When I pick up a detective story by an unknown writer,
there’s a pretty good chance it’ll start with the antagonist committing a
crime. It’s a tried and true opening, and it’s not hard to see why. There’s
conflict between the criminal and his victim, there’s action, there’s energy,
and there’s excitement. How could you possibly go wrong opening a book like
this? Unfortunately, it’s surprisingly easy.
Before we can get into the ways this kind of opening can go
wrong, I thought it’d be helpful to look at a couple of examples of authors
doing it very well and then to talk about the things they have in common. We’ll
start with one of my favorite contemporary authors, John Sandford.
If you write detective novels—particularly hard-boiled
novels—and you’ve not read John Sandford’s Prey series, you owe yourself a trip
to the library. Sandford is a bestselling author for a very good reason: he
consistently good books. You can’t go wrong picking up a Sandford novel, and he
starts many [maybe all?] of his Prey books with his antagonist on the hunt for
a victim.
If you’ve not read it, check out
Rules of Prey, the first book in his Prey series, on Amazon. You can
get a free sample that includes the first chapter.
It’s an excellent detective story, and it
starts with the antagonist stalking a young woman he plans to murder.
One thing you’ll notice when you read the first chapter,
though, is that the Louis Vullion, the maddog, isn’t just following this woman
around. He’s thinking the entire time. Sanford gets us into the head of a truly
vile man. We, unfortunately, don’t have a lot of background to explain why
Louis Vullion became the Mad Dog, but even still Sanford gives us a very clear,
very detailed picture of this villain.
Louis thinks and makes judgments about the victim, for
instance. He comments that even if he doesn’t kill the victim, the microwave
food she eats probably will. In commenting like this, Sanford shows us that Louis
Vullion has a macabre sense of humor. He has a very distinct personality.
More than that, Louis Vullion is smart. He lives and works
by certain rules.
“Never kill anyone you
know.
Never have a motive.
Never follow a
discernible pattern.
Never carry a weapon
after it has been used.
Isolate yourself from
random discovery.
Beware of leaving
physical evidence.”
He thinks of killing people and getting away with it as a
game. At one point Sandford writes that Louis liked the idea of traveling from
city to city in order to murder random people without getting caught but found
it “ultimately, intellectually sterile. He was developing. He wanted the
contest. Needed it.”
The picture we get in the first chapter is that of an
absolutely vile, chilling, intelligent villain who’s not going to stop
murdering people unless an equally intelligent, resourceful and capable
protagonist stops him. This is an extremely engaging chapter that works on
multiple levels.
Sanford isn’t the only major author who starts his detective
stories this way. Consider James Patterson. In terms of sales, Patterson exists
in a class by himself. He sells millions upon millions of books every year. If
you’ve not read them, the books of his Alex Cross series are consistently
entertaining, and they oftentimes start with the villain attacking or stalking
a victim.
Consider the prologue in
Kissthe Girls. In it, we follow two
different murderers as they go about killing their intended victims. Patterson
doesn’t develop the psychology of his murderers as well as Sanford, but he
doesn’t need to. What he does do, though, is show us two meticulous,
intelligent murderers on the prowl. We get an immediate sense that these are
dangerous people. Casanova, for instance, has spent weeks hiding inside the
walls of his victims’ home. He bought books with him to entertain him. He knows
intimate details about his victims’ lives. Furthermore, he paints his body to
look like a warrior and describes the night in which he murders them as “the
night of nights. The beginning of everything that really mattered in his life.”
Clearly, this is an unhinged man. The gentleman caller is
similarly unhinged. He follows a couple to a lake and then murders the guy.
Afterwards, he says to the woman that he didn’t mean to scare her. Then he says
“We’re old friends. To be perfectly honest, I’ve watched you for over two
years.”
The prologue works very well. It’s creepy and unsettling.
More than that, it makes me want to read more.
Bearing these two very different writers in mind, I think we
can come up with a couple of guidelines for openings like this.
If you’re going to
start with a villain, the villain has to be interesting and well developed.
You make a villain interesting the same way you make any
character interesting. You let me know him. You give him a sense of humor. You
give him a history. You give him positive qualities—intelligence,
resourcefulness, inventiveness, patience, etc. You make him excellent at what
he or she does. More than any of that, you give him stakes just as you do with
your protagonist. Give your villain a goal and a reason for wanting to achieve
that goal. Properly motivate him. By doing that, you’ll make him all the more
dangerous.
Consider Louis Vullion again. His needs and desires, as sick
as they are, matter to him. By killing people and then engaging in games with the
police, Louis satisfies some deep psychological need, he gains something
valuable to him. In other words, Louis is a very well motivated character with
stakes of his own. He can’t stop. If he fails once, he’s going to dust himself
off and start up again. That’s a big part of what makes him such a successful
character.
Patterson’s villains, again, aren’t as well developed, but
you also get the sense that these guys are fulfilling some deep psychological
need of theirs as well. Otherwise, they wouldn’t go to the lengths they do to
kill their victims. The important thing to note is that these antagonists are
at least as well motivated as the protagonists are to stop them.
Furthermore, by establishing your victim so well and by
making him so formidable and well motivated, you’ll be forced to make your
protagonist his equal. You’ll be forced to create an inventive, resourceful,
intelligent hero to counteract the villain. If your hero isn’t just as smart or
resourceful, he’ll fail. So make your villain strong and interesting.
There needs to be
tension from the very first sentence to the last.
Consider the first sentence of Patterson’s Kiss the Girls:
“FOR THREE weeks, the young killer actually lived inside the walls of an
extraordinary fifteen-room beach house.” That’s chilling. Right away, I
anticipate something awful is going to happen. There’s immediate tension.
Or consider this line from Rules of Prey. “The maddog waited
in the dark.” It’s not the first line of the novel, but it’s very early. It
immediately makes me ask, “What’s he waiting for?” After reading that, I can’t help but feel
something very bad is going to happen.
Because the characters are so well developed, I know this
tension is going to last. Even if they achieve their immediate goal in the
chapter, they’ve got bigger goals they haven’t achieved yet. I know they’re
going to kill again in the future, and that lends energy and urgency to the entire
rest of the story.
You need to set the
tone for the novel
If you’re writing a grim, hardboiled novel, you need to
establish it right away. Both Sanford and Patterson do that well. You establish
a contract with your readers with your first chapter. If your first chapter is
all about unicorns who eat sunshine and crap rainbows, I would feel very put
out if those same unicorns start vivisecting the animals of the enchanted
forest in chapter 2.
Keep the tension
going
Consider these two scenarios.
A.
Henry gets into a heated argument with
Henrietta, murders her, and then sits on his couch to watch Wheel of Fortune
until the police show up.
B.
Henry gets into a heated argument with
Henrietta, murders her, and then drags her body to his car to dispose of her.
He takes her out to the woods, and starts digging a hole, but then a family of
hikers comes across him and asks if he needs help. The chapter then ends with
Henry fingering the trigger of his pistol in his pocket, wondering what he
should do.
It’s obvious that Scenario B creates the better first
chapter. In both scenarios, the heated argument with Henrietta produces
tension. As readers, we anticipate something bad happening. In Scenario A,
though, that tension disappears when Henry murders Henrietta and then sits
down. It may have been exciting until that point, but once he sits down, the
conflict is over. What’s more, I don’t anticipate future conflict. That’s
boring. If a book is boring, I’m going to close it.
In Scenario B, the tension continues. I anticipate further bad
things happening.
Patterson and Sandford manage to keep the tension high
throughout their novels, and they both do that in part by developing villains
who can’t stop. The maddog in Sandford’s novel has killed before and developed
rules for how he kills. Killing is part of who he is. He won’t stop until
someone stops him. Though we don’t know as much about Casanova or the Gentleman
Caller in Kiss The Girls, those
things we do know point to them as having the same sort of psychological
proclivities. Casanova, for instance, hid inside a family’s ductwork for three
weeks before murdering them. The Gentleman Caller watched a woman for two years
before murdering her and her boyfriend. These are not normal people.
By developing their villains like this, Patterson and
Sandford do more than create tension; they create urgency. There’s a ticking
time-bomb element. If the protagonist doesn’t stop them soon, they’ll kill
again. It could make for a very exciting story, and it starts in the first
chapter.
The crime in your novel doesn’t have to be murder, and the
villain doesn’t have to be a serial killer. That said, you need to give your
readers a sense that your antagonist has big plans. You don’t need to tell me
what those plans are, but I want a sense within the chapter that he’s going to
do more than he’s already done.
Bottom line:
If you can do those four things within your
chapter—establish an interesting villain, create tension within the chapter,
set the tone for your story, and leave me anticipating further crimes—then
you’ll probably do just fine. There are a couple of things to watch out for, though.
I’ll list a few of them.
Lack of Originality
and Depth
This is the big one. Because this kind of opening is done so
often, you really need to think long and hard about your villain. There are so
many books on the market that you’re never going to make someone completely
unique. You need to put your own twist, though, on the characters you create.
Right now, you’re probably saying “But wait! You mentioned
John Sanford’s Louis Vullion as a good example, but he’s a cliché! I’ve read
about dozens of murderers who believe they’re playing a game with the
police.” As true as that is now, it wasn’t
true in 1989 when the book was published. At the time, it was refreshing and
interesting.
I can’t tell you how many novels I’ve picked up that have
Hannibal Lecter clones. You can do a similar character, but you’re never going
to write Hannibal Lecter as well as Thomas Harris. If you try, I will
continually judge you against him and find you wanting every time.
Also, make your villain more than a generic serial killer. Serial
killer novels are a dime a dozen. If you’re going to write one, really dig deep
in your villain’s psychology. Develop him. Give him a backstory, give him
internal tension, give him a motive and a reason for acting the way he is.
Incompetent villains
Your villain doesn’t need to be a criminal genius, but he
can’t do blatantly stupid things that would lead to him being caught
immediately. That means if your book is
set in contemporary America, for instance, you should know a thing or two about
modern forensics—or at least, you should know the tropes of the genre as
developed on television.
Your protagonist should catch your hero because of his
tenacity and hard work, not because your villain is incompetent.
I could probably go on for a while, but I think you get the
idea. If you start your detective novel like this, there’s a good chance you’re
going to do just fine. Good luck.
