Tidy vs. Messy

 

Terry here with our question of the week: Do you prefer endings that “solve” everything neatly, or ones that leave moral or emotional questions unresolved—and have you ever changed an ending because you were afraid of reader backlash?

I think when you’re writing crime fiction, you have to admit that there will always be unresolved questions. Most mysteries, from cozy, to thriller, to suspense involve murder. The question is not just who committed the crime, but why. Someone will (usually) be found guilty, with a good assessment of what drove them to murder. But even a solved crime leaves behind family and community victims who suffer from the perpetrator’s actions. Emotional and moral questions are often left unresolved. What will happen to the family of the man who killed a colleague? What will happen to the friends of the woman who killed her lover in a jealous rage? How will they cope? What will their lasting scars be? No matter how tidy the resolution is, there are those unresolved issues. 

 In my latest Samuel Craddock book, at the end the chief faces a dilemma. If he arrests the person he knows committed the crime, there will be shock waves throughout the perpetrators friends and family, and others will be at risk. Craddock has a dark night of the soul, realizing that he and his deputy maybe be targeted as well. He doesn’t know how to resolve the issue, not because he fears for his own life, but he fears for those who will be targeted because of their proximity to the guilty party. 

In the book, the dilemma does get resolved, but I sometimes think I pulled punches with the solution. I didn’t do it because I was afraid of a reader backlash, but because it seemed that the reader was owed a solution of sorts. I liked the solution, but I was still intrigued with the idea that if I had ended it differently, the book would have been open-ended. That is, the people who were at risk would have remained at risk. There would have been no resolution. 

I think unresolved issues are a matter of the ambiguity of justice. Craddock usually understands why someone committed a murder, and may even feel empathy for the perpetrator. But justice demands that the killer must pay society for what he or she has done. However, justice may not always be satisfactory. Someone who commits murder may leave behind a family facing loss of income, loss of nurturing parent, loss of status in the community, and an uncertain future. He may leave a community shattered because they held the killer in high esteem, and were shocked by his crime. There’s no resolution to this outcome, no matter how satisfying it may be for the reader to find out “who did it.” 

 As for the second part of the question, no I have never changed an ending for fear of reader backlash, and I never will. Nor will I ever not write about something because I think it might offend people. I’ve written two books on difficult subjects—dog fighting, and abortion. I knew some people would have trouble with both. I had trouble writing them. I wanted to give the characters full recognition, while acknowledging the feelings of the characters on more than one side of the issue. I still had reviewers that weren’t happy, but most readers, regardless of their thoughts on the subject, wrote that I had been fair. 

The only reason I’ve ever changed an ending—and this has happened often—is that my agent said she thought I wasn’t “done.” In two cases I can think of, I actually changed the identity of the killer because I realized I had “pulled my punches,” pinning the crime on someone more palatable as a perpetrator. I was hard when I recognized that I was shielding someone I didn’t actually want to be guilty.