There may not be much good to be said about Theodore Kaczynski, who is alleged to be the Unabomber, but at least he did not go dumb on us. Of course, Kaczynski is innocent until proven guilty, but based on what we now know, if he is the Unabomber, he stayed aloof, painstakingly cautious and shrewd to the end. His arrest was due to his family turning him in, not ingenious FBI detection or his own bungling.
Which would make him no candidate for today’s mystery and suspense fiction. It, for the most part, thrives on villains who are diabolically brilliant and efficient at the story’s start and even through its middle, but who become sublimely inept at the end. Initial victims are dispatched–poisoned, stabbed, garroted or shot–so deftly that only a residue of terror remains. Once the star sleuth gets close, however, these evil, twisted geniuses turn stupid, shoot badly, quiver, blurt and, inevitably, catch theirs.
When Mitch McDeere joins Bendini, Lambert & Locke in John Grisham’s famous first novel, “The Firm,” its lethal agents monitor his every move, his every breath. When McDeere gets wise, he is suddenly able to avoid the mikes and meet in secret with a few confederates to plan his survival. The novel’s strength comes in its dimension, the fact that all the main players, including McDeere, are somehow compromised. Grisham obviously worked long and hard on his plot, something not so evident in his later books.
“The worst is Patricia Cornwell,” said mystery expert and vocal critic Tom Schantz, owner of the Rue Morgue bookshop in Boulder, Colo., when asked about limp endings and suddenly stupid villains. Added Schantz, who has read thousands of mysteries, “I often say I didn’t finish the latest Patsy Cornwell book, but neither did she.”
Limp, dumb-thug endings, often with mindless chases and cartoonish fistfights, are common to movies and a staple of TV, where clock contraints make bad guys go stupid in a hurry. Books, however, have the time and latitude to avoid them. That is, if the author wishes.
“Ingenious plotting? Surprise endings? You don’t see too much of that,” said Enid Schantz, Tom’s wife and Rue Morgue co-owner. “Plotting is the biggest weakness in mystery fiction right now. Authors signal endings way too early or don’t know how to tie things up, or they let villains fall out of character to meet the dictates of the plot.” Blame Hannibal Lecter, Thomas Harris’ cunning, serial psychopath and cannibal in “Red Dragon” and “The Silence of the Lambs.” Lecter, in all his demonry, set a standard that too many authors have rushed to imitate without knowing how to resolve. The villain is so intelligent, so conniving, so omnipotent and fastidious that the hero has no way to triumph unless the villain screws up.
Cornwell, whose forensic pathologist sleuth Kay Scarpetta is confronted with gory, seemingly inscrutable serial killers, has admitted that she started her early novels without knowing how they were to end. Grisly crimes with bizarre, tantalizing forensic evidence are more important, Cornwell added, than slick plot resolution. Unfortunately, her villains turn out to be perverted but all-too-ordinary mopes who stupidly go after Scarpetta.
Even Elmore Leonard, the crime writer’s crime writer, said that if he knew the ending of his tales he’d be bored. At his worst, which is a good cut above the pack, Leonard caps a novel of scintillating character and perfect dialogue with a blunt, quick-draw finale. At his best, he pulls off an ending like that of “City Primeval.” In it Clement Mansell, a truly venal hayseed, is shot by his cop adversary not during a predictable bone-breaking, wall-thumping struggle, but when he reaches for a bottle opener in his jacket. He’s dumbfounded, yet in character to the end as he utters the perfect line, “I don’t believe it . . . what did you kill me for?”
Less sly but just as effective in not dumbing down his villains is James W. Hall. His technique in his south Florida thrillers is to make his villains so nasty and so ruthless that they turn on, and destroy, each other. Dumbness, or any sudden brilliance on the part of the good guy, usually has little to do with it.
There is, of course, the ever-present obligation in all dramas to resolve things. Unlike real life, where serial killers and terrorist letter bombers often do their damage undetected for years, a fiction must control and correct the evil. Readers demand it. Editors become apoplectic when an author allows a villain to get off, or away, or somehow remain unscathed.
Except for Hannibal Lecter, who currently roams and has friends over for dinner. “Too many books are written in too much of a hurry,” said Enid Schantz. The Rue Morgue offers hundreds of new titles every month, and the Schantzes refuse to recommend the lot of them. Top-selling authors such as Cornwell are under pressure to produce a new title every year. That makes it convenient to spend more time on the premise, the hook, the blurb-grabbing, heinous crime and its rotten-gummed perpetrator than on his ultimate discovery and downfall.
