The Bookdagger Author Panel: Sympathy for the Devil
We asked three crime authors about how they handle writing one of the most important aspects of any crime novel: the baddy!
Here’s the question we asked them:
How do you approach writing ‘baddies’? How do you keep them rounded and believable, and do you try to make them to some degree sympathetic?
Craig Robertson
In my novel Random, the story is told in the first person from the point of view of a serial killer. It demanded that I didn’t write him as being an out and out bad guy because he doesn’t see himself as one – even though his actions talk a lot louder than his words. His thought processes, motivations, desires and fears are in line with our own. But even though that line is blurred, we know that he has crossed it.
Most people come in shades of grey and that goes for serial killers as well as saints. While it’s comforting to think that killers are a differently wired species from the rest of us, it’s much more likely that they aren’t as dissimilar as we’d like to believe. That’s why I try to write villains as people first and foremost. Hopefully this makes the character rounded and real, given that you offer up both sides of his personality and the reasons why he does what he does.
Anyway, these guys are much more interesting than a one-dimensional goodie or baddie. Partly because it is easier to identify with the other side of them, whether you like it or not and even if they end up doing the most terrible things.
Attempting to make a serial killer sympathetic is a tricky business and probably not to be recommended. However it is possible that readers may sympathise with his motives if not his methods of putting them into practice. If that leaves the reader in the uncomfortable position of siding with something they know to be very wrong then I can live with that. It’s fun to play with people’s moral compass by putting them on the side of the devil, if only for a while.
That means as a writer putting yourself in an uncomfortable position as well, putting on the devil’s shoes. The saving grace is that you can take them off again once you are done.
AG: With serial killers, I wonder if it’s more fascination than sympathy we end up feeling – but a fascination that runs so deep we’re sometimes not sure what it is. Is it the fear of identifying with evil, and maybe even of admiring it? The fear (and thrill) of recognition? If a serial killer is well-drawn and believable, spending a few hours with them can be disturbing and stimulating in equal measure. Who could ask for anything more?
Andrea Japp
It seems to me there are two sorts of ‘baddies’ in thrillers and my approach depends on which kind I am dealing with. There are ‘ordinary baddies’ and ‘extraordinary baddies’ – those who are so extreme they appear to have lost their humanity.
When thrillers deal with ‘extraordinary baddies’, serial killers for example, I think they very often depart from reality and enter the area of dramatisation. A particularly successful example of this is the brilliant ‘Silence of the Lambs’. The main reason for the dramatisation is simple: no one wants to read about the bloody exploits of real serial killers for entertainment. The second reason is more complex and derives from the very essence of the crime novel, which is actually akin to the Greek tragedy (or the Western!): good is pitted against evil, with man in the middle – which way will he turn? The fictional serial killer has come to symbolise evil, which Man must combat. So very often the literary version of the serial killer becomes all-powerful, extremely intelligent (although really many serial killers have a lower than average IQ), rather attractive, completely lacking in either fear or remorse, breaking all the taboos and prohibitions, in short the Devil, even in societies that no longer believe in the Devil. The important thing when writing such a character is not to seek to ‘understand’ them but to destroy them. Of course, that’s a generalisation. Some authors have created serial killers that are very closely based on reality.
AG: Yes, I think since The Silence of the Lambs the serial killer has become the great secular bogeyman – the devil for infidels, and as a result has perhaps been romanticized and troped out of the realm of the realistic. In more recent times I think the serial killer may have been supplanted by the predatory paedophile as a more disturbing repository for all our fears. The psychic damage caused by sexual abuse is a remarkably widespread theme in modern crime fiction writing.
The ‘ordinary baddy’ on the other hand, is simply someone who has taken a wrong turning. From a novelist’s point of view, writing a character like that provides the opportunity for a detailed psychological study. What is that makes a human being turn to wrongdoing? The writer tries to understand the criminal’s motives, even where their crimes are unforgivable, and sometimes even forms a certain amount of compassion for the baddie. It is all within human reality (our dark side) unlike with the fictional ‘extraordinary baddie.’
AG: I find this easily the most interesting and satisfying kind of baddie. Take old Philip Mathers in Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman – his motive for killing is that he needs the money, but he then spends the rest of the novel in a maelstrom of guilt. Our closeness to his psychological state means that we suffer the torment with him. Another good though very different example of this might be Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley – he’s not evil and twisted in any cartoonish sense, the murders just seem to present themselves as necessary solutions to inconvenient circumstances, and of course Highsmith’s genius is to create the sort of suspense where we find ourselves rooting for him and willing for him not to get caught. Then we find ourselves implicated in the crimes and exploring how we could be on the side of such a vile, amoral character. Luring us into this kind of psychological quicksand is what the best crime fiction does.
In my own novels, whether contemporary or historical, my ‘choice’ of baddie is a function of the impetus I want to give the story and characters. Human nature fascinates me; especially it’s capacity for change. How will Mr and Mrs Average, like you and me, who lead a more or less peaceful life, who are good citizens who wouldn’t hurt a fly, react when faced with a terrible event or a situation of extreme danger (a murder, or the disappearance of a child etc), a situation they could never have imagined themselves being faced with? Will they try to fight against it, will they collapse, will they be cowardly? How will the experience transform them? If I want to explore such transformation I will choose to create an ‘extraordinary baddy’ – the perfect catalyst for such a transformation. On the other hand if I want to explore the dark side of humanity, I would paradoxically create an ‘ordinary baddy’. Most often I have both types of baddy in my novels.
CR: I like the distinction between ordinary and extraordinary baddies although I’m less sure of my ability to always know where one finishes and the other begins. Perhaps within every extraordinary baddie there is an ordinary one, still in touch with their humanity, bursting to get out. It may be that readers fear the extraordinary baddie but identify with the ordinary one – and that is something which might frighten them even more.
I think Andrea is absolutely right in that exploring the dark side of human reality through someone ordinary is what makes baddies particularly interesting. The extraordinary baddie’s dark side is obvious and as a result less appealing. It’s exploring our own dark side that is fun.
Alan Glynn
With baddies, I think, before sympathetic or believable, must come interesting – and baddies tend to have an edge in this department. The devil, it turns out, has all the best tunes, and even someone of John Milton’s stature couldn’t help making Satan the narrative engine of Paradise Lost. It’s the bad guys, after all (or, indeed, the bad ladies, as my six-year-old son likes to call them) and not the good ones, who instigate things, who commit the crimes, and transgress, who take us on these wild, headlong rushes into the darker cess pools of human nature and then give us permission to wallow there. So these people pique our interest from early on. But of course on its own this isn’t enough, and in order to make a baddie believable – and then perhaps, even sympathetic – what you need to give him or her is a psychologically and intellectually developed interior life. The bad guy in Avatar doesn’t have one of these, and is therefore one-dimensional and like something out of a pantomime. Macbeth, by contrast, does have one – as does his wife – and here are two enduring characters we feel we know and are able on some level to understand. The bad guys in my novels have tended to be businessmen, property developers or politicians, and I’ve written them from a close third-person point of view, which allows the reader to spend time in their heads – a place where the characters themselves tend not to be judgemental about their own actions. My bad guys have also tended to be somewhat tortured – racked with anxiety, guilt and paranoia. Either that or they are the sort of socialized psychopaths who are wholly unaware that what they are engaged in might be perceived as evil, or even criminal, at all. And when you mix this kind of moral ambivalence or lack of moral sensibility with a vivid interior life – observations on everyday concerns, health, family, work – you draw the reader into a type of looking-glass world, but it’s one where they can easily identify with the characters and even sometimes sympathise with them.
CR: I agree entirely with Alan that one-dimensional bad guys are less interesting and far more difficult to engage with. The same goes for unsophisticated heroes but the obvious difference is it’s relatively easy for us to understand a good guy’s motives without an insight into his interior life. With bad guys we need to know the ‘why’ before we can identify, sympathise or even properly condemn.
Like Alan, I’ve placed readers inside the baddie’s head where the character is not judgemental about his own actions and left them to deal with that. It doesn’t mean that they have to sympathise but hopefully they will at least understand the thought processes that took him to the place he’s at.
AJ: When you speak of characters being ‘tortured – racked with anxiety and guilt’ would you agree that that could never apply to ‘real’ serial killers, the kind that are the subject of criminologists reports? In other words, in order to write a criminal character that readers can engage with, the author has to create a literary version of the super-horrible-baddy.
The panellists
Alan Glynn is a graduate of Trinity College Dublin, where he studied English Literature, and has worked in magazine publishing in New York and as an EFL teacher in Italy. His first novel, The Dark Fields (2001), was described in the Daily Telegraph as ‘fast, clever – and horrifying’, and his new novel Winterland has recently been published by Faber. He is married with two children and lives in Dublin.
Andrea Japp is one of the grandes dames of French crime writing with over twenty novels published. She is a forensic scientist by profession and weaves this knowledge into her books, giving them particular authenticity. She is the author of The Season of the Beast, The Breath of the Rose, and The Divine Blood , published in English by Gallic Books.
During his 20-year career with the Sunday Post in Glasgow, Craig Robertson has interviewed three recent Prime Ministers; attended major stories including 9/11, Dunblane, the Omagh bombing and the disappearance of Madeleine McCann; been pilloried on breakfast television, beaten Oprah Winfrey to a major scoop, been among the first to interview Susan Boyle, spent time on Death Row in the USA and dispensed polio drops in the backstreets of India. Random is his first novel.
