“The more successful the villain, the more successful the picture.” —Alfred Hitchcock
Let’s start with the simple assertion that all great fiction is crime fiction.
From classic Greek tragedies to Shakespeare’s plays to film noir, To Kill A Mockingbird, Lord of The Rings or Stars Wars or Game of Thrones—something has been stolen, someone has been killed, loyalties have been tested, and it’s up to the reader to set their own moral compass before the story ends.
(For those of you still in college, your vaguely pretentious English Lit professor might take exception to this claim, but as a rebuttal just start reciting names: Dickens, Tolstoy, Aeschylus, Homer, Malory, and so on, until he gives up.)
The tension in any great novel, whether a locked-room mystery or global thriller, comes from the struggle between good and bad. The plot is driven by a hero trying to overcome a series of obstacles in his or her quest for a happy ending.
In a thriller one of the biggest obstacles is time, as the clock ticks down to Armageddon. Of course, the biggest obstacle facing your protagonist is your villain—an adversary waiting at every turn to bring the hero’s journey to a tragic end. But what is a villain? Certainly not someone who merely wants to stop something, a speed bump on the road to happiness. The antagonist is working just as hard as your hero, maybe even harder, because they, too, want something to happen.
Something bad or something good? Well, that depends on who’s side you take, and that’s for the reader to decide. That’s the mistake so many disposable Hollywood movies make, and you see it sometimes in first novels. The stories are forgettable because the villain is two-dimensional, a nefarious figure doing horrible things simply because he delights in being a jackass, sitting in the dark saying heh-heh-heh.
Storytelling is about movement, so the difference between your hero and villain is that they’re traveling in opposite directions, usually at high speeds. It’s the impending collision between those two forces that keeps us turning the pages.
The key to writing a memorable story is to create a character who wants something, and they want it so badly they’ve focused all their talents on achieving that goal, no matter what the cost. As any actor will tell you, finding your character comes from understanding their motivation, and that requires empathy. As a writer, you need to empathize with your villain as much as your hero, even if you disagree with their choices.
“Nobody is the villain in their own story.
We’re all the heroes of our own story.” —George R.R. Martin
Think of your favorite novels or movies and invariably it’s the villain who turns the protagonist into a true hero. Someone so smart, cunning, or clever that your protagonist is outmatched and outgunned, which is why we’re so emotionally invested. Everyone loves an underdog, whether it’s Sam Spade against a cadre of crooks, John McClane versus Hans Gruber in Die Hard, or Luke Skywalker against Darth Vader. By the odds, our protagonist should never be victorious against greater intelligence, better funding, or pathological purpose, which is why their efforts feel epic and their stories stay with us.
When you get it right, readers are quick to tell you how much they love the bad guy. The fun of fiction is that readers can enjoy the allure or charisma of someone sinister, even if each reader’s emotional barometer is jumping back and forth between love and loathing.
Hannibal Lecter is well-read and charming, which makes him all the more terrifying. Darth Vader is enigmatic and powerful, and with the voice of James Earl Jones, who wouldn’t want to try on the black cloak? Dracula is seductive, Cruella Deville has style, and Ernst Blofeld likes cats. Sure, you wouldn’t ask them to house sit, but they’d certainly make interesting party guests.
“The only difference between the hero and the villain is that the villain chooses to use that power in a way that is selfish and hurts people.” —Chadwick Boseman
The genesis of your nemesis matters. Many classic adventures feature a hero and villain with similar backstories, so it’s important for any writer to think long and hard about why the villain chose the path they’re on, and when. Did childhood trauma lead them to protect others from suffering the same fate (hero) or set them on a path of bloody revenge against an unjust world (villain)? In their origin stories a protagonist and antagonist may look the same, but their choices as the story unfolds define their respective roles.
Consider Sherlock and Moriarty, two soaring intellects, both afforded every advantage, yet their divergent dispositions set the stage for one of the most epic struggles in crime fiction.
In Hanging The Devil, my latest novel, Sally Mei is a character shaped by her childhood. Orphaned at age five and sold to the Hong Kong Triads, she was raised to become a deadly assassin. She left that life behind when she came to San Francisco, so when Sally discovers a young orphan named Grace hiding in the back alleys of Chinatown, she does everything she can to protect Grace from the traumas of her own past. Her antagonist, a mysterious thief known only as the Ghost, was raised by the same secret society as Sally but never left. The Ghost will stop at nothing to protect his identity, even if that means killing Grace. Sally’s compassion and the Ghost’s almost inhuman detachment set them at odds, but that does not mean the Ghost is entirely unsympathetic, either to the reader or Sally, and at no point in the narrative does he say heh-heh-heh. His motivations are clear and his ambitions not entirely amoral, he’s a three-dimensional character whose agenda is his own.
No one questions the importance of creating compelling protagonists, especially in an ongoing series, but too often we focus solely on our heroes when it’s the villain who sets a plot in motion. So the next time you stream a movie at home and wonder why the car chase was boring or you can’t remember much of the story a week later—or a book you really wanted to read turns out to be a disappointment—ask yourself the question an actor might ask if given the chance to play any role. Would you want to play the villain?
If the answer is no, then the bad guy isn’t good enough.
***
