On Being a Frequent Visitor to the Dark World
My career as a writer of thrillers has been endowed with what publishers like to call “psychological” undertones. This, I presume, means that what the characters do on the page makes some sort of cosmic overriding emotional sense. This is not always a quality found in some books, not to mention plays — I’m looking at you two, Romeo and Juliet — Really, now? Suicide? Can’t think of some less drastic alternative, like maybe just running away together and see what happens? And certainly not in films – exciting action, John Wick, but psychologically reasonable? Not to mention automatic weapons reasonable? I think not.
I try to stick closer to recognizable reality.
Every book of mine has a nugget of easily identifiable familiarity. Generally, one can find this at the start, so readers are drawn into a situation on the page that seems close.
It is a way of avoiding the cheapest and sadly most penetrating criticism:
“That couldn’t really happen.”
When I hear this, I get dry-mouthed and choke out a weak reply:
“Are you sure?”
And then I walk away quickly.
All that said, during my time creating stories, on occasion I get confronted with compliments that are criticisms and the reverse, criticisms that are truly more like compliments. These typically are centered on the fantastic question: is this something based on a real event or is it totally made up?
Usually my reply is: A little bit of both.
Here with a shrug, is my favorite compliment/criticism of all time:
A dozen or more years ago I wrote a novel titled The Wrong Man (a title I either stole or borrowed from Hitchcock. Up to you, the reader, to guess which: outright theft or admiring homage). The plot of the book concerned a young woman who had a one-night stand with a man who subsequently becomes obsessed with her, filled with volcanic rage at her post-mistaken-coital rejection, determined to undermine her entire life. Death and ruin were his desires – one or the other – a far different but equally intense passion than what they’d experienced one drunken night. With one of my niftiest images, the reader meets this man-considering-becoming-a-killer in a tattoo parlor, where he is having the young woman’s name inked on the ball of his foot, so he can grind it into the ground with every step. The book engages the young woman’s divorced mother and father and the mother’s gay woman partner as they try to extricate the young woman who made the initial mistake from her most dire dilemma. The threat she faces is real – and relentless. So, they come up with a most dangerous scheme. Death. Sacrifice. Devotion. Many elements to the drama along the route to a success that achieves their desired end – but which costs them all. A large price is paid for a single too-much-to-drink error in judgment.
Stalking and evil go hand-in-glove and are staples of headlines and conversations. If you don’t believe me – go to any high school or college women’s athletic contest and listen to the softly spoken conversations in the stands about their daughters.
Regardless…
It was a book I thoroughly enjoyed writing and a book I felt very close to when it was completed. I roundly connected with all the characters, and as they accompanied me through their story, I grew even more fond of them. I liked their eccentricities. I enjoyed their doubts. I relished in their choices – even the bad ones. No novel works if author and characters aren’t in the same scull, pulling in unison, oars dipping into the same waters, machine-like, listening to the same rhythmic cadence.
But about that half-compliment half-criticism…
Shortly after the novel was published (here is a moment of author’s runaway ego: published to uniformly excellent reviews, a bestseller in a bunch of countries, and a dandy film deal in France where it was very popular and subsequently turned into a nifty movie) I was approached by one of my own daughter’s long time best friends. College-age young women – not dissimilar in age from the error-prone character in my book. Read into that what you wish. Anyway, Jennifer, my daughter’s great friend, wore a bit of a grin and mischievous brightness in her eyes that seemed to reflect her shock of red hair, as she scurried up to me one fine afternoon.
“I know exactly why you wrote The Wrong Man,” she announced forcefully. And loudly.
I smiled. “And Jennifer, pray tell, why is that?” I asked her. Dad-like pomposity dripped from my reply.
Jennifer – I need to mention her emerging brilliance at this point – she went on to acquire a PhD in neuroscience from Weill-Cornell in NYC, graduating with highest honors — blurted out:
“Well, if your daughter ever gets stalked by some bad guy, all she needs to do is hand the creep a copy of your book and say, ‘Read this, dude, and then decide whether you really want to mess with my old man…’”
I must admit this possibility had not precisely occurred to me when I was constructing the novel.
But…
When Jennifer said it, I thought:
Damn. She just might be right.
A most unusual type of compliment, to be sure.
It amounted to: I think you can be several, perhaps contradictory, things at once:
Loving father.
Clever killer.
Enough of both contained in her assessment, to give me a sense of unease. Not of my book or the plot, or my career, or my potential criminality. But that “compliment” was a precise (dare I say ‘scientific?’) observation about the inner, unspoken me.
And what I might be capable of.
That inner me is reflected in the stories I think up.
But still, it was indeed a compliment (I think… yes, let’s go with compliment because the alternative is less palatable) that I have cherished through the years.
And, thankfully, neither my daughter nor her friend Jennifer ever encountered anyone even remotely like the bad guy in The Wrong Man. At least, not that I know of, because neither ever asked for my possibly deadly help extricating themselves from that sort of mistaken connection.
But remembering that observation made me think about the dual landscapes I have occupied throughout my writing career.
Split personalities. I live in a world where Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are my devoted associates.
Exterior: Mr. Regular. Dependable husband and devoted father. Pretty damn good fly fisherman if I must say so myself, which also makes me into something of a wild-eyed environmentalist. Mediocre youth soccer coach. Never-quite-good-enough athlete. Unabashedly left-wing liberal fellow. Passionate about films, streaming British, French and Swedish crime shows on television and books, fiction and non-fiction (although I very rarely read anything in my own genre). Democracy and human rights. Drives a fast car often too fast. Good with a barbecue grill, grossly inadequate at other types of cooking. Outgoing. Good sense of humor, but sadly, sometimes a willing distributor of often cringeworthy bad jokes. Friendly – but maybe a little too much so – ask me the cliched, “How are you doing?” and I’m likely to provide a long-winded and boringly accurate reply that reflects just how well the writing output has been on any given day. Loves dogs.
In other words: A generally acceptable good guy. A curriculum vitae of normal.
Or, at least, much evidence of what appears to be normal to the world at large.
But that inner landscape…
That is where dark emotional intensity resides.
That landscape is the psychological equivalent of the West Country moors where Sherlock Holmes pursues The Hound of the Baskervilles. An ominous, fog-ridden and deeply unsettling locale.
People often ask: “Where do you get your stories?”
Right there, on those inner moors. But… that’s not what I tell them. I usually respond with a joke: “Well there’s a shelf at the back of Walmart where story ideas are stacked up and waiting. You just need to know where they are, seize one, dust it off and start writing…”
A poor joke.
In my writing time, I have conjured up and eagerly ventured alongside killers of all stripes, evil that emerged from character’s pasts, and evil defined by their future aspirations. I have explored an endless variety of bad behavior, from the easily casual to the deadly routine, and eventually finding the dedicated extreme. I have examined madness. I’ve cradled obsession. I’ve embraced crimes of the head and heart. I’ve delved into savagery and outright cruelty. I’ve embraced psychopaths and other assorted deviants of all stripes. I’m not prejudiced: Various ethnicities. Men and women. Young and old.
These bad folks have been my eager companions throughout my travels. They are Virgil-like guides, whispering instructions as we pass together through the many layers of the terrible things folks can do to one another.
And to be honest, I’ve secretly enjoyed their friendship, even as they perform nasty stuff on the page. They are the overly caffeinated, often homicidal, sometimes calculating, sometimes enraged, frequently deliberate stimulus behind my stories.
They become engines.
Normal rarely launches a book.
Abnormal does.
So do obsession and compulsion and all the other twists that tighten our souls and are sometimes best left to those other purveyors of the knots inside human beings: psychiatrists, and psychologists, teachers and the occasional policeman, priest, or social worker.
But that said…
I suspect that all authors deeply appreciate the motors that drive their fictions forward – regardless of just how despicable those engines might be. If I didn’t connect profoundly with the bad guys, how could I expect them to seem real on the page? If they don’t reflect inner truths, how can I expect readers to see their outer truths? They should behave with the same sort of enthusiastic rationale that speaks to a reader and urges that reader to say, “well, that might indeed be terrible, but at the same time it makes sense, because if I were in that situation I just might….” Because readers can wrap their imaginations around those evils, it allows me to think they will follow me to the end. In my world, failure to bring the bad guys to life is perhaps the biggest danger I face when I sit down to write any thriller. Instead of creating fascination, an undeveloped and unreal character will seem like a Saturday morning cartoon, sitting in a corner, twiddling their thumbs, non-threatening and modestly ridiculous, left to fester swamp-like throughout the story, sadly dragging the story down, muddying matters rather than lighting the path of the novel forward.
In an odd reversal – their aberrant behavior must be more calculating and rational than that of their good-guy counterparts.
Consider:
Where would we be without Hannibal Lecter and Buffalo Bill? There’s not much of a novel in simply detailing Clarice Starling’s FBI education. More a textbook. Inspector Javert? He makes Jean Valjean. Miss Havisham? Raskolnikov? Ahab and his over-interest in a rather large albino whale with a bad attitude? Or many years later a similar attitude in a hungry Great White Shark? If not for that fish, would we really be interested in Quint, Hooper, and Brody? What about Loki (not the Disney interpretation, the actual nasty Norse myth fellow) or Morgan le Fey or Medusa and those obnoxiously selfish, very doomed suitors whose lives take a bad turn when Odysseus shows up unannounced and isn’t at all pleased to see they’ve taken up residence in his house and are trying to wed and bed his wife?
Every one of those characters stepped out of an author’s very suspect inner landscape.
The intriguing thing about that dark place inside is that it is strangely inconsistent. Not every bad guy (or gal…) is the same. And the relationship is not one-for-one: In my inner world, I can be many things. In addition to that obsessed spurned lover with the unique tattoo in The Wrong Man, I’ve shaken literary hands with unredeemed racists, compulsive Nazi’s, wannabe serial killers, actual serial killers, deceptive serial killers, and joking serial killers, a squad of sex offenders – rapists, child molesters and kidnappers, onetime radicals obsessively seeking revenge for imagined wrongs, ex-cons and Death Row inhabitants, and both men and women, young, middle-aged and elderly, thrust by circumstances into taking actions they never believed they could. Good guys forced to do bad things.
This makes me believe that the inner landscape is large. Flows quietly like the Gulf Stream does along the East Coast of the USA.
A river of varieties of evil.
In my writing life, seeing bad guys meet their own poor ends is always bittersweet. The truth is: I like them because I’ve come to know them so intimately. It is a cliché to suggest that they are a piece of me but what other conclusion can one draw? In a bizarre way: I admire them. Respect them. Sort of. Regardless, I’m always comfortable with the dark choices they make.
The standard I have always used in creating a bad guy is to crawl into their head and heart and then ask myself at the very start, when they first get constructed on the page: “well, if I was a burgeoning psychopath, what would I do…?”
Simple Answer: Get a tattoo on the ball of my foot.
To launch into a thriller, the first question one needs to ask of their own evil side Is what sort of bad guy could I be? If a wannabe writer looks inside and doesn’t see that question… well, then write a book about a boy and his dog. People like those. Except… well, they shoot Ol’ Yeller in the end, don’t they? But never despair. I concede some great books don’t really have a dark side. There is always room for Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm on the bookshelf. I guess. No Orcs or Professor Moriarty’s or Madame Defarge’s in that story.
Just not my style.
Remember that assessment from my daughter’s friend Jennifer? “…Hand the creep a copy…”
Would I have resorted to the extremes that my good guys do in that tale to extricate their loved one from a fate that is clear and about to be delivered by a bad guy?
Quick answer:
Yes.
Not so quick answer:
Probably.
Let me further reflect. On second, third and fourth thought:
I don’t really know. Not for certain. Wouldn’t know until that moment confronted me.
But I think so.
My belief is this: To write a successful thriller, bring out what is hidden inside.
And that, I suppose, is the formula. The A squared plus B squared equals C squared of writing thrillers.
Just as we never truly know the lengths we might travel in life until that moment when we must come up with an answer, so we never know what the bad guys on a page will invent for those unsuspecting protagonists. Nor do we know the lengths the good guys will go, how they might compromise values, laws, and ethics to emerge – just as we are never sure of our own limits. We might think we know them, but in truth, we do not. Same doubt exists in a novel: We don’t know the prices either side is willing to pay. Those are the questions that live inside every story and need to climb out onto the page.
And here is an obvious secret:
Bad guys are easier to write. They aren’t encumbered by so much morality. They have fewer social concerns. It is much easier to write about an obsessive love (that is really hate) than it is to write about simple love. And far easier than trying to answer the question what should my character do about that obsessive attraction?
His options.:
Always difficult. Always tense.
The same as in life. We muddle through, hoping for the best and from time to time getting the worst.
But there are several important distinctions between life and fiction.
Fiction can’t simply be convenient – as life sometimes magically appears to be.
Actions characters take can’t just be helpful for advancing the plot. They must be organic to the plot. Make psychological and emotional sense. Seem eminently human. In life, the actions we take far more often stifle movement forward (see innumerable ‘self-help” books littering shelf upon shelf in every bookstore). In my books, there aren’t any psychologically sound shortcuts.
I was once asked in an NPR interview about violence in my books.
I replied two-fold.
First: I’ve never written anything describing violence that matched or even came close to what I saw as a crime reporter daily, in terms of depravity and savagery. Real life is far worse than fiction.
That’s what I told the interviewer. It was true then. True now. Think Parkland, Uvalde or Sandy Hook.
Second: I think what intrigues readers are when characters are trapped by situations and circumstances that defy easy answers.
So, I replied with a joke. “All my books are about ordinary people,” I said, “and they get caught up in substantial moral and ethical dilemmas, often solved with a volley of gunfire…”
I first started exploring the dark sides of human nature and behavior when I started to read as a child and as I took every step through the literary world. It’s a winding path from Goodnight, Moon to The Wizard of Oz to The Count of Monte Christo to The Silence of the Lambs.
The dark sides of every book I devoured fascinated me – although probably not so much with Goodnight, Moon. Or The Runaway Bunny.
The dynamics of evil – and how they influenced the story I was wrapped in reading – figured in my understanding of the plot and characters and what they wanted to say to me.
I never questioned this fascination. Just accepted it.
And… in was in that state of being comfortable with my inner self, when a bit of that dark side – a tiny amount, more a shade of light gray than a resounding black – surfaced in a conversation over forty years ago.
I was in Miami, living in a quite nice but extremely inexpensive apartment with the young woman who would soon become my wife, covering what I liked to call the crime and punishment beat for first the Miami News and subsequently the Miami Herald. I was just old enough to understand that if I was ever going to try to write a novel that I desperately wanted to write, the moment was close. But what I lacked was the right story. I hunted for this often. Frustrated much of the time. Anxious, filled with fear it would never appear. Imagining it was just beyond my grasp, out there nearby, but I just couldn’t see it.
I did not want to grow old and realize the soundtrack to aging would be the singsong words I wish I’d taken a chance when I could…
In this state of emotionally subterranean doubt, we were sitting around one night when my soon-to-be wife asked me if anything interesting had happened in the world of news I covered that day, and I replied no, I just got a couple of calls from the jail. Guys accused of crimes they say they didn’t do, but which odds are, they did, because after all, that’s why they are in jail in the first place. Nothing unusual about those calls. Got them all the time… And then, I hesitated, and thought about it for a moment, and added you know what would be much more interesting? If some guy called me and said they did do the crime. And this is why they did it…
I stopped there. That inner me was bubbling to the surface.
And, in that moment, I could see my entire first novel. From the first words…
“A runner found the first victim near the 13th green…”
To the last…
“And for that I suppose I take some comfort…”
The word inspire is overworked and usually exaggerated. The sorts of eureka! moments people like to believe are commonplace are rare. Let’s just consider this a moment of compelling vision. And I can recall with precision exactly where I was seated when that observation came to me. And where she was seated. And the meat loaf we’d had for dinner that night. And the thick humidity of the Miami night when I walked outside and breathed in heavily, the air as intoxicating as a 100-year-old Scotch, telling myself:
Time. Now.
Within a few days, I’d arranged for “a leave of absence” from the paper. But even with a plot crying out in my head, I was still filled with misgivings, doubts and hoping I had just enough determination to overcome these as I squirreled down facing my old IBM Selectric typewriter and I slid a clean sheet of paper into the platen. I did remember with some trepidation the great journalist and author Gene Fowler’s admonition: “Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead…”
First person narrative. My “first victim” was a teenage girl. And her fictional death draws my main character – curiously enough a newspaper reporter at a paper very much like the Miami Herald and oddly resembling me in age, hair and views on life and journalism – into telling her story.
However, it wasn’t until some pages later that I realized I was walking through the landscape that would change my life significantly. That was when I put these words down on the page, spoken by the antagonist to my guy, the journalist:
“I have a special interest in your stories…Because I’m the guy that killed her.”
The book became In the Heat of the Summer which was a title my publisher insisted upon. I had originally called it News Story which they didn’t like, and I loved. Twelve publishers rejected it. The thirteenth (like the unfortunate runner I put near the 13th green…) took it. The next folks to read it was the Book-of-the-Month club, where it was one of their main selections. It sold in 40 countries. It was re-titled The Mean Season in the subsequent film and many other editions. It is still in print. The book examined the relationship between a serial killer and a newspaper reporter whom he calls to explain why he is killing and why he will continue to kill.
To fully explore that connection required me to enter the head of the killer. He had to make sense – in a perverse, homicidal fashion. His behavior had to ring psychologically true. His actions had to slip effortlessly both into the narrative and in how he interacted with my main character, the first-person newspaper reporter who finds great instant fame and large personal loss in their back and forth, give and take and the stories he writes for his paper.
And as I constructed the novel, I learned:
I need to know the dark just as well as I know the light.
The big realization: I couldn’t hope to write without that understanding.
So, all those years ago, I gave in to every ink black Raskolnikov thought lurking inside me. Those thoughts were what made the novel work and what turned it into a success.
I owe that side a big debt.
Looking back, now, older, presumably wiser (jury remains out on that question), one would imagine these frequent dark side travels to have taken some sort of dire psychological toll. A sort of inner portrait that resembles that belonging to Dorian Grey.
Nope.
Don’t think so. Pretty confident about that. Except…
…I could be totally 100% wrong…
Not sure. No, not at all. Yes. No. Maybe. How much? A little. A lot. Some. None.
I could go on…
But… upon reflection…
… Maybe – just maybe –these inner trips to the moors have set me free.
And that might just be the best result I could have hoped for.
Amherst, Massachusetts
June 2024
English (United States) 
English (UK)