In the inevitable wrestling match each writer has with plot, some enter the ring swaggering, to the matter born, and some, like me, skulk in with a reluctant side-shuffle. One of the aspects of plot construction that has always vexed me, and that I hope to examine in this essay, is the inverse relationship between a crime story’s faithful and enthusiastic delivery of expected tropes (a big twist; a plot-related love interest; a high-concept and diabolical villain; etc.) and the degree of realism achieved. I don’t mean realism as it pertains to eschewing the supernatural, but rather, realism as a feeling the reader has that the story could/would actually happen in the known world, the actual world their friends and enemies and neutral acquaintances live in. I mean realism in the sense that the reader responds emotionally to the characters’ troubles like they would if these were flesh-and-blood people. What I’m interested in, and have always suspected, is that often the more success a writer enjoys in conjuring suspense (to many crime readers, the most important thing) and thrills, the less likely the story will exist in the realm of the real. Great crime reads come from all positions on this spectrum—I’ve chosen four books that, to me, represent different ratios of ‘high suspense’ to ‘feels real’, all books I admire and wish I could write myself.
The Poet, by Michael Connelly
An absolute masterpiece of suspense. This is a bona fide page-turner.
CHARACTER – When the book begins, the action that jumpstarts the plot has already occurred. The main character is already dealing with it. As a reader, this assures me because I immediately know where the mystery originates and what to focus on. On the other hand, the immediate firing up of the suspense machine precludes spending ‘normal’ or everyday time with the protagonist. There’s certainly enough information about Jack McAvoy to keep him from feeling generic, but there’s no time for the details of daily life—mundane or zany or anywhere in between—that make it seem a character might exist outside the book. (The teacher in me wants to stress that neither of these approaches to opening a book is better than the other. Some readers will miss the grounding of the character’s daily plight and idiosyncrasy, while some, plodding through the character’s normal life, will wonder why they’re reading a book just to hear about some person’s mundane existence.) Connelly does a good job of never allowing Jack to feel like a pawn of the plot, but at the same time, the reader understands that plot is the main thing, that the ride may upstage the rider at times.
The second aspect of character I want to track is whether the protagonist is morally compromised or under serious threat of moral compromise. I would say that Jack McAvoy is not. This feels important to me. I suspect that part of what makes characters feel ‘real’ (I’m already tired of that word) is their ethical fallibility. I don’t remember any significant instances when McAvoy wasn’t on the moral high ground and neatly filling the role of righteous protagonist—the book convincingly forgives him for the possible transgression of wanting to use his brother’s death as fodder for a great newspaper article. He’s mostly smart and brave and reasonable and decent.
PLOT – The Poet concerns itself with a single investigation—in two parts, but they’re closely connected—which helps maintain suspense by not dividing the reader’s attention, and the novel also delivers big twists. Toward the end of The Poet, something interesting happened to me as a reader. I started getting impatient for the twist, knowing there had to be one, feeling a sympathetic writerly pressure to deliver the genre-promised goods, which I knew the book would because Connelly had signaled early and often that this book would deliver everything it was supposed to. The twists at the end felt exhilarating, but they also felt less real than anything else in the book—that Rachel would be the cop-killer felt strained and too bleak, and that Backus would be the villain instead felt like the only way to not have the killer be Rachel. To me, this was the spot in the book where the desire to fulfil the promises of the genre worked against the book.
VILLAIN – Backus, the villain, is what I would call, for lack of a better term, a high-concept psychopath. This is an important issue in the thrilling suspense vs. real feel equation. The unique, captivating, genius serial killer who leaves Poe quotes and hypnotizes people is at once the amazing, terrifying heart of the novel, and also a choice that pushes the story (happily in this instance, I would say) away from feeling real.
SETTING – The scope of the setting is the whole United States—Colorado, Chicago, DC, Phoenix, Los Angeles. This provides grandeur and fun, while costing in specific, immersive atmosphere.
LOVE INTEREST – This is the item on the checklist I’m the least sure about. I guess my thesis statement would be that the more closely tied to immediate plot the love interest is, the more predictably adherent the romantic storyline will feel to the conventions of crime/suspense/noir. In the case of The Poet, the love interest, Rachel Walling, is an FBI agent the main character meets in the course of working the central case.
High suspense rating: 10
Feels real rating: 2
The Searcher, by Tana French
A slower, more down-to-earth burn than The Poet, but she still has the big ratchet out when it comes to suspense.
CHARACTER – We spend a lot of everyday time with Cal, the main character, before the main plot concern is set in motion. The initial third of the book is slow in comparison to most suspense/mystery-type books, which might bore some readers, but Cal is grounded effectively in reality with generous descriptions of his humble cottage (which he plans to fix up) and French makes good use of Cal’s project restoring an antique desk to let the reader hang with him and learn something of his past and current life situation—unlike Jack McAvoy, Cal wants to move away from crime/criminals, away from situations/people that might be expected to be found in a crime novel. She slowly wades him into the surf of trouble, using the presence of a high-school-aged kid spying on him from the woods as a signal that plot is indeed on the way. Is the protagonist under threat of moral compromise or ambiguity? Not really. In this way, Cal is similar to McAvoy.
PLOT – Like Connelly’s book, The Searcher also focuses on one dominant plotline—in this case, figuring out what happened to the missing brother of the kid who spies on and then becomes friends with Cal. We know, despite Cal’s resistance, that he will eventually agree to look for the missing boy, but still his resistance is compelling and makes sense. Once the investigation starts, the book quickly steps into better line with the conventions of suspense plot—scenes of Cal poking around under false pretenses; scenes of Cal forcefully interrogating; scenes of Cal being threatened to back off. All expected, and all satisfying, and leading to a more straightforward ending than The Poet. The twists in The Searcher are less gymnastic and come earlier. Two that jump to mind are the fact that Trey (the kid Cal befriends), who Cal had always assumed was a boy, turns out to be a girl, and the more important realization that Mart, the funny, warmly cantankerous neighbor and seeming ally to Cal, might have a nefarious side.
VILLAIN – The various bad guys are mostly regular in their motives—making money; preserving the town’s decency. The real bad guys are from the city and are scary because of what we don’t know about them. No high-concept psychopaths.
SETTING – The setting is small and stable in scope—a remote village in Ireland. French spends more time/energy on the particular atmosphere of her place than Connelly, and the place matters to the story—the town’s collective attitudes and the fact that Cal is an outsider are important to the narrative. The vividness of place works toward the feeling of reality.
LOVE INTEREST – Though Cal’s love interest is discovered and developed alongside the main trouble, she isn’t entangled in the plot to nearly the degree Rachel Walling is in The Poet.
High suspense rating: 7
Feels real rating: 6
Harlem Shuffle, by Colson Whitehead
The protagonist’s busy personal life and an energetic, rich setting are put to the fore.
CHARACTER – Unlike Cal (from The Searcher), Ray Carney isn’t looking to simplify his life; he’s looking to move up in the world. The fact that he has a lot going on facilitates the depth of Whitehead’s dive into his life/plight/current situation. We learn more about Carney than about the other two main characters we’ve considered—time is spent generously on family dynamics and neighborhood dynamics and the ins and outs of his small furniture business, his marriage, his father’s legacy as a fairly important Harlem criminal (a life Carney is resisting falling into himself). Part and parcel of the setup is that, instead of trying to solve a case or catch a criminal, Carney is a criminal. He’s on the other side of the law, which pushes him away from the familiar cop/reporter model (all three of the other books in this list feature a character on the right side of the law who investigates criminals) and therefore away from convention. He’s a character working primarily—though not always—for himself. All this, for me, pushes the realism quotient higher, as does the fact that Carney is the first character on the list whose morality is questionable. Though solidly sympathetic as a protagonist, he understands that crime does pay and chooses to engage in it. He orchestrates an elaborate takedown of a neighborhood patriarch for reasons of revenge.
PLOT – Unlike the previous two books, Harlem Shuffle is structured around three major intrigues (the Hotel Theresa, Wilfred Duke, and Linus), rather than one. To me, this hedges the book toward the real because the framing infers that another caper cropping up is the natural course of Carney’s life. Though the individual capers are unique, the fact that there’s another caper on the way is a given—the book, instead of detailing the most interesting single thing that ever happened to a character, cuts a period out of the character’s timeline that happens to be populated with capers. Crime is so much a part of the atmosphere that twists, if there are any, are hard to detect. The biggest twist may be how often Carney’s criminal plans go well.
VILLAIN – There’s no high-concept psychopaths/serial killers, but unlike The Searcher with its shadowy, distant antagonists or friends-with-antagonist-qualities, Harlem Shuffle is packed with colorful, idiosyncratic criminals. I would say that the high stylization and zing of Whitehead’s cast of crooks are a force working against realism, one of the only forces working against it in the book, but I also would never want those criminals muted or normalized—the book wouldn’t be the same if the collective criminal element were all pragmatic, composed, forgettable, realistic-feeling characters. Part of the algebra of character in this book is that Carney is a straight man for all the other criminals, and that does work in realism’s favor. The fact that Carney can be contrasted as normal against criminals who are super-flashy or super-hero-tough or indulgently self-destructive—this only makes Carney feel more real.
SETTING – The setting is a single place, same as The Searcher. In fairness to Tana French, whose setting is also expertly done, Whitehead’s setting probably feels more alive because Harlem in the early 60s is objectively more complicated and energetic and just much bigger than a village in the Irish countryside. For both books, the setting feels integral to the action, and I’m willing to believe that this quality is a boon when trying to trick the reader’s mind into processing your tale as real.
LOVE INTEREST – Carney is already married when the book begins, relieving Harlem Shuffle of the burden of a discovered love interest.
High suspense rating: 4
Feels real rating: 8
New Hope for the Dead, by Charles Willeford
Unlike other books in the Hoke Moseley series, this one is long on personal and professional hassles and short on the undoing of vile, brilliant sociopaths.
Character – This novel deemphasizes the central plot arc to an extreme degree. While this is frustrating for some readers (though likely not for Willeford devotees), the energy/space that normally goes into plot is used to provide a wildly generous amount of personal and professional context and hassle. This character and his life feel absolutely real—in real life, personal snafus are likely to pile up while glamourous, unique, and emotionally involving criminal plotlines are not. Hoke’s daughters are dumped on him suddenly by his ex-wife, when she re-marries and moves to California (from South Florida), which leads to all the problems of raising children, their dating lives and part-time jobs and all the attention and gear they need; he is told by his boss that he has to move from the El Dorado hotel, because all Miami detectives must live in the city limits (ahh, the El Dorado: the sad little TV, the bottle of Early Times, the cup where Hoke deposits his dentures, the hotplate); his partner, Ellita Sanchez, gets pregnant and is kicked out of her house, where as a Cuban daughter she still lives at the age of 30. Hoke’s moral fiber isn’t rotten but it’s far from pristine, evidenced by his willingness to bend police regulations, to date a woman involved in an investigation, by his exhibition of the natural callousness of a veteran detective, and perhaps evidenced simply in the notable messiness of his life.
PLOT – Unlike Harlem Shuffle and its sequence of three plots, Willeford’s book seems at first like it might follow the traditional single dominant story concern—a petty drug dealer/user being found dead in his stepmother’s house—but soon that story is interrupted and overwhelmed not only by all the already named commotion, but by his boss’s insistence that he and a couple fellow detectives take on a stack of cold cases. From that point, the initial case is kept on a back burner while other cases are worked and while Hoke navigates his personal dilemmas. The book’s middle two-thirds almost pushes into the realm of a slice-of-life narrative, if your life is that of a police detective with multiple cases up in the air and a domestic existence in shambles. In the end, the initial case is solved (in an unexpected manner), but I don’t remember any plot contortions that would qualify as twists.
VILLAIN – Unlike a couple other Hoke Moseley books, this one does not feature a demonic superstar. The villainy is spread over many different perps—he’s a detective, so he should come into contact with the desperate and misguided and mean, and he does.
SETTING – Much like Whitehead’s Harlem, Willeford’s Miami is boisterous and crowded and gritty and flashy and full of people on the edge of disaster, though Willeford seems more determined to give a tour of his city, and to educate the reader about its history and the way it’s changing. Again, the setting is crucial and contributes to the feeling of realness.
LOVE INTEREST – Hoke is divorced. He sort of discovers someone to date (and sort of dates her), and though the love interest is discovered in the direct course of the plot, the relationship is so unsweet and dead-on-arrival that it almost subverts the trope as it fulfils it. The ragged romance is basically another of Hoke’s chores.
High suspense rating: 2
Feels real rating: 10
***Someone else will have to do a full evaluation of my new crime novel, Penalties of June, but I’ll tell you that Pratt, the main character, is a non-cop/reporter who’s been forced into doing detective-type stuff in order to escape a bad situation. I’ll tell you that he’s decent but not averse to violence. I’ll tell you that the plot revolves around a single, unique problem/case. I’ll tell you that the character who’s actually a detective is one of the villains. Along with one of Pratt’s coworkers. Along with Pratt’s father figure. I’ll tell you that the setting is gritty, non-beachy 90s Florida, and is treated with loving attention. And that the love interest is an old flame but their romance, when the book starts, is yet unconsummated.
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