Monday, August 8, 2011

INSIDE TOP SUSPENSE: Writing the Bad Guy

We’re baaack… and this week we’re talking about the Bad Guys. How do you write a Bad Guy who’s not cardboard, stereotypical, or boring? Our very own “bad guys” Bill Crider, Dave Zeltserman, Harry Shannon, and Paul Levine will tell you. But don’t let them stop you. Please join us with your two cents. (Of course they may have to kill you afterwards…)


Bill Crider here. Everybody likes to write the villains. I’m sure a good analyst could explain why better than I can. Anyway, for me there has to be something in even the worst villain that people like. Or maybe that’s the wrong word. “Recognize” might be better. Villains have to be as human as the other characters. They should also have reasons for what they do. I’m not a fan of the book that ends with the “he must have been crazy” explanation. And while Shakespeare can get away with attributing Iago’s misdeeds to “motiveless malignity,” I’d never try that one, not being quite in Shakespeare’s league. One more thing: The villain has to be right for the story. Hannibal Lecter wouldn’t fit in Cabot Cove, or at least he wouldn’t work for me in that setting. (Jessica Fletcher could probably handle him, though.)


Dave Zeltserman here. I’ve written a lot of bad guys, but none badder than Kyle Nevin. Violent, amoral, near-psychopathic, Nevin is my protagonist for Pariah. That’s right. The main guy, the one who the reader is going to follow throughout the book. This is a character who thinks nothing of breaking a man's fingers and slamming a car door into his face for leaving a dumpster in the neighborhood uncovered, or beating someone to near death for failing to pay him what he considers the proper respect. But readers need to like and sympathize with your main character, right? Well, Nevin has a certain verve and charm to him, but what readers really need is to be fascinated by him and want to know what’s coming next. What’s important in creating a character like Nevin, and really any bad guy is that he has to feel very real and can’t be some drooling cartoonish version of a villain. The things that Nevin does might be very wrong, but in his skewed way of thinking it all makes sense and is justified, and the reader needs to believe that also. As long as Nevin’s logic, no matter how screwed up it might be, is consistent, he will seem very real to the reader, and very scary.


Harry Shannon here. We'll use "guy" knowing the antagonist could easily be female, especially these days. As any actor will tell you, the bad guy has rationalized his behavior and rarely thinks of himself as the bad guy. The rest us have treated him unfairly, or someone else's cruelty has justified his own. A sociopathic personality is driven by fear, anger, avarice and not much else--but isn't ever at peace. He tends to believe the rest of us are the same way, i.e. crying crocodile tears, manipulating for advantage and so on. That makes for a scared and hollow experience of life. Knowing this can help create a far more realistic enemy. The sexual psychopath is often driven by a punishing super ego. John D. MacDonald understood both those folks very well, and gave them voice as few authors have done. Evil humans are like the rest of us in that sense, that is to say tortured by inner demons they usually don't even recognize as their own. If we can relate to them on a psychological level they are that much more terrifying.


Paul Levine here. Harry referred to John D. MacDonald, author of the classic “Travis McGee” series. MacDonald also said “there are no one hundred per cent heroes.” I’d like to turn that around and say that the best antagonists are not “one hundred per cent villains.” Remember cold-blooded assassin Alan Ladd in “This Gun for Hire.” He feeds a stray cat…before slapping around his landlady and shooting the target of a paid hit. The best villains believe what they’re doing is right, at least according to their own skewed moral codes. Remember “Max Cady,” the relentless ex-con portrayed by Robert DeNiro in the remake of “Cape Fear.” Was he evil? You bet. But Cady doubtless thought he was justified in terrorizing Nick Nolte’s family. After all, Nolte, his own lawyer, sold him down the river. That violated the code of lawyers…and criminals alike. (Coincidentally, “Cape Fear” was adapted from a novel by MacDonald, “The Executioners.”) Something else we can learn from the vicious Max Cady. A villain can be uneducated and crude and yet brilliant in his own, twisted way. And that’s far, far better than a stupid, brutish villain. The antagonist should be a worthy opponent of the hero, whose task must be challenging, both physically and mentally, and sometimes morally as well.








17 comments:

  1. One of the most throughly rotten characteres I have encountered was in James O. Causey's "Frenzy" Norman Sands is the protagonist of the story and he is a self described, “two-bit grifter” but he is even worse than that as the story unfolds. He will commit every conceivable sin, murder, theft, he betrays everyone he encounters - he steals from not only his mobster boss but his innocent neighbors - adultry, etc...eventually even betraying his own brother. In the story he tells how a man becomes what he has become, Yes, he was orphaned when his parents were killed in an accident, but he had an aunt that provided a decent life, they had a little money from insurance, etc... but one incident as a young teen, trying to seek revenge for a wrong done to his brother led to him almost killing another teen - he thinks he killed the other kid and flees town. Eventually he learns to survive the degenerates, the thieves, sadistic brakemen, he learns to hustle pool, he lerns to cheat at cards, he'll steal another mans woman, he becomes a pimp, etc...even tho' he eventually is willing to exploit women, his neighbors, and betray his brother - one scheme after another to "get ahead" to make that one big score, and he is no master mind, his sins are "small, dirty sins" but he seeks whta he perceives as a decent life , he always undoes himself by goinng just a little too far. So, he is totaly dispicable, has no morals at all, his motivation based on the belief that he was already a murder at 16, so no other crimes are off limits.Life has dealt him a bad hand so he must cheat to beat life. By the end you hate him, there are no redeeming qualities, but you can identify with his motives. maybe even empathize to an extent.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Max Cady is a great creation because we understand his motives. The Killer Inside me by the genius James M. Cain is another one.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I think Harry's right regarding sociopaths. I find them the least interesting villains, because they are stuck in the Terrible Twos. Everything revolves around them, and they have to play-act constantly just to appear normal. They want what they want when they want it, and I can't imagine the surreal landscape of their minds. It must be a barren place. Because they have nothing going on. They are bored a lot.

    So the "bad" guy in my thriller, THE SHOP, is not a sociopath. Cyril Landry has his own standards. He was a Navy SEAL and then worked for a company like Custer-Battles. He knows that rules bend and the end justifies the means. Landry can like someone and still kill him. He's a compartmentalizer. He adores his wife and daughter but can't really know them.

    Why do writers love to write villains? It's liberating. We can really let ourselves go--the same reason I find it easier to write male characters.

    ReplyDelete
  4. There are two kind of bad guys -- the bad guy as anti-hero protagonist, like my characters Quarry and Nolan (and to some extent Mike Hammer) -- and the bad guy as antagonist. The real trick -- and it's really more than just a trick -- is that bad guys don't know they are the bad guys. So while we're in their point of view, everything they think and do should seem perfectly reasonable and justified.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Max, of the anti-hero protagonists, my favorite is Richard Stark's Parker. But then you have what I call the noir anti-hero protagonists, like Jim Thompson's Carl Bigelow (Savage Night, my favorite!) and Lou Ford, And Cain's Walter Huff (Double Indemnity)--in these cases these are broken individuals heading towards the abyss, and their rapid descent is what keeps the reader fascinated (and maybe even pulling for them to avoid the abyss).

    Robert, thanks for pointing out Frenzy + Norman Sands. Sounds like my kind of book!

    ReplyDelete
  6. Perfect that you mention PARIAH here, Dave, because I literally just bought it. Very interesting to read everyone's thoughts. I always feel like the book is close to completion when the main character sees herself in the bad guy--and the bad guy finds himself in her.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Twenty years ago I had trouble with an editor who wanted me to excise a letter my bad guy wrote to his young daughter just before he set out to kill the man he'd been hired to murder. Prisons are filled with convicts worried and sentimental about their children, killers included.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Ed, good point. What's interesting is is that most anti-heroes, noir or otherwise, are loners without wives or kids. I can think of Frank "Dolly" Dillon from Thompson's great "Hell of a Woman" being married (sort of), and of course Doc & Carol from The Getaway, but I can't think of any classic noir with the protagonist having kids.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Jenny, thanks for dropping by!

    J. the more subtly written sociopath can be a lot of fun. I highly recommend Shane Steven';s classic "Dead City" which is filled with sociopath, characters who are ultimately cold-blooded killers without an ounce empathy for anyone else. I don't think there's a good guy in the book, but Steven's still has you rooting for some of these sociopaths to escape the fate waiting for them. And then there's Jim Thompson's brilliant noir novels with the anti-hero as the sociopath, but his brilliance is keeping you the reader guessing whether this character is a sociopath or not, and whether it's too late for them to have any sort of redemption.

    ReplyDelete
  10. Shane Stevens created a monster in "By Reason of Insanity," a chilling novel if ever there was one. Although Hannibal Lector has now jumped the shark, he scared the crap our of me in "Red Dragon" and "Silence of the Lambs." It's gri8pping when an author manages to create a truly fleshed out antagonist, someone understandable and readly identifiable to us--the horror of the murderer who lives right next door.

    ReplyDelete
  11. Dave, I've been meaning to read "Dead City." I think what I dislike most is the plethora of serial killer stories. Those are the really boring sociopaths--I don't want to wade through their infantile obsessions. Having just seen Pulp Fiction again last night, I can see where bouncing sociopaths off one another and skipping along with remorseless killers and quirky con men *is* entertaining. Writing that kind of story is challenging, and takes craft, skill, and brilliance. And usually, humor.

    ReplyDelete
  12. My all-time favorite bad guy is Robert Mitchum in "Cape Fear." The scene that astonishes me most is when his rage becomes self-pity and he says that he was a family man once, too. That's the real source of his monster heart. His inability to take responsibility for anything he's done--he's the victim here and he's damned well going to savage and murder anybody in his way.

    ReplyDelete
  13. Just wanted to mention that Jim Thompson wrote THE KILLER INSIDE ME, not Cain, as stated above. In my opinion, Cain's bad guys are more understandable and enjoyable than Thompson's. They're just stuck in the mud of their human condition and mistakenly choose the quicksand path out. (I'm unable to stop myself from taking any chance I get to define noir characters.)

    ReplyDelete
  14. J., I mostly avoid serial killer novels too, although there are times when you find ones that stand out, like Dexter, which was very clever, and When She Was Bad by Jonathan Nasaw, which is remarkable.

    Vicki, while I enjoy the Thompson bad guys much more--they're just so broken and deep into denial as to what they are--I mostly agree with your characterization of Cain's bad guys, although Walter Huff in Double Indemnity is a more complicated character. It wasn't sex and Phyllis that seduced him as much as being bored and curious whether he could get away with murder.

    ReplyDelete
  15. I agree with youse guys, Vicki and Dave. I love the Cain bad guys because they're all just your average loser. We can relate to them... Frank, Huff, and especially Cora and Phyllis. I actually think Cain did an excellent job with Cora, given the sexist attitudes of his time. She was well fleshed out. Not so much with Phyllis. She was too predictable.

    Here's kind of a follow-up question... does a crime fiction novel suffer if the bad guy is NOT fully developed? What if he is just seen every once in a while, along with other characters, as might happen in an Agatha Christie novel? Is the story somehow less effective? Just wondering...

    ReplyDelete
  16. IMO there has to be a reason for the bad guys to be bad - some kind of trigger at some point in their lives. It makes them far more fascinating and three-dimensional. My bad guy has a history which at least explains what he does, even if it doesn't excuse it.

    As to whether the novel suffers if you don't see the bad guys much - depends on whether it's character or plot-driven. Personally, as a reader and writer, I prefer to see them, get to know them and find out what makes them tick.

    ReplyDelete
  17. Libby, I think it comes down to the focus of the novel, and how much the bad guy is in it. With mysteries from Agatha Christie and Nero Wolfe, the bad guy usually is on the peripheral of the novel, and it's okay then for him/her to be lightly drawn as long as their actions are logically consistent. I have a crime novel where the bad guy barely makes an appearance, for the most all you see are the results of his murders, and in this case there's very little given about him because he's really not the focus of the novel, but what's there all has to make sense, and he still can't come across as a cartoon character.

    ReplyDelete