Writing Popular Fiction Read online

  Few suspense novels generate narrative tension exclusively through the chase. A rare exception is Alan Dipper's modern chase story, The Paradise Formula, which seems to have been modeled on the more famous but inferior The 39 Steps by John Buchan. The new suspense writer is on more solid ground if he augments his chase sequences with other tension-generating techniques.

  THE RACE AGAINST TIME

  Setting a time limit for the events of the story creates an urgency that adds to the suspense page by page. For example: "Unless he located Hawfield in twenty-four hours, the girl would be killed," or "He had six hours to reach the rendezvous point, and if he did not make it, he would be left alone behind enemy lines without resources of any kind." As the minutes tick by, each obstacle to the hero's progress is magnified and made more (pleasantly) frustrating for the reader.

  Two novels which make superb use of the time limit are John Lange's Binary (in which a federal agent must find two hidden tanks of deadly nerve gas, in the center of a city, before their scheduled time of detonation) and Michael Mason's 71 Hours (in which Secret Service and FBI agents have exactly seventy-one hours to locate a hired assassin before he shoots the Russian Premier at a scheduled diplomatic mission landing at a Washington airfield).

  Be certain that your time limit is a genuine restriction on the development of the plot. Don't send your hero racing towards a place when, in actual fact, there's no reason for him to be there in two hours instead of two days. Something drastic should transpire if he fails to reach the place in time.

  If you have set a time limit for your hero and propelled him into a breakneck journey, don't put more than one accident of Fate in his way. If he is delayed by a long freight train crossing the road, don't repeat a similar incident with a herd of cows, and don't confront him with a landslide across the highway after those first two unexpected delays; the reader will stop believing your story. You must build obstacles from the hero's own actions. For example, if he is reacting to the pressure of the situation by driving too fast for the road conditions, it is logical for him to wreck the car. He will then need to find another vehicle or continue on foot. If he is in a blind rush to get where he's going, he might steal a car that's parked nearby with the keys in its ignition, and a confrontation with police might ensue, further delaying him. The reader would not mind this sort of obstacle, for he can see cause and effect, which are missing when the obstacle is a trick of Fate.

  ANTICIPATION OF A VIOLENT EVENT

  The third method of creating narrative tension-anticipation of a violent event-should be implicit in the first two techniques. The man being chased is trying to avoid his own death or trying to keep information from the antagonists which would allow them to wreak havoc on other people. The race against time is entered for the express purpose of preventing some deadly, disastrous event. If this violent event is not his own death, it should be something that will have a grave effect on the hero-such as the death of the woman he loves.

  The bestselling novel, The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth, builds narrative tension in all three ways. The protagonist is a clever French policeman assigned the job of tracking down a hired killer who intends to assassinate the President of France on a certain day, at a certain place: the race against time. The antagonist is the assassin who is almost as clever as the policeman and is being hunted across the entire European continent: the chase. As the story builds and builds, the reader begins to wonder if the assassin might not kill someone, even if not the President: anticipation of a violent event. Forsyth employs the three methods to the last page, resolving the story in the very last paragraph.

  Once you have chosen the type of suspense story you want to write, have picked and researched a background, have plotted your story, and have decided how you will build narrative tension, you should ponder these three less important but still vital questions:

  1. Should my story be told in first or third person? There is no hard and fast rule for this, in any genre; every story demands its own voice. However, a good rule of thumb is to use third person for a story whose hero is hard-bitten and extremely competent. A first person narrative by such a hero, in which he must regularly comment on his own prowess and cunning, may seem ludicrous to the reader. He may dislike the hero and, therefore, the entire novel. A very sympathetic, very human hero makes a good narrator for a story, as in Donald E. Westlake's comic crime novels, God Save the Mark, Somebody Owes Me Money, and The Fugitive Pigeon.

  2. How close to the end of my suspense novel should the climax come? The nearer the end, the better. Do not resolve the main plot problem on page 200 and continue to page 220 before typing "The End." When the reader knows what happened, he doesn't want to read on while the characters gab about how awful it was. If your plot contains an element of mystery, the explanations should be given throughout the climactic scene and not as an afterthought when all the action strings have been tied and cut. On the other hand, try to leave a couple of pages after the climax to let the reader settle down from that peak of emotional involvement-a thousand words, no more.

  3. Can I build a series character into my suspense novel? A spy will be sent on more than one dangerous mission in his career; a detective will handle more than one case; a criminal will pull many robberies in his professional life; a soldier may be assigned to several different campaigns in one war; an explorer will most likely tackle one of Nature's challenges after another. All of these make good series characters. It stretches credulity, however, to imagine that any ordinary citizen will have bad enough luck to become the protagonist of more than one sudden terror story in his lifetime. Likewise, few scientists experience major crises more than once or twice in their careers, if that often. Remember that the nature of your hero's occupation must generate dangerous situations.

  That's it. If you read Chapter Nine, especially the section dealing with style, you're ready to try your hand at providing vicarious thrills for the vast suspense audience.

  CHAPTER FOUR Mysteries

  The mystery story is the oldest of the seven categories discussed in this book. Oh, certainly, some fantasy was written centuries before Edgar Allan Poe created the first fictional detective (C. August Dupin, in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," published in 1841), most notably The Iliad and The Odyssey. And erotica has been around nearly as long as the written word: even the Bible contains subdued erotic passages, stories of outlandish orgies, incest, and lascivious women. The Gothic novel pre-dates the mystery, but in its early form, the Gothic was much different than it is today: it contained little or no romance and was closer to what we now think of as the straight horror story. In any event, though all of these things existed prior to the mystery story, none of them achieved a steady, solidified audience or form strong enough to let them be thought of as categories until after the mystery emerged, as the first easily identifiable category of modern fiction.

  Although very few mysteries provide a good vehicle for social commentary or important observations on the human condition, they do make for fine escape literature, and they are always being published. Because the mystery-as we discussed it the previous chapter-is most concerned with Who did it?, with the solving of a puzzle, and is very little concerned with the morals of crime or the themes of human suffering that crime is tied to, its function is more therapeutic than that of any other form of category fiction. Most people pick up a mystery novel when they want only to relax. The mystery reader doesn't want the slightest reminder of his workaday world. Unlike science fiction, fantasy, suspense, and occasionally the other genres, the mystery deals almost exclusively with lightweight material. Indeed, the only mystery novelist I can think of, after considerable cerebration, who writes meaningful mysteries is Ross MacDonald; and in his Lew Archer books, the reader actually becomes less concerned with the traditional mystery question-Who did it?-than with another question -Why was it done; with what social maladjustment does the fault lie?

  You can, of course, attempt the Ross MacDonald sort of story;
but, as with all category work, you will achieve acceptance and recognition much sooner if you begin within established limits before breaking out into less-tried territory.

  In every genre, there is a single element of those five mentioned in Chapter One which is the most important. In science fiction, it is the background. In suspense, it's plot, closely followed by action; a suspense novel should move. And though your first impression may be that plot, once again, is the fundamental element of the mystery, such is not the case. In the mystery, the writer must pay special attention to character motivation.

  Yes, I know, the words "mystery" and "plot" seem almost synonymous. However, consider that the average mystery novel's plot is quite like that of any other: a crime is committed; suspects are introduced in the course of the detective's probing; further crimes are committed by the villain as he tries to keep his identity secret; the detective draws nearer the truth, finally puts the pieces together; the guilty party is confronted; climax, conclusion. If this is somewhat simplified, it is also close enough to the required line of a mystery story to show you that plot is not the most essential element of the mystery.

  Action, in the mystery story, is usually confined to the detective's travels and his interrogations of various witnesses and suspects. Though some physical confrontations between the hero and the villain may occur, they are generally saved for the end of the book, after the hero has begun to narrow down his field of suspects, and the villain has begun to feel the pressure.

  Background is important, of course, but not nearly so major a factor in the successful mystery novel as it is in science fiction. Once you have chosen your background, a couple of books devoted exclusively to that area-or your own experience, if you place the story in your own geographical region-should prepare you to begin.

  However, when you set out to establish the motives of the people in your mystery, you must give much careful consideration to each of them. Since the characters in a mystery are basically pieces in a puzzle, the reader's attention is focused on them, closely, as he tries to solve the crime before the author solves it for him. If the characters' motivations seem weak or implausible, the reader will notice it at once, and he will swiftly grow bored with your story.

  Any of the major character motivations are applicable to the mystery. Love, greed, self-preservation, revenge, and duty within their limitations are all sound motives for murder. Curiosity might lead someone to become a victim.

  And self-discovery might be a secondary motivation for your hero.

  Keeping the nature of the mystery novel in mind-Who did it? being the first question the reader wants answered and the five elements of category fiction all employed, with special attention given to believable character motivations - there are fifteen other requirements of the form that you should be aware of:

  1. Does your story open with a crime in the first chapter? It should. The sooner the puzzle is presented to both the reader and the hero, the stronger your narrative hook. You may even open after the murder was committed and the police have arrived. Or you might begin with the discovery of the body, or with a brief scene of the murder in progress. However you start, start with a bang.

  In the first chapter of The Bridge that Went Nowhere by Robert L. Fish (one of his Captain Jose Da Silva mysteries), a plane lands in a clearing in a dense Brazilian jungle, carrying three men. One of these is shot on the second page of the story; another is blown up, along with the bridge that feeds into the clearing, on the fifth page, well before the end of the chapter. It would be difficult to imagine a bigger bang of a start, and the novel goes on successfully from there.

  In Donald E. Westlake's Murder Among Children (under the pseudonym Tucker Coe), the hero, Mitch Tobin (who has appeared in five Coe mysteries to date), opens the first chapter with a trip into the West Village, in lower Manhattan, looking for his cousin, Robin Kennely. On the third page of the book, he finds her:

  "The stairs are through that door," the young man said, and as he pointed the door opened and Robin Kennely came through, smeared with great streaks of not-dry blood. The knife in her hand was carmine with it.

  "There's a certain thing," she said, enunciating clearly in a high thin voice, and collapsed on the floor.

  Thus ends a very short first chapter, obviously immediately after a murder. Though the killer's identity would seem certain, the second chapter brings up other possibilities, other suspects, and launches the reader on the trail of the solution.

  2. Does your hero appear in chapter one? He should. In most mysteries, he will be, by title and/or circumstance, a detective: policeman, private detective, a private citizen caught up in a situation only he can unravel (Agatha Christie's Jane Marple mysteries are good examples of this form), a scientist sorting through clues to a disaster only he can explain, a soldier-detective, a spy-detective-and his entire role in the story will be that of the sleuth seeking and evaluating clues. If the crime is committed at the outset, then, you'll have a good reason to focus on him from the first page.

  Some mystery writers favor the first person viewpoint for telling a story-that is, telling it through the eyes and the mind of the lead character. In fact, the mystery genre supports more first person narratives than any other. Though this makes the early introduction of the hero almost no problem at all, it should be avoided; the vast majority of published novels are told in the third person. A great many editors and, apparently, readers as well, share a prejudice against the first person. Since your chief goal is to please first the editors and then the readers, you should not tackle a first person narrative until you can do it well enough to squelch any editorial dissatisfaction with the method.

  In Rex Stout's enormously popular Nero Wolfe series, even though the initial crime is usually committed offstage, the heroes are onstage in the first chapter. With only a few exceptions, the Wolfe stories begin with a client who comes to Wolfe's 39th Street townhouse in an attempt to get Wolfe and his trusted associate, Archie Goodwin, to take on a case. We know our heroes straight off, and we soon learn the nature of the puzzle, and from there on, it's easy reading. (Some of the Wolfe novels, by Rex Stout, include The Doorbell Rang, Plot It Yourself, Death of a Doxy, The Father Hunt, The Mother Hunt, and Might as Well Be Dead.)

  3. Does your hero have a sound motive for becoming involved in the investigation of a case? He should have some other reason, outside the most obvious-i.e., it's his job. For example, Stout's detective, Nero Wolfe, is quite often motivated by a desperate need for cash. Wolfe lives lavishly, with a full-time chef, a half-day orchid specialist who helps him tend his hundreds of greenhouse orchids, and other expensive accouterments of the "good life." Naturally, there are times when he is desperate enough for ready cash that he will take on even the most unpleasant cases. When it isn't money that motivates Wolfe it may be curiosity, because that overweight private investigator is as much a puzzle fancier as any mystery reader. Or he may be motivated by self-preservation, to the extent that Wolfe must preserve his rich lifestyle by preserving his reputation as a private investigator.

  Occasionally a writer creates a mystery novel protagonist with more depth to him than most. Donald E. Westlake's ex-detective, Mitch Tobin, the focus of a series of novels (Kinds of Love Kinds of Death, Murder Among Children, Wax Apple, A Jade in Aries, and Don't Lie to Me), is a man with a monkey on his back: the monkey is guilt. It's like this: Tobin was once a respected detective on the police force. However, when he arrested a burglar named Dink Campbell, he met Campbell's wife and fell for her at once. The attraction was mutual. While Campbell was serving his sentence for burglary, Tobin and Linda Campbell carried on an affair; since Tobin was married, the affair had to be during working hours. Tobin's partner covered for him, during their tour of duty, when Tobin wanted to see Linda-until one afternoon, while Tobin was in bed with the girl, the partner was killed. Tobin was disgraced, thrown off the force, and left with a load of guilt he was almost unable to bear: guilt that he had cheated on his wife, guilt that he h
ad embarrassed his son, guilt, most of all, that he had shirked his responsibility and had not been there to back up his partner when the partner arrested a heroin pusher. In each of the novels, one of Tobin's motivations, either unspoken or quite evident, is this guilt, a need to make up for what he's done, to repay the debts, to help other people and thereby even his own moral record a little. In some cases, he actually would prefer not to be involved at all, but does get involved, out of this sense of duty to his family, his dead partner, and himself.

  4. Is your fictional crime violent enough? You cannot expect a reader to get terribly excited about a stolen car or a mugging. You should begin with a murder, attempted murder or threatened murder, or missing person. One other possibility is the story in which a woman (usually young and pretty, but not necessarily so), either the accused man's wife, sister, girlfriend, or mother, comes to the private detective and hires him to prove that the accused is innocent despite what the police or the jury has said.