An idea for a new book always begins, for me, with a scene. A single moment suspended in the aftermath of violence. However, there was something different about the scene in my head, that would become the catalyst for my fourth Inspector Henley novel, The Shadow Carver. This time, the victim in the scene was someone who’d killed before.
Usually, I would ask myself the question “Who is this person and why were they killed?” but instead, I asked myself the question, “Do we still care about the motive when the victim is not in any conventional sense, good?”
The moment a body appears on the page, a single question hums beneath the surface: Why. If cruelty is simply eruption, even to someone who may arguably deserve it, the unfiltered discharge of unchecked emotion with no traceable origin becomes ambient. It seeps into everything. It cannot be contained within the pages of a novel. And that is far harder to live with.
We are deeply uncomfortable with the idea that violence might be impulsive, misdirected, trivial, or emotionally incoherent. We can understand premeditation and we can understand long-harbored resentment. However, emotionally incoherent violence, that has no narrative or beginning, is unsettling.
In reality, many violent crimes are situational. They emerge from escalation. An argument turns sharp, sharp becomes heated, heated becomes physical. Add intoxication, alcohol or drugs, into the mix and impulse overrides restraint. Sometimes the offender cannot articulate a coherent reason and will simply say, “I just saw red.”
In court, those four words, I just saw red, has legal shape. Loss of control is a partial defense to murder in the British legal system and if accepted by a jury those four words can turn murder into manslaughter. The law has language for emotional rupture; however, fiction, resists this.
All crime writers make a contract with the reader and that is to reshape chaos into intention. The detective is not primarily a hunter. They are a translator. They translate violence into language. They convert brutality into pattern.
Randomness is intolerable in story because it suggests randomness in life.
Readers do not relax when the suspect is caught or when the truth is revealed. They relax when the behavior makes sense.
A motive needs to be established because without it, that means anyone could do it. A crime without motive, one that appears on the page and is solved procedurally but lacks emotional coherence, is narratively unsatisfying. No motive means that there are unanswered questions. Unanswered questions means that the threat of danger still lives even if the identity of the killer is revealed.
If violence is random, then prevention is impossible. If there is no traceable origin, no precipitating factor, then harm can occur anywhere, to anyone, without warning. Motive creates boundaries. Motive tells us that the crime was personal, specific and contextual. Motive suggests that the violence arose from conditions that can be identified, perhaps even avoided. It reassures us that this will not simply descend upon us arbitrarily. Motive is reassurance disguised as darkness.
Crime fiction allows us to approach horror while preserving our belief that the world is interpretable. But is there always a motive in fiction? I believe there is, even when it is partially obscured or when the victim is an antagonist.
In fact, good crime fiction sometimes withholds full motive deliberately. Complete understanding can dissolve fear. When we entirely reduce a character to explanation, we strip them of power. The most compelling antagonists feel inevitable but never fully reducible. We glimpse their reasoning. We understand enough. But something remains beyond our reach.
Writers must balance recognition with mystery. Too little motive, and the story feels hollow. Too much, and the darkness becomes domesticated. We do not close a crime novel because the killer has been caught, convicted and sentenced or because we have discovered the truth. We close the book because chaos has been narrated into order.
Even if the perpetrator escapes, even if the legal system fails, even if justice is morally ambiguous and the truth is in fact a lie, the reader can accept it all if motive has been revealed. Because revelation implies structure.
In life, truth is often fragmented. Motive may remain contested or unknown. Courts operate on evidence, not psychological certainty. A verdict does not necessarily deliver meaning or the truth. But fiction promises something else.
It promises that behaviour emerges from cause. We read crime fiction not to learn why people kill. We read it to confirm that reasons exist at all. We need to know that violence is not purely arbitrary, that darkness has edges and that the world, however brutal, remains interpretable.
Perhaps that is why the murder of a killer felt so compelling as a starting point for me. When the victim is morally compromised, motive becomes even more essential. Without it, we are left with a vacuum. Was it justice, revenge, opportunism or ideology?
We demand motive not because we care about the victim’s virtue, but because we care about the architecture of meaning.
The lie we tell about crime, in fiction and sometimes in life, is that explanation equals containment. If cruelty is merely an emotional eruption, if it has no pattern, no reason, no traceable origin, then it becomes contagious in our imagination. It expands beyond narrative and into possibility.
The lack of a motive means that the violence persists not because it is justified, but because it is no longer questioned. Stories, at their best, are containment devices and establishing a motive allows us to confront violence while preserving the belief that it can be understood.
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