There are people out there who can’t enjoy a book without someone virtuous to root for. There are also people who only go to restaurants that serve chicken fingers. In each case, you would hope those people are all children, but they aren’t.
If you like your heroes anti, and you like your menu diverse, I’d like to direct you to a few books featuring not-so-good folks in prominent roles that may tickle your fancy. I tend to write key characters who are downright criminal at heart—like in my latest, THEY ALL FALL THE SAME—but who you somehow pull for anyway. Creating such a character relies on craft, intuition, trial and error, and a few trusted beta readers who can tell you when you’ve struck a winning balance between virtue and vice. Here are some great books featuring characters that hit that sweet spot.
Frank Guidry in NOVEMBER ROAD
Lou Berney lets you know right out of the chute that Guidry is a ruthless man. Guidry is a foot soldier for a New Orleans organized crime boss so powerful, he upends the United States government and the history books all over a personal grudge.
This is a spoiler for sure, but it happens in the first chapter, so I’m going to spill it. When we look in on Guidry, he is immediately forced to choose between getting sideways with his boss or giving up the life of his mentor. He barely hesitates to sell his mentor out, rationalizing that if he doesn’t do it, someone else will. If he feels any guilt about it, he shakes it off quickly enough to bed a redhead he just met.
Trouble is, his mentor was a loose end, and it’s not long before Guidry realizes he is one too. And he faces the same fate. He goes on the run with a particularly lethal killer close on his tail and soon concludes his single-man-on-the-road profile is a giveaway. Dual storylines come together when Guidry encounters a wayward housewife from Oklahoma and her young daughters. He hatches a plan to join them as a cover and proceeds to derail their trip long enough to charm his way into their party, knowing all the while that linking up risks the family’s lives. Before long Berney deftly pits Guidry’s survival instincts against his late-developing affection for his traveling companions and his urge to preserve his soul.
Claire in YOU’D LOOK BETTER AS A GHOST
Can you root for a serial killer? How about a snarky British one with a vicious inner dialogue who weighs whether to kill nearly everyone she meets? Joanna Wallace makes the audacious bet that you will as Claire wields a hammer to do the unthinkable again and again.
Wallace slowly teases out the origins behind Claire’s cold-bloodedness as the pages draw on, detailing a troubled childhood that pits a loving father against a mother who sees pitch-black darkness in the child nearly from the start.
It seems at first that Wallace will take the predictable, easy course: that Claire will only kill lowlifes who deserve what they get. It soon becomes clear that she didn’t play it that safe. She dares readers to turn away as the bodies pile up and a mystery builds—not about who has done the killing, because it’s Claire each time—but who has found her out.
Beauregard “Bug” Montague in BLACKTOP WASTELAND
S.A. Cosby is the current world heavyweight champion of getting readers to root for characters with a robust criminal history and a reluctant criminal present. Bug is a perfect example of that: someone doing wrong for a right reason.
A father and legitimate business owner, it’s not all his fault that he’s drawn back to his felonious past when his lawful livelihood is threatened. Bug is still the best wheelman in Virginia and anywhere close. When he takes that one last job you just know he’s going to take, it’s his associates who derail him from making it clean, but even then, he’s not looking to hurt anybody who doesn’t deserve it.
Even at his most audacious, Cosby keeps Bug to the good side of ruthless, because at heart, he’s someone who’s not as bad as his worst deeds.
Teardrop in WINTER’S BONE
Teardrop is not the protagonist of WINTER’S BONE. That would be his sixteen-year-old niece, Ree Dolly—an indelible character herself. The fact that Teardrop leaps off the page as well is a testament to Daniel Woodrell’s mastery.
Teardrop is a man so bad that he strikes fear into the bad men most others fear. His temperament is as bleak as the Ozark winter he inhabits. Ree’s father is missing—Teardrop’s little brother—and it could cost her, her helpless mother, and her young brothers their home if he doesn’t turn up. Dead or alive. In line with the harsh criminal code of the mountains he follows, and that his brother may have broken, Teardrop declines to intervene.
Only after it becomes clear that Ree is willing to give her life under that same code does Teardrop finally relent. Once their purposes align, Woodrell drops one of the greatest brief exchanges the genre has ever seen.
She (Ree) yawned and said, “You always have scared me, Uncle Teardrop.”
He said, “That’s ‘cause you’re smart.”
It’s not often you find yourself cheering someone so frightening. Teardrop is something special, and he’s chilling until the uncertain end.
Jack Foley in OUT OF SIGHT
Elmore Leonard made a career out of getting readers to ride along happily with outlaws of one sort or another, so there’s no shortage of characters or books for this list, but Jack Foley is one of his better creations. The two things Foley can’t resist are robbing banks and U.S. Marshal Karen Sisco.
Foley notoriously robbed a bank the day he got out of prison. He robbed another just for enough money to get back on his ex-wife’s good side. If Foley has a problem, robbing a bank is the solution. That is until he ends up pulling thirty in a Florida prison after getting involved in a road rage incident while fleeing a heist.
After he piggybacks on a prison break, things quickly go amiss and he ends up in a trunk with Sisco. When he should be thinking about prolonging his own freedom, he instead fixates on how he can spend some quality time with the alluring marshal. Thanks to his charm and lustrous blue eyes, Sisco craves a rendezvous with him too.
The action shifts from sunny Florida to chilly Detroit, but neither’s passions ever cool. After the two get mixed up with some truly ruthless scoundrels in The D, Sisco has to choose between making Foley her man or bringing him in.
My new novel THEY ALL FALL THE SAME attempts to thread this same needle. It has been likened to The Sopranos meet the Hatfields and McCoys. The protagonist, Burl Spoon, would feel right at home on a road trip with Frank, Claire, Bug, Teardrop, and Jack. If you find yourself drawn to that gray area between crime and righteousness, you may want to take a spin with any one of them.
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