Thursday's Thugs: The Unreliable Narrator

Not all unreliable narrators are villains. Dean Koontz's character, Odd Thomas, is one of the most famous unreliable narrators. Odd Thomas is more hero than villain. There are times when he leaves you wondering. Wonder and questioning are the essence of the unreliable narrator.

With villainy, the unreliable narrator blurs the lines between good and evil through obfuscation, withholding essential truths, outright deception, distracting the reader by espousing views that are repugnant, or being incapacitated in a way that contradicts his or her version of events.

Another way mystery authors accomplish the unreliability of the narrator is to present several versions of the same story from the point of view of different characters. In this version, villainy is depicted through the biases and character flaws of the different points of view. The essential facts remain the same, but each storyteller presents them in a different light. Citizen Kane demonstrates this very well in presenting five varying views of the main character through the eyes of acquaintances. This kind of story leaves us questioning who we should believe.

In mystery, Agatha Christie experimented with the unreliable narrator as a villain in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and Endless Night. Not being able to trust the narrator of the story was almost unheard of before Christie. In The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, her villain withheld information, obfuscated facts, and evaded answering questions, but never outright lied. Although I enjoyed the story, she was widely criticized for "not playing fair with the readers." Having read the story, as well as all the other Christie books, I can say that she did not play unfairly in presenting the facts. The murder can be solved with the information given, but the controversy serves as a warning to writers today.

Being unfair to the reader is a cardinal sin with mystery readers. If your readers feel cheated by the omission of details, it can damage your reputation as a mystery writer. I'm not trying to warn you away from writing unreliable narrators, though. Excellent mysteries can be and have been written using all states of reliability. Some of the best stories depend on ambiguity and shades of truth to create the desired mood. The real question to consider: are you up to the task of writing this kind of bad boy? If you are planning to use this villain, you must pay attention to presenting all the clues readers need to solve the puzzle.

Thursday's Thugs Guest Post: Villains in Medical Mysteries and Thrillers

No, I didn't write this book.

Hello! I'm Sarah Glenn, guest posting today on Thursday's Thugs. If you'd like to know more about me, check out my blog or the bottom of this page.

Anyone who knows me in person knows that I like medical mysteries. I've watched everything from Marcus Welby to House, MD. I've read everything from Coma to A Heartbeat Away. I'm not the only one, either, as sales figures and TV rating attest. Sickness and death come to us all. Physicians, nurses, and other healthcare workers are the police - and sometimes detectives - who identify and battle the enemy.

The hero of a medical mystery is usually a physician or a nurse. I did read Pharmacology is Murder from Dirk Wyle, but that's the only pharmacy-oriented mystery I believe I've ever seen (feel free to recommend others). The author is frequently a member of the same profession as the hero. Medical mystery is a subgenre where Mary Sue is expected, and often preferred by the reader. The villains in these novels can come out of a wider selection of professions, but they tend to fall into a group of specific tropes.

Big Business: HMOs and Big Pharma are soulless, greedy entities whose qualities extend to their flesh-and-blood representatives. Neonates in the NICU cost too much money, so the HMO in The Provider by David Shobin finds a vile way of removing them from the caseload. Our Hero must figure out what's going on and stop it.

Medicine Gone Wrong: Medicine is being misused or has gone awry. The first book I read from Robin Cook, Mortal Fear, hooked me with its answer for why salmon die after they spawn. In Acceptable Risk (also by Cook), a scientist tests the psychotropic properties of a mold by injecting himself and other people in his program with the mold. Bad idea? Oh, yeah. I think that Tess Gerritsen provides one of the most jarring perversions of medicine in Life Support. Truly horrible - but I couldn't set the book down. As a side note: most medical novels that involve Science Gone Wrong should carry a gross-out warning.

Serial Scientist: Someone is killing people via medical means to get their jollies. Contagion by Robin Cook, possibly my favorite medical thriller of all time, has an antagonist who loves collecting deadly viruses because -well- he likes collecting deadly viruses. Naturally, he must infect a few people so he can see them at play. Jack Stapleton, forensic pathologist, is the only one who recognizes that a conspiracy is afoot. One of the other villain types on this list usually exploits the serial scientist for his/her own agenda. 

Terrorists and the Military: Two sides of the same coin - medicine offers a strategic advantage. Good guys and bad guys both start to get ideas when Dr. Wonderful or Serial Scientist comes up with a supersoldier serum/really scary way to kill people.

The Patient Who Won't Take No for an Answer: Dr. Wonderful must treat a VIP/deranged powerful lunatic - or else. Like the Serial Scientist, often involves one of the other tropes. Michael Palmer's The Patient, for example, is a terrorist who will do horrible things to his hostages unless the heroine removes his inoperable tumor.

One of Us: A doctor or nurse is behind the crimes. The reasons can vary from revenge to mercy. Robin Cook combined this with an Unreliable Narrator in one of his novels, but telling you its name would spoil the story for you.

Do you think I've covered them all? Do you have better examples than I do for these types? If so, let me know. I'm always looking for new material to read.

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Sarah Glenn has a B.S. in Journalism. She's worked as an art intern at the billboard company, as an NCIC operator for her local police department, and as a teaching assistant for medical terminology. She currently works in continuing healthcare education.

Sarah's first novel, All This and Family, Too, is the story of a lesbian vampire who moves into a gated community and discovers the true meaning of horror. Will she survive the experience with the mixed blessing of a loving but dysfunctional family?

Thursday's Thugs: Victorian Villains

Like most mystery writers, I came to the genre as a mystery reader. I particularly have a fascination for Victorian Era mysteries. Loveday Brooke, Sherlock Holmes, and Auguste Dupin held fascinating insights into the human character. In particular, they held knowledge of the criminal classes that made me look sideways at my junior-high classmates. Which of them held villainy in their heart?

So, aside from telling you that I was a weird child, what does this have to do with Victorian Villains?

The Victorians not only gave us the detective genre, they passed down their fears in the form of villains. It is not Holmes that gives us insight into what his society feared, it is the bad guys that show us the shape of evil in the minds of readers in his time. Today I thought I would talk a little about what the Victorians feared most in their society and the six basic types of villains I gleaned from reading them.

1. The Visual Villain - character showed in this villain's appearance. You could tell by looking at the physical deformities, the nervous twitches or speech problems, harsh features or scarred flesh gave this bad boy away. The Victorians not only feared deformity, they carried it to the extreme of studying bumps on the head and facial construction as a way of determining criminal behavior.

2. The Working Class Villain - yes the butler did it, or the coachman, even the upstairs maid might harbor reasons to take the master's possessions away from him. If they killed the master, so much the more affirming of the black-hearted working class mindset. If they were good people, they would be rich too.

3. The Upper Class Other - this guy is dark, foreign, elusive, and often mysterious in origin. He may be of the upper class, but he's NOT one of us. The British were particularly good at this typecasting of other races and cultures.

4. The Mysterious Woman - sometimes this is portrayed as the fallen woman. She is exotic, mysterious, and/or erotic. A woman on her own is suspect. An attractive woman of independent means is exponentially more suspect. If she shows signs of being well read, educated, and able to hold her own in a conversation... watch out.

5. The Supernatural Villain - one of the most feared. The Victorians consulted the mediums, created Hellfire Clubs, brought mystery objects from Egypt, drugs from the orient, and picked up superstitions from dozens of conquered cultures. Detectives might explain the phenomenon as a fraud, but the bad guys frequently resorted to supernatural threats to prey on the upper crust.

6. The Domestic Villain - this is the friendly villain that can hide in plain sight. He blends in: a college chum you would never suspect of holding a grudge, the professor in gold-rimmed glasses you met on the train to London. He blends in, he is one of us, but behind the smile, evil lurks.

That's my take on Victorian Villainy. What do you think? Are there more ways the nineteenth century writers shaped their bad guys? The more interesting thoughts to me is how often these types of villains show up in our today and how often our own fears color our writing.

Thursday's Thugs: Guest Blog by Marilyn Meredith

This week I have invited F.M. Meredith, also known as Marilyn Meredith, to talk about her bad guys. She is the author of nearly thirty published novels. Her latest in the Rocky Bluff P.D. crime series, from Oak Tree Press, is Angel Lost. Marilyn is a member of EPIC, Four chapters of Sisters in Crime, including the Internet chapter , Mystery Writers of America, and on the board of the Public Safety Writers of America. Visit  her at http://fictionforyou.com and read her blog at http://marilynmeredith.blogspot.com .

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The third book in my Rocky Bluff P.D. series, Fringe Benefits, was all about a bad cop who took advantage of his badge. Other books in the series have had an abundance of bad guys, murderers and other unsavory characters, but in my latest, Angel Lost, the bad guy is sort of in the shadows. He doesn’t make an appearance until near the end of the book though he’s hinted at much earlier.

Even then, though what he does is the pivotal point of the plot, he still isn’t a central figure in the book. Having said that, I guess I should explain that in all of the Rocky Bluff novels, the focus is on how the job affects the police officers’ families and how what is happening in the family affects the job.

No, the police officers in my fictional department aren’t perfect, but in this particular book the villain is not a major player. Officer Stacey Wilbur is so focused on her upcoming wedding to Detective Doug Milligan she doesn’t put enough attention onto what is going on around her. Sergeant Navarro is worried about his mother who is displaying Alzheimer’s symptoms and he misses something important at work. Officer Felix Zachary is excited about becoming a father in the near future, and though he knows something may be amiss with a new-hire he doesn’t pursue his feelings. Detective Milligan is as anxious to get married as Stacey, but not much interested in the wedding, he just wants to be sure his renter, Officer Gordon Butler, finds a new place to live.

Of course, nothing goes quite as planned and the appearance of an angel in a furniture store window causes a stir in the town and puts Officer Zachary and the new guy, Vaughn Aragon, together policing the crowd.

Angel Lost is the seventh in the series, written under the name F.M. Meredith. It’s available as an e-book and trade paperback from the usual places. If anyone would like an autographed copy, they can go to my website: http://fictionforyou.com

Advance praise for Angel Lost:

In ANGEL LOST, author Marilyn Meredith has created a thrilling adventure that weaves together the lives of several point-of-view police officers, with Officer Stacy Wilbur and Detective Doug Milligan in starring roles. I truly, truly, TRULY loved every minute of this terrific story!  So there!  Read it yourself and find out why.

Radine Trees Nehring
Author of the Carrie McCrite and Henry King "To Die For" mystery series.  

F.M. Meredith has another hit on her hands with her latest installment of the Rocky Bluff P.D. series.  A fast-moving mystery full of suspense, well-developed characters and realistic interpersonal relationships, Angel Lost wants for nothing.  Meredith weaves a compelling story that keeps you guessing with a satisfying ending guaranteed to please even the most discerning mystery lover.  Impossible to put down, Angel Lost is the first must-read of 2011.  

Holli Castillo

Author of Gumbo Justice

Reading a F.M. Meredith Rocky Bluff novel is like having a wonderful family visit—without having to travel farther than your favorite chair. Once again, Marilyn delivers a story you want to get into, a mystery you want to unravel (several actually), and characters you like and want to root for. In “Angel Lost,” F.M.’s Rocky Bluff  Police Department “family” must really come together to save one of their own--with a little help from an angel. A most enjoyable read. Thank you Marilyn!"

Madeline (M.M.) Gornell, the author of “Uncle Si’s Secret,” “Death of a Perfect Man,” and “Reticence of Ravens.” http://www.mmgornell.com

Thursday's Thugs: Guest Blog by Howard Sherman

Howard loves reading books as much as writing them. When he's not wiling away his day with words he also enjoy fine food and wine, rousing conversation, travel, golf, gambling and gourmet cooking that he both executes and eats with his wife and daughter.

http://www.malinche.net/suspensefiction.html

Howard Sherman is an 'implementer of interactive fiction'.  All of his books can be considered ebooks that you play or games that you read, thanks to the fact they are all 100% text based and yet require a computer, a smart phone or other tech gadget to enjoy.

Howard has graciously stopped by today to talk about writing villains in interactive fiction. I hope you will give him a warm welcome. If you would like to know more, you can visit his blog at: http://howardsherman.net/

Interactive Fiction Villains

Like any writer, I take great care and give much consideration to the villain in my novels.  It's a tricky balance writing a character who's evil machinations are simultaneously plausible yet unpredictable. 

Plausible in the sense the villain's decisions and actions make (relatively) perfect sense when fully unveiled and unpredictable in the sense that the reader should have only the vaguest of notions as to who the nemesis may be.

This becomes a whole lot more complicated in my arena as an Implementer of interactive fiction.  I have all of the same challenges any author of fiction has plus a couple of more to really keep things interesting:

1) Interactive fiction is non-linear, which means that the normal understanding of "beginning, middle and ending" doesn't apply.  Since you can investigate a crime scene one moment, go buy a bagel the next minute, then head over to police headquarters the next minute, and then decide to retrace your steps - the story is a vast area of unpredictable possibilities all driven by the reader.

2) Since the story is dynamic in the sense that the other characters in the story are also walking around of their own accord, performing actions in keeping with their own timetable and at times reacting to what you, the reader who has assumed the persona of the main character,  those characters (including the bad guys) can become capable of almost anything.

How do you write a villain that can just as easily keep tabs on you (as the good guy) as you (the main character good guy) can keep tabs on them?

I tend to keep my villains hiding in plain sight.  That means they can be anybody you'll meet in the story.  Then, to keep the reader guessing, I pepper in enough red herrings to make at least three characters prime suspects. But which one is the villain?

This is exactly what I did in my forthcoming interactive murder mystery Four Badges.  I wrote the entire novel around who did it, what they did and why they did it.  The only thing the reader knows starting out is that a sleepy little town in New Jersey way past the 'burbs wakes up to discover two prominent members of the local community were slaughtered in the safety of their own hones.

But that's it. Who did this? Why would they do this? Where are they now? What are they up to? From there I leave the reader guessing as they explore town, examine crime scenes, question witnesses and local townspeople in the quest to find the killer.

Along the way, I throw a few more curve balls to really keep things interested and mix it up for the reader.  I'm a big fan of the art of misdirection and consider it the most cherished tool in my author's toolbox.

At the end of the day, the villain's been discovered only after the reader discovers crucial details yielded only through keen observation while also, employing superior deductive reasoning to come up with the killer -- whose actions are perfectly plausible, yet far from predictable when all is said and done.

Thursday's Thugs: Guest Blog by Mary Reed

Today I would like to welcome Mary Reed, one member of a dynamic husband and wife historical mystery writing team. Mary Reed and her husband, Eric Mayer, published several short Lord Chamberlain detections in mystery anthologies and in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine prior to 1999. One For Sorrow, the first full length novel about their protagonist, was published in 1999. They are currently working on the as yet untitled ninth entry in the series.

Their current book is titled Eight For Eternity. It is set in January 532, when mobs ruled Constantinople, capital of the Roman Empire. Against a murderous backdrop lit by raging fires, John, Lord Chamberlain to Emperor Justinian, must find those seeking to use the Nika Riots to dethrone the emperor, untangling a web of intrigue in a city where death holds court at every corner and before escalating violence in the streets removes all hope of finding those he seeks.

Mary has graciously accepted my invitation to talk about one of her villains on Thursday's Thugs, Theodotus of Constantinople. Enjoy:

Four For A Boy, the prequel to John's adventures, relates how John regained his freedom and began his rise to great office. Theodotus, a major villain in the novel, was based upon an historical City Prefect of Constantinople.

According to Procopius' Secret History, Theodotus was much feared for his ruthlessness, particularly in putting down riots. It was also claimed he practiced magick. Theodotus was nicknamed the Pumpkin but Procopius gives no reason, leaving it open for authorial speculation.

We took Procopius' mini-portrait of a powerful and hated man who exhibited what my mother would call a nasty manner, changed his name to The Gourd, and described him thus:

Though he dressed like a peasant in leather breeches and a rough wool shirt, no one could have mistaken the broad-chested figure, shambling along as if weighed down by his enormous and asymmetrical head, set between wide shoulders without apparent benefit of a neck.

Some whispered he'd been kicked in the head by a horse as a youngster. Others said the misshapen head was a result of his mother easing her pregnancy with demonic potions. No one, however, said anything at all about the matter when within earshot of the man nicknamed the "Gourd".

Early in the book, the Gourd gives a banquet at which he insults his high-born guests by giving them cooked gourds to eat before performing an apparently magickal feat. Having freed a caged dove he proposed dropping into a scalding pitch, he plunges his hand into the bubbling mixture.

His hand emerges unscathed -- an explanation is provided later in the novel -- and the Gourd declares:

"This is the indestructible hand that reaches into the darkest alleys to choke the life from the murderous bastards who lurk there! Why do you think they whisper my name with such dread? They know my powers. They fear me. And rightly so!"

At that point news arrives of a riot breaking out in the city, an event allowing him to display his vicious nature and confirming his boastful statement was not mere words. We do not often feature violence on stage, but in this instance the Gourd illuminates the scene by burning a captured rioter alive:

Upending the pot he doused the [rioter] with lamp oil. The man began to struggle frantically as the viscous liquid soaked into his clothing and trickled down, forming a puddle.

Theodotus stepped away and casually kicked one of the lamps illuminating the scene towards the obelisk. The lamp skittered on its side, rolling in a tiny wheel of flames to come to rest against the man's oil sodden cloak. A thin line of red snaked slowly along it and began climbing up the man's chest.

Then the oil exploded into a ball of flame, inside which a dark figure writhed and screamed.

While the Gourd is only briefly mentioned in the Secret History, he made such an impression it was inevitable he would show up in our series.

Although it does not occur in Four For A Boy, the fate of the Gourd is known. According to the Secret History he was accused of causing a near fatal illness to Emperor Justinian, and of being a magician and a poisoner. While the charges are probably untrue, evidence against the Gourd was obtained by torturing his friends. However, one courageous high-ranking official spoke out, declaring the Gourd innocent, and as a result the Gourd was exiled rather than executed. When he later learned men were being sent to assassinate him, he fled to a church, took sanctuary, and spent the rest of his life there.

Thursday's Thugs: a Double Standard

Hello, I'm Sarah Glenn, guest posting on Gwen's blog today. We're going to take a little departure from mystery for today's discussion of fictional villains.

When it comes to books, movies, television shows, etc., there are villains we hate, villains we love to hate... and villains we just love. Marion Zimmer Bradley created two of the most polarizing characters in SF/fantasy fiction with her Darkover series: Dyan Ardais and Bard di Asturien.

Don't know what Darkover is? Oversimplification: Darkover is a planet inhabited by a lost human colony. Through interbreeding with a local humanoid species, some descendants of the colony were born with psychic abilities. Those descendants gave rise to family dynasties, the Comyn, who rule the inhabitable part of the planet.

Dyan Ardais is usually presented as a villain or at least a dangerous man in a group of the novels, but dies heroically. He uses his psychic powers to try coercing teenage boys into sleeping with him. He had an unpleasant childhood, overshadowed by an insane father.

Bard di Asturien is the hero of a standalone novel in the series. He makes several missteps, but does 'the right thing' by the end of the book. He uses his psychic powers to coerce women into sleeping with him. He had a marginally pleasant childhood, overshadowed by his illegitimate status and ambitious relatives.

Dyan stops his depredations once they are publicly revealed. He makes public reparations.

Bard di Asturien stops his depredations after raping the woman he wanted to marry. She psychically shows him, in detail, how awful his acts are and how his blindness to others has screwed up not only his relationships with women, but with everyone else in his life. Bard is guilt-ridden and resolves to make up for everything he can.

The majority of Darkover fans are female. They love Dyan Ardais. Many fanfic stories have been written about women who convince Dyan to sleep with their Mary Sue character. They also despise Bard di Asturien, who developed a much greater desire to right his wrongs and become a better person than Dyan every did. Meanwhile, Bard di Asturien's story is one of the few Darkover novels I have heard straight men say they like.

What's the difference? Female fans of Dyan talk about his painful past, his doomed love for Kennard Alton, his sense of honor (except where young toothsome men are concerned), the aura of dark power about him that made Darth Vader sexy, too. The same women often view Bard as pond scum, craven, evil. They ignore Bard's sense of honor, mostly in waging war. His reform at the end is a plot device by the author, wanting to end the book with the hero's redemption. I think they underestimate MZB at that point, who in her prime was very good at creating complex and compelling characters.

I think it comes down to whose ox is getting gored. Bard's story is one of the few Darkover novels I don't read over and over again, because it pisses me off. I think if he wanted to really show his regret about forcing himself on those women, he would have castrated himself like the priests of Cybele. This is probably because I, like other female readers, pictured myself as one of his victims.

Dyan does have a certain amount of Darth Vader coolness, but is he really so much better? Or does he provoke less hostility from me because I'm 'safe' from him? How would I feel about Dyan if I were a teenage boy reading The Heritage of Hastur, whether straight or gay?

What if we turned the concept upside down? What if the villain were a woman who forced men to sleep with her? We might picture a kinky dominatrix, which would probably sell well... but what if we're talking about an ugly woman? Worse, one with herpes or something worse? How about the woman being a member of an alien species that has vagina dentata, and the sexual coercion is how she gets her meals?

Oh, wait. It's been done. OMFG.

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Thursday's Thugs: The Manipulator

The manipulator as a villain is one of the more interesting types of criminal, because the nature of a manipulator's evil is revealed through the actions of others. The manipulator is a puppet master, pulling strings that make his hapless victims dance. He or she would never soil a hand by actually committing a crime, but beware that you are not persuaded to do his dirty work. Horror uses manipulators very well. Stephen King's Needful Things is a prime example. Mystery is not without its manipulators, though.

When I consider manipulators, none impresses me more than X in Agatha Christie's Curtain. In many ways Curtain is a very sad book. Poirot and Hastings have returned to Styles. Styles is not the stately country estate it once was. Poirot is very old. Considering that he was a retired Belgian detective at the beginning of the series, 'ancient' would probably be a more accurate description. He is confined to a wheelchair and suffering with a failing heart. Hastings is mourning the death of his wife and worried over the romantic entanglements of his daughter. Into this, Christie introduces X.

Poirot knows the identity of X and tells Hastings that a murder is about to occur, but not the identity of the victim. He gives Hastings newspaper clippings of five murder cases, each with a different person convicted for the crime. X is connected to every case, but is not the actual killer. Poirot steadfastly refuses to confide the identity of X to Hastings, because Hastings' face would reveal the truth.

The book makes us question whether X is the master puppeteer Poirot believes, or if, at last, the great detective has lost the deductive powers of his "little gray cells." Christie's final twist is a surprising bit of manipulation that saddens us as it restores our faith in her storytelling ability. Few writers today have the skill to craft such an excellent example of the inner workings of a manipulator's mind.

Thursday's Thugs: The Femme Fatale

What's not to love about the femme fatale? Therein lies the trap. These sexy, seductive, irresistible bad girls ensnare the lovers into invisible bondage. The hapless fools that fall for their charms will do anything for love. We readers can do nothing to help as good men are led into compromising, dangerous, even deadly situations by the beautiful face of evil.

The femme fatale is the anti-girl next door. There is nothing clean cut about this babe. She is beautiful, well endowed, seductive in every way. Often the femme fatale is foreign, and more exotic than that wholesome beauty down the street. She is a woman of mystery. A guy just can't help falling for her charms. When he does, she will pull him into a life of the most exquisite torture.

A lot of noir mystery novels use the femme fatale as a double-crossing seductress who leads the hero into trouble. Heroes take a lot of beatings and the occasional bullet wound on her behalf. It isn't surprising that Raymond Chandler loved to use these bad girls in his novels. I don't blame him. Done right a femme fatale makes the story. I must admit though, my personal favorite is the satire of the femme fatale, Jessica Rabbit. She wasn't a bad girl, just drawn that way.

Thursday's Thugs: The Dark Side of 80's Excess

Not long ago I talked about the sociopath next door. This week in Thursday's Thugs I would like to take that a step further and talk about a fictional sociopath that represented a generation.

The "Me Generation" that came to power in the 1980's wallowed in excess. Yuppie sensibility was at its height. American culture was about style, glitter, flash, power and pizazz. In my opinion nobody captured the dark side of the self-indulgence of the generation better than Bret Easton Ellis in American Psycho. Ellis's Patrick Bateman has all the outward trimmings of a yuppie hero; young, handsome, athletic, and filthy rich. He has climbed to the top of his wall street firm. His life is filled with parties, powerful deals, and all the trappings of success. He was just the sort of man the culture idealized.

Patrick just has one little quirk. For him, the rape, torture, and murder of prostitutes and homeless people is his hobby. He will occasionally expand his hobby to include a cop or even a child, but mostly he sticks to people who won't be missed. If you haven't figured it out by now, Patrick is a raving lunatic. He is very good at keeping up appearances and does a fantastic job of epitomizing manhood in the 1980's.

Taking a close look at Patrick Bateman forces readers to take a look at the dark places inside their own souls. Outwardly he has everything. Inside, though, the American psycho is tormented by his own hollow existence. His life, his success, everything the world admires about him leaves him numb. For him, murder is the only release from the banality of his empty life. It is the quest for something, anything, that will allow him to feel.

Money can't by Bateman happiness, but for a long time it allows him to get away with murder.

Thursday's Thugs: Bad to the Bone

I have read very few books with bad guys that were utterly without any redeeming qualities. As a writer, it is hard for me to write such a villain without leaving him one dimensional. A classic villain of that stripe, the kind we really want to see get what's coming to them, is rare. Most of the time we see this type of bad guy show up as a nemesis of comic book heroes. But if you look at the book "The Sociopath Next Door," you can get a better picture of how this could be done in a novel.

To be fair, I haven't attempted to write my villains this way yet, but I am considering it as an option. I have done this on occasion with murder victims. In my work in progress, the murder victim is the kind of man that brings out the urge to kill in everyone he meets. It is easier to make such a man the victim, because all his evil is past. Our contempt for him is blunted by the fact he already got what was coming to him. We are free to turn our attention and our emotional responses to the characters that have reason to want him dead. Making such a man the villain gives us a completely different sort of book.

Unfairness and bullying are part of what makes this villain tick. It's easy to have a sneaking sympathy for an underdog, even if he's evil; but when someone starts with all the advantages and uses them to crush his opponents ruthlessly, we delight in seeing him get his comeuppance. That kind of bad guy must be humorless, friendless, and void of both empathy and the ability to love. I think that is the key to villain who is "bad to the bone." He must be someone who has a driving need, nothing exists outside of his personal wants. He will go to any lengths to win.

Why would I write such a villain? Because somewhere in the back of my mind is the nagging question of whether or not I have the ability to do it well. I keep thinking that there must be a way to write someone so clinical, corrupt and utterly ruthless that we have to like him just a little, because he is having so much fun making everyone else suffer.

Thursday's Thugs: When Good Guys Turn out Bad

How do you feel when the people you expect to heroic turn out to be the thugs? We've all seen it done in real life and fiction. It isn't hard for me to believe in rogue cops. After all, I live in Lexington, home of the Bluegrass Conspiracy. Freewheeling practices with undercover police in the 1970's drug trade did a lot of damage to the reputation of the Lexington-Fayette County Police. In the era when I write, the Lexington Police were up to their eyeballs in graft and corruption. Many officers and city officials were members of the Klan. Still, there are times when I just hate what a writer does with their heroes.

One of the most disappointing turns in a story involved Thomas Harris' character Clarice stopped chasing Hannibal and joined him in cannibalism. Really? After all she had done to stop Hannibal, Harris has them join forces? What was he thinking?

Don't get me wrong. I have nothing against the tarnished badge as a plot line. Some of the best thugs have been wearing a uniform. L.A. Confidential did a wonderful job with bad cops as the villains. What I hate is when the good guys turn bad. For me, taking someone who has done years of fighting crime and turning them to the "dark side" is a disappointment I won't forgive. Write your plot that way if you must, but as a reader, you've lost me.