Character Archetypes: The Comfort Food of Writing

Which crime fiction archetype do you find truly essential to the genre? Which would you like to see retired for a while? 

Note: Instead of a Jungian interpretation, I'm going for something crime fiction related, e.g. introspective gumshoes, screaming police superiors, alcoholic ex-investigators, reluctant detectives, that sort of thing. 

by Paul D. Marks

Which crime fiction archetype is essential?

Archetypes are a funny thing. On the one hand they’re familiar. They allow us to get into a story quickly and relate to the characters. We know them, without having to be told a lot about them, at least initially. You know, the dreaded info dump. It’s like comfort food only comfort characters. So that’s a good thing. On the other hand, archetypes can become hackneyed and clichéd. And therefore lifeless and dull. Predictable. So it’s a fine razor’s edge (my favorite book btw) that one has to walk to keep that from happening.

For me the noir anti-hero, who’s been kicked to the gutter and comes back for more, is one of the essential crime fiction archetypes. I think it’s something that most people can relate to on some level – we’ve all been down, though hopefully not to the extent of a noir protagonist. And I think this is one of the things that draws people to crime fiction in the first place – we want to root for the underdog (even if we know s/he’s doomed as is the case with most true noir “heroes”). We want to believe that people can be redeemed and can come back from the lowest point and fight for justice, even if they never achieve that justice. It’s the human struggle that we all understand.

David Goodis and Jim Thompson are two of my favorite noir writers. Okay, neither is very original or out of the box, but good is good (and Goodis is Goodis). And both often write about people on the skids, who often don’t stop skidding and even if they do they never really get back to a place of normalcy. Even Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins is someone who’s constantly fighting to maintain his place in the world. In Nightmare Alley, by William Lindsay Gresham, Stanton Carlisle truly falls from grace (if he ever really attainted it) and the ending of the book is much more noir than the movie. And so many more.

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Which would I like to see retired?  

I can think of a few but the main one that bugs the $^%@&*# out of me is the investigator that magically pulls rabbits out of hats. They bombard us with red herrings and then out of nowhere they have some clue so obscure that Miss Marple, Sherlock Holmes, J. Edgar Hoover and the dataminers at Facebook couldn’t find it in a Google search (and, as we know, they know everything about everyone and everything) and – voila! – crime solved. I’m not sure if this is really an archetype or not, but it drives me nuts.

Along with the above and often in the same corporeal body is the busy-body amateur who’s always there when someone’s murdered! If you’re a neighbor or friend of this person, you better get all your affairs in order ’cause you’re probably not long for this world. I mean …come on… how can one person run into so many crimes in such a small space? Or if not a small space everywhere they go.

Jessica Fletcher comes to mind. Everywhere she goes: dead bodies. She’s the Typhoid Mary of Murder. One can understand this in the case of a cop or a P.I. as they deal with crime and criminals on a regular basis. But she’s neither. She’s a middle-aged, middle class (maybe upper class) woman in a small town, and a writer to boot (how many dead bodies have you come across in your writing career or any career if you’re not in law enforcement or a first responder?). I’m surprised there’s anyone left in Cabot Cove at all. Maybe she kills them so she has something to write about for her books ;-) . – And don’t get on my case about her, I’m just kiddin’ around. The show is fine. She’s fine. You’re fine…just as long as you’re not in the same state as her.

But, all that said, I think a writer can make any archetype work if they make the character fresh and don’t rely on trite character ticks. I used to teach a class on screenwriting and would tell my class that “character” is not smoking a stogie or picking their nose with a .38 (as a producer once put it to me), it’s their actions and the choices they make. So go ahead and have your character wear a deer stalker hat, but let them do something that grabs our attention and makes us say ‘wow’ that’s original.

What are the archetypes you think are essential and which should be retired?

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And now for the usual BSP:

My Shamus-winning novel, White Heat, is being reissued in May by Down & Out Books. It’s available for pre-order on Amazon.  Release date is May 21, 2018:

Check out my website: www.PaulDMarks.com

Click here to: Subscribe to my Newsletter

~.~.~.~

...And now for even more blatant BSP:

There’s still time to nominate for the Anthony Awards if you haven’t already voted. Ballots are due by April 30, 2018.

I have four stories eligible for Best Short Story and one book for the Best Anthology category:

“Windward” – Coast to Coast: Private Eyes from Sea to Shining Sea (and as a note: this story has been selected by Louise Penny and Otto Penzler for The Best American Mysteries of 2018).

“Bunker Hill Blues” – from the Sept./Oct. 2017 Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine – now available to read on my web page: http://pauldmarks.com/stories.The others you gotta buy – but, hey, support mystery publishers.

“Blood Moon” – from the Day of the Dark anthology, Wildside Press, Kaye George, editor

“Twelve Angry Days” – from the May/June 2017 Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine

Coast to Coast: Private Eyes from Sea to Shining Sea – for Best Anthology. Edited by Andrew McAleer and me. From Down & Out Books.

Hopefully you’ll have time to check out my stories, as well as others. Thanks!

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Everyone is Fair Game

Did you base any characters in your books off of friends or family?

by Paul D. Marks

Most of my characters are based on people I know or have known, or see or have seen in my various life adventures, at least in part. Those adventures can be anything from mundane daily life events like walking the dogs, going to the market or bookstore, to more exciting things, such as SCUBA diving and a hopefully once-in-a-lifetime experience like pulling a gun on the LAPD! They are also, of course, based on me and most of them have a part of me in them. It could be a big part or a little part, but since I know me better than I know anyone else there’s always some seepage by osmosis. Sometimes consciously and sometimes subconsciously.

Both my lead and secondary characters are based on people I’ve known through the years. And then there’s part of a name here or there, from people I’ve known. Bad guys are often based on people I, uh, don’t like... But to say that this character or that is based on me or so-and-so wouldn’t be accurate because for the most part they’re composites of people I know or have come across.

And some of them are simply based on observations of people I see here or there. For example, I was in the original Barney’s Beanery (click the link for Barney’s to read a history of it, it’s pretty interesting: https://barneysbeanery.com/about/), a famous LA dive and two guys were playing pool, got into a fight. Beer flying. Pool cues cracking. It ended up as a scene in something I was working on.

My latest story, Nature of the Beast, up at David Cranmer’s Beat to a Pulp (http://www.beattoapulp.com/wz20160303-pdm-natureofthebeast.html), is a noir story about a

hitman with a heart of lead. Now, I’m not saying I do or don’t know any hitmen. But either way, the character of hitman Jack Lake is based on the experiences and world outlooks of people I’ve known over the years, as well as on parts of my own experiences (and no, I’m not a hitman). We extrapolate traits, characteristics and motivations for characters from our own lives or the lives of people we’ve known or have come across, even if the characters are different in some ways from the real people. So you can take character traits from anyone and insert them into any character that they’ll work for. I may not know any hitmen, but I know some hard people and so their traits make it into Jack.

Everything and everyone is fair game. Writers observe and borrow from everything – people watching in the airport, making up stories in our heads about who they are and what they’re doing. Or sometimes a friend does something or tells us about an experience in their life that we find compelling, which we “borrow” for a story. Often they’ll be very loosely based on something we’ve heard or read about. For example a friend might have gone through an unpleasant divorce and told you about it, but in your story you embellish so one of the divorcing couple plots to murder the other, whereas in real life the unpleasantness might have only been in arguing over who gets to keep the dog. So watch what you say or do in front of a writer, you might just end up in their next book….

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And now for the usual BSP: Check out David Cranmer's interview with me at: http://davidcranmer.blogspot.com/2016/03/drinking-with-nilsson-freaking-out-mork.html

And check out my article on Vortex and the Green Absinthe Fairy at Mystery Playground's Drinks with Reads:
http://www.mysteryplayground.net/2016/02/vortex-and-green-absinthe-fairy.html

Anthony voters please consider my short story, "My Enemies Have Sweet Voices", from Down & Out Books’ anthology Coast to Coast: Murder from Sea to Shining Sea, for Best Short Story.

And please consider Coast to Coast: Murder from Sea to Shining Sea for Best Anthology.

Subscribe to my Newsletter

www.PaulDMarks.com