Some readers hate ‘unlikeable characters.’ But I love them. Well, let’s be clear: I love complicated, charismatic, devious, utterly compelling characters. The kind who keep you guessing, keep you flipping the pages, wondering, are you good? Are you bad? Or something in between?
Writing my own historical heist, The Housekeepers, was my chance to play with just that sort of duality. My protagonist, Mrs King, is a sharp-witted, cool-headed housekeeper to one of West London’s grandest mansions. We meet her in 1905, an era of big hats and big houses captured in the popular imagination by TV shows like Downton Abbey and Upstairs Downstairs. She’s just been dismissed from her job after twenty years of loyal service. And as she marches through the back gate and into her untethered new life, she starts unfurling a plan many weeks in the making: a dazzling and dastardly burglary, the kind high society has never seen before…
Playing with Mrs King’s morality, unpeeling her motivations, understanding her reasons for wanting to rob the mansion she served so loyally – well, this was delicious detective work for me as an author. And it also gave me the chance to play with a person who could be compassionate and loyal one moment, and ferocious and devious the next. I knew I wanted Mrs King to be multidimensional, to have a chip of ice in the heart – because it takes a certain ruthless gumption to rob a seven-storey mansion on the night of the grandest ball of the London season. I also wanted her to operate in accordance with her own personal, private moral code.
And indoors, upstairs, lives her former mistress: the elusive Miss de Vries. Aged twenty-three, she is the fabulously wealthy and entirely formidable heiress to the most glamorous house on Park Lane. At first glance, she is Mrs King’s antagonist. But as we get to know her better, I hope the reader begins to wonder: is she really bad? Or misunderstood? Or something more complicated altogether?
Here are four novels (and one film) with characters shifting from good to bad to the delicious grey areas in between…
My Cousin Rachel by Daphne du Maurier
A masterclass in historical suspense and threaded with the most glittering psychological details, this luxuriant 1951 novel tells the story of Philip Ashley, raised by his bachelor uncle Ambrose on a stunning Cornish estate. But then Ambrose marries the mysterious Rachel and dies in mysterious circumstances, forcing both Philip and the reader to wonder: did Ambrose perish from natural causes, or did Rachel have a hand in his demise? Jealousy, envy, lust, poison, betrayal… it’s all there. And at the heart of the novel is a single gripping narrative question, twisting first one way and then the other: is Rachel good or bad, good or bad…? She is compelling, mercurial, authoritative, tender – and I love her, and this book, so much.
My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
Really this is a sequence of four sumptuous and immersive novels, set in Naples, telling the story of Lenu and Lina, two friends destined to be rivals and soulmates all their lives. Lina is the elusive, enthralling ‘brilliant friend’ of the title: devious, ferociously intelligent, creative, manipulative, brave, wronged – and she grips the protagonist and the reader alike. Kind and gentle she is not. Cruel and vicious she can be. And yet we are entranced by her, and from page to page, chapter to chapter, book to book, we wonder: who will you be, in the end? And by reflection, who are we? Rarely has a novel moved or absorbed me more.
The Secret History by Donna Tartt
You’ve read it already, haven’t you? Good for you! You’ll know why I had to put it on the list. A group of friends who commit an unspeakable crime – it’s there in black and white in the prologue. But the reasons, and the aftershocks, are what keep us tearing through these elegant, icy pages. For we can’t help but hope that this group of chilly, strange, morally complex friends will escape persecution for their crime…
The Talented Mr Ripley by Patricia Highsmith
Talk about charismatic criminal: Tom Ripley has it all. Charm, anxiety, ferocity, and a determination to stay ahead of the game. We can’t help but care about him, even as we are disturbed and dismayed by his crimes. This is the kind of calculation and cunning that keeps a story motoring forward without mercy.
Ocean’s Eleven (2001)
Okay, I’m cheating – it’s not a novel. But The Housekeepers has been described as Downton Abbey meets Ocean’s Eleven, so it would be criminal (get it?) not to mention this masterclass of the heist genre. The 2001 version was directed by Steven Soderbergh. At the heart of the story is Danny Ocean, the charming, sardonic hero, with an unshakeable determination to carry out an eyewatering robbery of a glittering Las Vegas casino. His swagger, his sentiment, his loyalty and his audacity – these traits (even more than lasers and gunfire) keep us on the edge of our seats. And it showed me that you can play with a little moral complexity, a certain icy hauteur, when I started creating my very own Mrs King…
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