The Balance Beam

 

w/b Terry here, with our question of the week: 

 How do you find a balance - if you try for balance - between the overly neat bow at the end of the book and the potentially unsatisfying open end. Is it easier in crime fiction than other genres? 

 I had an agent who challenged me with every book I wrote: You’re not done yet. After fuming a couple of days, I’d have to admit maybe she was right, and I’d start trying to push one step farther. Invariably the book was better for it. Usually what I was trying for was “a neat bow,” and it was never quite satisfying. 

I don’t mean when I finally pushed past my initial ending and came up with something more that I left an open end about who committed the crime. But I would realize that other questions had wormed their way into the story—questions which didn’t necessarily have an answer. 

 My best example is book six in the Samuel Craddock series, An Unsettling Crime for Samuel Craddock.

The last chapter was written, the perpetrator identified, and everyone should have been happy, at least in my mind. But my agent said, “you’re not done yet.” I pitched a silent fit. I told her I thought it was my best book. ‘It is,” she said. “And you’re not done yet.” 

 Only when I gave in, and started thinking about what more was needed, did I realize that there was a character I really liked that I had failed to account for in the end. I wrote the last chapter, and I still remember the heartbreak of it. It was time for that character to move on, and I knew I would miss her. But it had to be done. I actually cried as I wrote it. It was poignant and believe it or not I still wonder sometimes what she’s up to. 

 I think actually a “neat” ending is harder in crime fiction. I recently read a non-mystery that I enjoyed, by a very well-known author. But I thought the end was too easy; “tied up in a neat bow.” I can’t help thinking that if it had been a mystery, the characters would have had more angst, more difficult decisions to make. The end would not have been so tidy. 

 Murder brings with it repercussions that aren’t so easily dispensed with. Maybe cozy mysteries can achieve that some of the time--after all, it's meant to be lighter reading. But even then there are often little threads that you know the characters will have to address either off the page, or in the next book. A thriller may also have an easier time of it. The ticking time bomb has been defused, and everyone can congratulate themselves and ride off into the sunset. Noir? Never. The whole zeitgeist of noir crime fiction is the brooding, dark heart of the set-up, the crime, and the characters. The idea is that even if the crime is solved, there’s the still the matter of the criminal nature and the brooding protagonist usually has to contend with that. 

 I write a police procedural series, and at the end of each one, Samuel Craddock feels a pull between justice and empathy. In fact, in The Curious Poisoning of Jewel Barnes, which comes out December 2, he has to make a decision that has no good outcome. It was wrenching to write it. So, no neat bow. 

 But I don’t think an open end is unsatisfying. The open end mirrors real life. We hope decisions we make will result in the best for everyone, but sometimes there is not a “best” that can happen for everyone. Sometimes a decision is forced that means no one is completely satisfied. That’s life. And the best fiction will make us examine life more closely. 

 In an open-ended resolution, The questions remain: “What will happen next? Will the decisions characters made turn out to have been a mistake? Does the solution to the crime resolve everything, or does it leave a hole to be filled? I think that’s the most interesting book, one that leaves the reader with a lingering itch to know what happens next.