THE WORTHY VILLAIN
When I finished writing my first novel, I did what most of us unpublished writers did back then twenty years ago before literary agents became the publishers’ gatekeepers. I bundled up a chapter with a query letter and sent it directly to several editors.
Rejections, predictably, followed, so I was thrilled when an editor from Scribner’s asked to see the whole manuscript. I mailed it out the next day.
I waited for two months, trying not to think about it.
The response, when it arrived, was not exactly what I’d hoped for. “We think you can write,” she began, and you didn’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to know a “but” was coming.
But, she went on, many of the characters are flat, the plot is predictable, the story doesn’t generate much tension or suspense, and we knew whodunit from the beginning.
For a mystery novel, this was not exactly high praise.
The editor -- her name was Betsy Rapoport, and she ended up being my beloved editor for seven novels -- concluded her note this way: I can’t offer you a contract, and I can make no promises, but if you’d be willing to rewrite your novel I’d be happy to look at it again.
I realized that my novel-writing career had arrived at a turning point: I could revise the book, make it wonderful, get it published, and launch a career; or, I could accept the fact that I didn’t have what it takes, hide my amateurish mystery novel in a drawer, and live a sensible life.
The choice filled me with dread, because I had no idea what I was doing. But I knew that if I didn’t give it my best shot, I’d never find out if I had what it takes to write a salable novel.
I reread my story and concluded that Betsy was right. It was flat, predictable, and utterly lacking in conflict, tension, and suspense.
But how could I fix it?
I kept thinking about her final words. We knew whodunit from the beginning.
And then it hit me: All of Betsy’s criticisms amounted to the same thing. If the villain was obvious from the beginning, there could be no mystery, and a mystery novel without a mystery could have little tension and suspense -- those qualities that compel readers turn the pages.
In my eagerness to provide lots of clues, to “play fair” with the reader, I had created a villain who looked villainous and acted guilty from the beginning. Any half-witted sleuth should’ve pegged her immediately -- but, of course, if he did, it would have been a very short book.
I’d created a story about an oblivious sleuth trying to catch an obvious villain, and the only suspense revolved around the question of just how long it would take my hero to figure out what readers knew from the beginning.
Moreover, when the climax, such as it was, mercifully arrived, and Brady Coyne, my sleuth, finally confronted Rina, the villain -- who by then had committed several murders and told many lies -- she suddenly and inexplicably gave up, confessed her guilt, and spewed out her entire story.
Simply put, the villain had failed to challenge the hero from beginning to end. She didn’t put him to the test. She was unworthy of his best efforts.
The solution was obvious: Create a worthy villain, make it hard for my hero, and everything else would take care of itself.
It takes a great villain to make a great hero.
So I reinvented Rina. She had committed a murder that she believed was necessary and justifiable. She felt no guilt. She was smart and resourceful and determined to get away with it. She made no mistakes. She was willing to murder again, if that’s what it took to preserve her secret.
But when she appeared on the page, she seemed normal. She was a face in a crowd of interesting secondary characters and possible suspects. She gave nothing away. You would never guess what she had done.
Now it took courage and brains and perseverance and a lot of hard sleuthing before Brady found the key piece to the puzzle, and when he finally confronted Rina, she still didn’t make it easy for him.
When I finished rewriting my novel, this time with a smart and determined villain, it bore scant resemblance to the story I’d originally submitted to Betsy.
She liked it. She published it. It won an award.
And now, all these years later, the twenty-first novel in my Brady Coyne series is about to hit the bookstores. My villains have been cops and lawyers, Vietnam vets and government officials, housewives and teenagers, nurses and businessmen. They are murderers and kidnappers and blackmailers and terrorists. They appear ordinary because they lie and dissemble masterfully. They will do anything to escape detection.
They are worthy villains.
I was lucky that first novel of mine hit the desk of an editor who was willing to give it a second look. It probably deserved to be rejected outright. One way you can avoid that fate -- no matter what kind of book you’re writing -- is to attend to your villains. Make them worthy and good things will naturally follow.
THE ROLE OF THE VILLAIN IN LITERATURE
In his groundbreaking study THE HERO WITH A THOUSAND FACES, Joseph Campbell argues that all plots are essentially the same: The hero embarks on a quest, encounters obstacles and challenges, and emerges either triumphant or defeated.
Books and articles of writing instruction rightfully emphasize the importance of creating a sympathetic protagonist, a driven hero with strongly-felt wants and needs who will strive mightily to fulfill his quest. If the hero is passive and wishy-washy, there won’t be much of a story.
In my reading, however, rarely to I find comparable emphasis on the villain, the antagonist who opposes the hero, the character who creates those obstacles and challenges and dangers that make the hero’s quest uncertain and difficult.
The villain is the main source of conflict and tension and suspense -- those necessary qualities in all of literature. Without a worthy villain, there cannot be a worthy hero. Whether the hero wants to win back the love of a woman, escape from prison, rescue a child, nail a serial killer, or save the world, his quest must be difficult and its outcome uncertain if we are to keep turning the pages. That’s the job of the antagonist. As Christopher Vogel writes in his essential book THE WRITER’S JOURNEY, “The function of the Shadow [villain] in drama is to challenge the hero and give her a worthy opponent in the struggle.”
CHARACTERISTICS OF THE WORTHY VILLAIN
Shakespeare’s Richard III. Dickens’s Uriah Heep. Ian Fleming’s Goldfinger. Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lector. Deliciously, exuberantly vile literary villains.
Except in unusual cases, however, the contemporary novelist is better advised to heed the master of suspense. Alfred Hitchcock said, “In the old days, villains had moustaches and kicked the dog. Audiences are smarter today. They don’t want their villain to be thrown at them with green limelight on his face. They want an ordinary human being with failings.”
“The banality of evil,” Hannah Arendt called it in her analysis of the Nazi atrocities. Ordinary people performing extraordinarily evil deeds are far more interesting than sneering obvious villains who twirl their moustaches.
Compelling villains are not one-dimensional. Barbara Peters, editor-in-chief of The Poisoned Pen Press, looks for novels “where you mourn the victim and empathize to some degree with the villain; that is, the villain is someone fully human and not some cardboard or demonized figure there just for the purposes of the plot. . . . The villain . . . should be someone worthy of the sleuth’s intelligence and efforts to apprehend him/her as well as the reader’s time and emotional investment.”
A villain worthy of the hero’s best efforts is able to lose himself in the crowd. He may be a murderer or a rapist, but he manages to appear normal. He deflects suspicion by lying and dissembling expertly.
The worthy villain is not wracked with guilt. In fact, he typically believes he is doing the right -- even the heroic -- thing. “From his point of view,” Christopher Vogel says, “a villain is the hero of his own myth, and the audience’s hero is his villain.”
THE VILLAIN AS HERO
Sometimes the hero is not a good guy, nor is the antagonist bent on evil. In fact, a villainous character can serve the function of protagonist, the “good guy,” the hero of the story. Compelling novels have been written from the point of view of characters determined to commit crimes. Elmore Leonard and Donald Westlake, for example, often choose as their protagonists small-time hoods and bumbling hitmen.
In Lawrence Block’s SMALL TOWN, an ordinary man, grieving over the incomprehensible loss of his wife on September 11, 2001, is plotting his revenge against this horrific injustice. In spite of ourselves, we find ourselves liking and rooting for this tragic figure with an evil plan.
Objectively, the Corleones -- Vito, Sonny and Michael -- are villainous characters. But in Mario Puzo’s THE GODFATHER, the Corleone men are the protagonists. They are the heroes in their own myths.
In these cases, it’s the cops and private investigators and FBI agents who are the antagonists -- the villains -- because their function is to oppose the “heroes.”
THE WORTHY MYSTERY VILLAIN
Conflict between two or more strong forces fuels all stories. Conflict produces uncertainty, tension and suspense. In mystery novels, the life-and-death contest between a determined sleuth and an equally determined villain, usually a murderer, is the central source of conflict.
The sleuth’s quest is to identify the villain, to escape the dangers and avoid the pitfalls that threaten him every step the way, and to bring the villain to justice. The hero confronts all obstacles. He risks all dangers. He never quits.
The villain must be equally committed. He will do whatever it takes to get away with murder. “Villains and enemies,” says Christopher Vogel, “are usually dedicated to the death, destruction or defeat of the hero.”
When both sleuth and villain are highly motivated, it appears to be an equal contest at best. If anything, the villain has the edge. The outcome is uncertain.
If it’s to be mysterious, of course, the villain must successfully withhold his identity from both the sleuth and the reader until the climactic revelation. To be worthy of the sleuth’s best efforts, the villain must be supremely skilled at lying and dissembling. He must appear ordinary to both sleuth and reader. He must not arouse suspicions. He should personify the “banality of evil.”
By all civilized standards, murderers are evil. But by their own standards, their evil deeds are justified. They believe they are good, even heroic. Their quest is virtuous. They will not abandon it.
Beginning mystery writers often invent their sleuth first and then try to think up a mystery for him to solve. A better way is to begin with the villain. Imagine him fully. Inhabit his mind. Give him passionate beliefs and powerful wants. Understand him. Make him believable. Then create a scenario in which, if you were he, with the same wants and beliefs, you can imagine yourself committing a murder.
Villains are motivated by human passions we all feel: Love, greed, ambition, fear, envy, betrayal, pride. Remember and relive moments when you’ve experienced these feelings, and use them to build characters. Mystery writer Al Blanchard says, “I try to get inside the villain’s head and think like one. It’s always scary to me when a reader tells me I created a good villain. No two villains are alike. Motivation is the key to believability. It’s motivation that makes the bad guy come to life.”
THE WORTHY THRILLER VILLAIN
In mystery novels, the reader knows only what the hero knows. Readers are invited to participate in his sleuthing and detecting.
In thrillers, the identity of the villain, while perhaps unknown to the hero, is either known to the reader from the beginning or revealed early in the story. The story’s suspense builds from the uncertainty of whether the villain will succeed in his evil plan before the hero can stop him. Typically, the point of view shifts back and forth between hero and villain.
Thrillers play out as cat-and-mouse games. They are zero-sum games. There can be only one winner. The villain’s triumph means the hero’s defeat.
The stakes are often higher in thrillers than in mysteries, and thriller villains are correspondingly bigger and badder and scarier. They kill without conscience. They are serial killers, assassins, political or religious fanatics, terrorist bombers.
Frederick Forsyth’s “Jackal” is determined to assassinate President DeGaulle. Ken Follet’s Nazi spy “The Needle” wants to deliver information that will change the outcome of World War II. Thomas Harris’s “Buffalo Bill” kills women to harvest their skin. Ian Fleming’s Goldfinger plans to rob Fort Knox.
When a flawed, ordinary hero -- or even a superhero like James Bond -- is matched up against a bigger-than-life villain, the outcome is doubtful and the suspense intense. “The hero has to be powerful and clever,” observes mystery writer Hallie Ephron, “so what's the fun if the villain is a wimp? Any game that's too one-sided we turn off before half-time. A worthy villain is absolutely crucial in a suspense/thriller.”
But regardless of how psychopathically evil and monomaniacally committed to their purposes they might be, thriller villains would not be worthy unless they were adept at blending into the crowd.
Nor would they be interesting unless they were complicated and multi-layered and even likable. They do evil, but they appear ordinary. Novelist Philip R. Craig says, “My take on villains is that they’re not much different than ordinary folk. I get this from Dostoyevsky, who thought that murderers were very similar to regular people. When I create a villain, I usually try to make him appear as a normal or even a sympathetic character. Very few of my villains are satanic.”
THE WORTHY MAINSTREAM VILLAIN
Mainstream, or literary, novels depend on conflict, tension and suspense just as mysteries and thrillers do. But in mainstream fiction, the hero’s opposition may come from sources other than a conventional bad guy. The hero confronts his internal psychological conflicts, or he struggles against social, institutional, natural, or cultural forces, or he goes after things that other “good” characters also want.
Adrian Alexander, a promising young writer, recently asked me to critique his novel. It’s about an ordinary small-town shopkeeper named Jack whose wife suddenly dies. Soon thereafter, Jack’s young daughter, Amanda, accidentally burns down their house, which has been in Jack’s family for generations. Jack’s goal, the quest that drives the story, is to rebuild the house exactly as it was, to insulate Amanda from all unpleasantness, and thus to restore the familiar normality of his life.
In Adrian’s first draft, all of the conflict and tension emanated from Jack’s fears and obsessions. Nothing external opposed his rebuilding efforts, nor was Amanda in any apparent danger. The result was a smart and entertaining story, but it lacked tension, because readers were given no objective reason to doubt its outcome.
My advice to Adrian: Personify Jack’s struggle by introducing a worthy villain or two. Perhaps a bureaucrat from the welfare department appears on the scene, determined to take Amanda away from her distracted and depressed father. Maybe a by-the-numbers building inspector nixes Jack’s plans for the house.
Adrian tells me that he’s working on it.
Melville created Moby Dick to personify Captain Ahab’s self-destructive obsession. Ken Kesey’s Nurse Ratched, surely one of literature’s most delicious villains, personifies the destructive institutional forces of an insane asylum, and metaphorically, of society. The banal Rev. Arthur Dimmsdale stands for the prejudices of Hester Prynne’s narrow-minded community. Mark Twain’s Injun Joe is the real-life bogeyman that haunts the nightmares of boys like Tom Sawyer.
Mainstream antagonists needn’t be evil. Their simple -- but vital -- function is to oppose the hero. In a story about a divorced woman fighting for custody of her daughter, for example, her ex husband plays the antagonist’s role. If he’s a nice guy, a good provider, and a loving father, his claim on the daughter will be strong, putting the outcome in doubt and making him the worthy villain in the wife’s story. Told from the husband’s point of view, of course, the hero-villains roles would be reversed.
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The job of the villain is to make things hard for your hero. Without an opponent to create problems and obstacles for your him, there is nothing for readers to worry or care about. Without a villain who is worthy of you’re hero’s best efforts, in other words, there is no story.
“The villain has to be shaped to suit each story,” says Barbara Peters.
“There’s no single rule how to do it. But he must be worthy of the reader’s time and emotional investment. A novel is a journey, and something needs to be drawn from it. The greater the balance between the forces at work in creating the basic conflict that sparks the plot, the higher the reader’s level of enjoyment.”
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A WRITER’S CHECKLIST
HOW WORTHY IS YOUR VILLAIN?
Can you answer “yes” to the following questions:
1. Do your villain’s goals stand in direct opposition to those of your hero?
2. Is your villain as committed to achieving his goals as your hero is?
3. Is your villain a believable and interesting character in his own right?
4. Are your villain’s motivations understandable and coherent?
5. Is your villain skilled at lying and dissembling in order to disguise his acts and purposes?
6. Does your villain avoid making stupid mistakes?
7. Is your villain the equal of your hero, or virtually so, in intelligence, courage, talent, and resourcefulness?
8. Does your villain challenge your hero to test the limits of his own courage and ability?
9. If your villain wins, will your hero necessarily lose?
10. When the pressure’s on, does your villain get tougher and smarter and even more determined?
