Stories Matter. And never give a sucker an even break...

Sometimes I wonder about the point of writing stories when there are so many, and mine are unlikely to be remembered a few years from now, and much less likely to stand any test of time. That sort of thinking leads to madness. However, we can take heart in the fact that crime stories matter, for good and bad.

Lately, mostly for bad. The big wake-up call was when the idiot President blathered plot points from Sicario: Day of the Soldado as reality in his useless crusade to build a wall on the U.S. southern border, a technology that didn't work thousands of years ago when China tried it against actual invaders. Every scrap of cloth found along the border became a "jihadi prayer rug" to scare the ignorant, when his drug-war scares stop working. Migrants don't bring drugs. Semi truck trailers do. To quote Don Winslow, one crosses into the U.S. from Tijuana legally every 15 seconds. I used to work for a shipping terminal, and one of our vendors was a security firm that you can thank for the red light cameras that scan every license plate so the police state can run your license and pull you over with probable cause, fund local town coffers, and search our car for drugs or cash to seize so they can throw a big barbecue this year. That company also made gamma ray scanners to check trains, shipping containers, and trucks for people, drugs, and explosives.

Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't. The sheer volume of cargo moving back and forth over our borders is too massive to scan completely. If you've watched Breaking Bad you have an idea how difficult it is to find contraband. But Sicario 2, written by Taylor Sheridan, thought it would be a wicked cool story to suggest terrorists were coming over the toughest border crossing into the U.S. instead of using their visa from our "ally" and Trump family friend Saudi Arabia to simply fly in. Now, who cares what some badly researched movie uses as a plot point?

Well, it matters when the President is watching. Now thousands think it's truth. Never mind that toddlers with unsecured handguns have killed more Americans than terrorists have after 9/11, toddlers with guns don't sell books. Scary foreigners do. But hey, you gotta pay the rent, so go for the easy villain.

Just like we embraced the myth of the "superpredator" and gave every D.A. who liked locking up young black men a book deal, after 9/11 we gobbled up thriller fiction where swarthy foreigners with accents were coming to kill the white womens. My personal favorite predates 9/11, when Dan Brown created a Middle-Eastern assassin with a rape fetish for Angels & Demons. I'm not sure if this character also dined exclusively on live puppies, but I wouldn't doubt it. That superpredator myth exploded with books like Slow Motion Riot, which undid all the humanity given to kids lured into gang life in books like Clockers.

Needless to say, lazy writers have always used mental illness, child abuse, drug use, and foster parenting to justify why their villain likes to eat puppies. Make sure they are poor and lust after the middle class protagonist's perfect home, to seal the deal. (And only working class men hit their kids or their wives, because they wear stained "wifebeater" shirts)

So remember, if a suburban white kid uses drugs or falls in "with a bad element," make sure it's the kid who got into their school on a scholarship from a working class background. As I write this, I overheard a story about a young white boy from an affluent family who supplements his allowance by selling Juul weed vape pens. He must have gotten them from his friend on the basketball team who's there on a scholarship, right? He can't be leveraging his privilege to be overlooked, like the total non-genius Ted Bundy did.

This isn't to say that crime is not often driven by desperation, or that the less affluent are saints and salt of the earth, that's another stereotype we were fed by stories.

So when you come up with that great plot twist where OMG the killer is trans or was in foster care as a child so they are angry and want to kill Sweet Polly Purebred, single white lawyer, maybe don't.

How does this tripe get published? Publishing is largely white and homogeneous, sheltered summer camp kids all growed up and easily fooled. There are exceptions who prove the rule, of course, and there are plenty of good people in the business, just like there are great cops and honorable mechanics.

If you don't believe me, read this scathing "profile" of Daniel Mallory, con man extraordinaire, who bluffed his way into an executive editorial position, and got his employer to bid seven figures for The Woman in the Window--yes, Mallory is "A.J. Finn sounds like Gillian Flynn LOL"--which seems to have been copied, not kidding, from a '90s suspense film called.... COPYCAT. I mean, brass clanging balls on this guy, but how did he get that far? Yes, he leveraged his privilege to get everything he wanted, used Tom Ripley as a model, and was the grandson of a media executive at RKO General, but have these people never smelled bullshit?

The story begs belief. I mean, we've all known a fraud or two, people who get a newsworthy chronic disease whenever they need to defend against their feckless behavior, but Mallory was particularly egregious and knew exactly how to fool people of his class. Say you have a doctorate from Oxford and talk in a faux British accent because you spent six months in London (oi, I knew one of these types, and it's not Madonna). And of course he must have an ironclad contract of some sort because he's from money, and won't have to give back a dime like the last thriller plagiarist, Q.R. Markham, aka bookseller Quentin Rowan, who used the cut & paste method to get himself a three book deal. I saw "Markham" at a book signing with two actual writers. He was a smug asshole who seriously looked like a grinning kid showing us his peepee. He made it obvious he was pulling one over, but no one noticed until after publication. He even put "mark" in his pen name!

And then there's Lee Israel, the subject of Can You Ever Forgive Me?, who forged correspondence between famous writers to pay her rent. At least she did it for the money, but there's something to be said about a community that smug con artists love to target. As the old bear joke goes, "You don't come here for the hunting, do you?"

Memorable Villains

I read a Facebook thread about memorable villains recently. You know, those long sprawling posts where eventually the majority start sharing some combination of the same five characters, and others share obscure entries to avoid that trap?

The top 5 seem to be:
Darth Vader (Star Wars)
Randall Flagg (Stephen King's The Stand and Dark Tower series)
Sauron (The Lord of the Rings)
Hannibal Lecter (The Silence of the Lambs)
Cersei (Game of Thrones)
Anton Chigurh (No Country for Old Men)

That's completely unscientific. Now, the reason I mention it is because we are taught to write villains who have more than one side, who we can sympathize with, who don't think they're the villain. And from the success of these series, that advice seems to be worth its weight in squirrel turds.

The worst thing to happen to both Vader and Lecter was when the creators showed more of them, and why they became who they are. Vader's redemption in Return of the Jedi was enough for me. He was just someone tempted by power, and that was enough. Lecter is great on paper, the mastermind serial killer who outsmarts everyone; he works because to quote my friend Les Edgerton, serial killers are boring. (Read that and more in his post about talking to Charles Manson, at his website). They do the same thing over and over! Only in fiction do they become interesting. I loved Silence in book and film form. Hannibal was silly fun, but Hannibal Rising was a disaster. And so were the Star Wars prequels. They made Anakin just an angry kid who got taken in by a Rasputin. Chigurh is a great creation, but he's barely human as well.

But I digress. I haven't read George R.R. Martin--he's far too wordy for my tastes, I prefer Glen Cook's The Black Company for my grimdark fantasy-- so I can't speak of Cersei except from the HBO series. She's not one-dimensional there to me. Randall Flagg certainly is. In The Stand, he is more than or less than human. I still recall the scene with his boots crunching gravel as he runs after a toadie who failed him, and the last thing that toadie sees, "big tombstone like teeth." He's the worst of us, but I can't see any sympathy for him. In the lesser novels of the Dark Tower series, he is more of a toadie himself, a henchman of the Crimson King, and he is much weaker for it.

So why are we crafting villains who are just folks like us who think they are working for the good side, if the culture adores big grandiose villains who are barely recognizable as human? In Bad Boy Boogie, the police chief Leo Zelazko is such a character. He is based on my father's friend Tony Maffatone, a former police officer turned executive bodyguard, who was a great family man and friend, but who had a Machiavellian philosophy of life. I amplified that to the extreme, creating someone who would commit terrible crimes to protect his family and his town, a man who lost the love of his son and tries to explain his behavior to get it back. Zelazko means "iron" and in my stories, the "iron people" are the authoritarians, who would rather be feared than loved.

What were my choices? I opted to pick new ones. I like Vader, Lecter, and Saruman, too.

Magneto from the X-Men movies especially because he thinks he's saving the world.
Javert from Les Miserables, for the same reason. He is the iron rule of law personified.
Maleficent from Sleeping Beauty. She feels wronged and insulted and punishes generations of a family for it.
Loki from the Thor movies. Another wronged type who uses deceit and subterfuge rather than brawn. In Ragnarok he is still terrible, it's his nature, but can still love (and hate) his family. More realistic than many villains out there.
The nameless killer from Lawrence Block's final Matt Scudder novel, All the Flowers Are Dying. He's Keller if he murdered for sport, a villain out of Dumas made real.
Soulcatcher and Lady from Glen Cook's The Black Company series make the Cersei and Jadis look kind. I think they were sisters, too. Soulcatcher is the younger jealous one. Lady just wants what she wants, and heaven help you if you're in her way.
Annie Wilkes from Misery is pure terror.

A good read is this article, The Root of All Cruelty? in the New Yorker. The pattern in my choices becomes clear, afterward. The article speaks of how we commit atrocities, and Fiske and Rai define it as "the desire to do the right thing, to exact just vengeance, or to teach someone a lesson." With righteousness behind us, we can do terrible things.

And live with it.

Less is More (some thoughts on the legends of Villainy)

By Russel D McLean

“You’d like to quantify me, Officer Starling. You’re so ambitious, aren’t  you?” – The Silence of the Lambs

Its fair to say that Hannibal Lecter is one of the greatest and most terrifying villains in modern entertainment. From his appearances in Harris’s novels RED DRAGON and THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS to his recurrence in MANHUNTER and later SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (the movie) he was the ultimate in chilling evil. We saw just enough of him to know he made the hairs stand up on the back of our neck. He was revealed in slow moments, in pieces, stepping out of the shadows just far enough for us to see his teeth and to know that we needed to steer clear of him.

He was a shadow.

A monster.

A bogey-man.

“Dr Hannibal Lecter himself reclined on his bunk, perusing the Italian edition of Vogue. He held the loose pages in his right hand and put them beside him one by one with his left. Dr Lecter has six fingers on his left hand.” – the Silence of the Lambs

We wanted more of him, this strange, unknowable and terrifying figure.

But when we got more of him, something strange happened. He lost his power. That uncertainty, that unquantifiability suddenly became quantifiable.  Because we learned too much and too fast. By the time Hannibal rolled around, Lecter was no longer this creature in the shadows, but suddenly he had a backstory (a sister lost in terrible circumstances, eaten in front of his eyes, because, you know, that explains his obsession with canibalism) and even an enemy who was more brutal than he was (the ludicrously over the top Mason Verger, who happens to be a paedophile, just so we get the message that he’s more morally reprehensible than our favourite psychopathic doctor). He became more than a supporting character in a larger tale and instead the focus of the story. He became the “hero” instead of the villain. And he lost his edge; became a parody of himself.

And I won’t even talk about Hannibal Rising.

It’s the same story as with Darth Vader. A mysterious black clad figure, Vader was given just enough backstory (spoiler – he’s the hero’s father) to grant him life, but then we were given his backstory which fleshed out his character to the point of pointlessness. All those beats that one could easily have filled in as an intelligent consumer of stories were made explicit. And suddenly Vader was no longer this omnipresent threat, but rather a lovelorn idiot who was once an extremely annoying kid with a talent for driving race-cars. All the threat and menace he once exuded was gone. And it didn’t help that he was given one of the most painfully hamfisted origin scenes in the history of the movies:

The great villains – and by villains, I mean the ones who speak to the blackness of the world, the ones who are truly monsters and bogey-men - do not need backstory beyond what is neccesary. They work at their finest when we know them in the moment, when we know only that we need to be afraid of them, that in this moment they make us feel something at back of our neck.

But the problem comes when those villains start to step out of the shadows; when they become so popular that their creators feel the need to give the audience more, to expand upon their creations, to give these creations more depth than they were every created to handle.

And to do that, they have to let the bogey-men step out of the shadows.

Thus, Hannibal Lecter becomes less a manifestation of our fears regarding the intelligent, thinking monster, and more of a strange sad-luck story.

Darth Vader becomes a weak parody of power; a lost little boy carried by a destiny beyond his own control.

They lose the effect they once had. In the harsh light of over-exposure they become less powerful and consequently lose the effect that they once had on audiences. We know them too well for them to have the same effect upon us they once had. They have become quanitifiable. Understandable. Predictable.

There is such a thing as knowing a character too deeply.

The legends become too thin. The increased knowledge on the part of the audience weakens the power of the character.

Think about it: would Jaws be so powerful if we knew the Shark’s backstory? If we learned that the shark were angry at the residents of Amity Bay because Quint had killed its mother?*

Would Max Cady have benefited from a sequel to The Executioners/Cape Fear in which we learned about the childhood trauma that created the monster?

“He kept grinning at me. I can’t remember ever seeing a more disconcerting grin. Or whiter, more artificial looking teeth. He knew damn well he was making me uncomfortable.” – The Executioners.

Certain villains are iconic in and of a moment and only within a certain fictional framework. Certain heroes work in the same way, too**. They are legends more than they are characters. They do not need to step beyond the confines of the stories that gave them power in the first place.  They do not need continual expansion or mythologizing. Because instead of adding the depth that the creators – and the audience who have demanded this – crave, all that happens is that the characters become lesser. They lose their impact. They become something else entirely; something weaker and altogether less appetising.

I always think about The Joker. He is the Batman’s most appealing villain, and yet for every attempt to explain who he is, we only wind up with more questions and indeed even today we know as much about him as we did in the early days; he is a homicidal maniac with no (definite) name and no agenda beyond spreading chaos across the Gotham city landscape.  We may get glimpses of other parts of him, but never more than is necessary and never anything to take away the most powerful aspects of that character.  Think about Christopher Nolan and Heath Ledger’s take on the character in The Dark Knight: constantly telling different versions of his origin, never letting anyone close to what he really is or how came to be. The very uncertainty of the character gave him his power.

 Wanna know how I got these scars? My father was… a drinker. And a fiend. And one night he goes off crazier than usual. Mommy gets the kitchen knife to defend herself. He doesn’t like that. Not one bit. So – me watching – he takes the knife to her, laughing while he does it! Turns to me, and he says, “why so serious, son?” Comes at me with the knife… “Why so serious?” He sticks the blade in my mouth… “Let’s put a smile on that face!” And…Why so serious? - The Dark Knight.

Less is more. The less we know, the more the legend has its power.

The best villains – the best legends – do not need to come into the light, do not need to let us see more of them than we do in the moment of the story.

This is why they are effective.

And that is not to say that some villains do not deserve depth, do not deserve to come into the light. But when you’re dealing with iconic figures, with characters whose very existence is dependent more on the effect they have on the reader than on their depth, then you have to walk a very fine line between psychological acuity and oversharing.

Or else you run the risk of destroying everything that made that character work in the first place. By giving the audience more, you wind up giving them less.

*Actually I have a sick feeling this may have been hinted at – or something similar – in one of the sequels. In which case, given how bad the sequels were, point proven.

**Although, as with everyone, I find its more fun to talk about the villains; they get all the best lines.