A is for Ambiguity and D is for Deviant

 

Crime fiction has tried and true conventions, such as a murder/crime in the first chapter (or soon thereafter), an investigation, believable motive, hidden clues etc. Add to this, the conventions for each subgenre, such as cozy or police procedural. Have you ever ignored or deviated from these established conventions? Do you find them restrictive or do you like working within them?

I see rules as guidelines, as training wheels. I break rules, but they’re not the usual suspects.

I’ll save us time and quote Lionel Twain in the dramedy Murder by Death for some of the ways authors infuriate readers:

You’ve tortured us with surprise endings that made no sense. You’ve introduced characters at the end that weren’t in the book before! You’ve withheld clues and information that made it impossible for us to guess who did it.

Lionel’s complaint speaks to the violation of the contract between Author and Reader. In my mind, THE most unforgivable crime any mystery author can make is to kill an animal. Do that and, as Australian author Sulari Gentill pointed out at CrimeReads, it’s a deal-breaker.

I do like to subvert expectations, though. I’m tired of the indestructible hero, who, like a Timex watch, ‘takes a licking and keeps on ticking.’ Pounced, punched, thrown from heights, burned, iced, hit by a car, struck with a baseball bat, stabbed, and shot, the guy or gal carries on. It’s as if descendants of the knight-errant Marlowe are Monty Python’s Black Knight, who says, “Tis but a flesh wound.” In my novels, pain is real, and violence has consequences. In real life, violence is ugly, often brutal and fast. I don’t feel compelled to dwell on violence or be graphic about it in my writing. Like sex, which I think is often comical in real life and which most writers write horribly, violence is best implied or kept minimalistic.

My Shane Cleary dishes it out and receives it in kind, but I make short work of it. There is context, purpose. It is never gratuitous, though I like to surprise readers. This year’s Agatha and Left Coast Crime nominated author of Time’s Undoing Cheryl Head wrote me after reading HUSH HUSH (curious, or) upset that Shane had thrown a guy down a flight of stairs after he’d attacked Shane’s cat Delilah, but did nothing when thugs attacked his girlfriend Bonnie. The short answer is Shane’s relationship with Delilah was stronger and deeper than his with Bonnie. Sorry, not sorry.

My characters are subversive, against type. My ‘bad guys’ do good things. Mafioso Tony Two-Times defends a drag queen in THE BIG LIE. Criminals are people, and individuals in my novels are gray. Behavior is neither all black nor all white. People are, however, motivated by self-interest. People are capable of darkness and light. As a person, I seem able to tolerate ambiguity in others better than most. I see both sides of the street in unique ways. The mafia, for example, is ‘bad’ but I don’t see the government and its RICO laws against organized crime as ‘better.’ Why? The quest for justice starts with a crime, then proceeds to an investigation. With RICO, it’s the opposite: law enforcement targets an individual first and then ‘looks for’ the crime second. The legal logic is bonkers. A person could be acquitted of a charge, but that same alleged crime can count as a ‘predicate act’ a decade later for another bite at the apple. That’s gray and very real world. Our world. That's why I don’t follow all the rules.

I tend to favor open endings over tidy resolutions because, again, that’s life. The traditional denouement where the detective explains all the clues, exposes the red herrings, and the bad guy is dragged off is too traditional and clean. Sometimes the villain gets away with it, and returns to commit more crimes another day.

We would like to think life is rational and linear. A leads to B, then C. This is perception.

It’s more ‘realistic’ to factor in chaos. A might lead to B, or maybe C. This is perspective.

I don’t want to be a predictable writer. I put forth the idea that sometimes the truth is unknowable, and we are forced to embrace that. The movie Anatomy of a Fall masters this point perfectly. Did the wife do it? Was it murder or suicide? This embrace is a form of empathy.