Burke's writing now, an awareness of mortality and the futility of struggling to avoid it.

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