All’s Fair in Love and Stories

Have you ever read a book that entranced you until the very last chapter, when the ending reared up like a brick wall in your face? Like, a wicked murder mystery where the death turned out to be an extremely improbable but still technically possible accident, or a fascinating fantasy in which the final battle consisted of the orphaned hero and the Dark Lord suddenly bursting into a chorus of “Why Can’t We Be Friends?”. Or the strange ring the protagonist found in the first chapter turns out to be an Evil-B-Gone charm. Or two characters who seem to have had nothing in common all through the story suddenly kiss and (the narrative informs us) fall madly in love and have a long, happy marriage.

Stories like this are so disappointing, especially when the set-up has been good. It’s like, the magician has been building up the most awesome illusion on the face of the planet, sprinkling her patter with wry jokes, deft sleights of hand, and clever card tricks. But, then, when the moment comes for her to saw her assistant in half, you can see him slide his bottom half into the hidden compartment as she brings down the blade.

The “wand lore” and “Deathly Hallows” parts of HP7 made me feel like this. So did the end of the film Identity and the part in the Nero Wolfe mystery I just read where the murderer decides to use a poison that kills on contact and hangs a saucer of it on the ceiling of the victim’s car with a sling made of tape. All those bits made me go, “Wait a minute. I’ve been following this story for six volumes/eighty minutes/the whole first 99% of the book. And I was lead to believe stuff like that just doesn’t happen in this universe. Hey, this is made-up!”

Sometimes, though, the feeling of disappointment is subtler: it’s not that the writer threw in anything that seems to contradict the rules of the world she’s created, or that a hitherto unknown new rule has suddenly sprung into existence. It’s that, well, the resolution could have gone so many interesting ways, but it just didn’t.

This is what happened in the first draft of my manuscript Our Man Tom. Half spy story, half ghost story, all with one foot firmly in the silly, Our Man Tom is about a kid (Tom) who has to save the world from Dr. Shade, an international criminal genius thought to have been killed eleven years before. Throughout the story, Tom escapes Shade’s minions, braves his threats, and evades his traps, but he has no idea who the guy really is until the climax. In the original, Tom faced his foe, heart pounding, only to find out that the faceless enemy he’d fought for so long was – drum roll please! – er, the equally faceless janitor who got mad at him and his friends for sneaking around the school building after hours.

That’s right. I pulled an it-was-the-strange-old-man-who-told-us-not-to-come. Sucks galore.

Why did it suck galore? Simple. Because the fact that Dr. Shade was the janitor meant absolutely nothing to Tom. Tom had no emotional connection to the janitor, except maybe mild dislike that turned out to be justified. Tom didn’t care what the janitor thought of him. And, in terms of plot elements, learning the janitor was Shade didn’t mean anything: Tom learned no new information about Shade that either put the kibosh on his plans or made the situation more dire. In fact, all Tom learned was that his previous suspicions had been wrong. So he’s fallible. Big whoop.

I’ve since reworked the plot of Our Man Tom so that (I hope) it no longer falls prey to this problem. ‘Cause, you see, I got so caught up with the “ha, I’m gonna surprise my reader with the identity of the villain!” that I forgot that the story has to work even when the reader already knows all the surprises. The Sixth Sense and Fight Club are both movies that end with twists, but they don’t depend on the twists they end with*. Even if the reader starts the story knowing the identity of Tom’s enemy, the new Our Man Tom can still entertain.

It’s like all the Sherlock-Holmes-meets-Jack-the-Ripper stories. I hate it when the Ripper turns out to be an original character the author just stuck in there. (Well, I don’t hate it as much as I hate it when the author ends the story with Sherlock Holmes basically saying, “Well, Watson, I know who the Ripper was, but I just don’t feel like telling you. Or the reader.” Yes, I read a novel like this.) For a series-character-meets-historical-figure mystery to work, the villain has to be someone with whom the reader already has an emotional investment: one of the recurring fictional characters, or one of the prominent real-life ones**. It doesn’t “mean” anything if made-up Joseph Q. Smythe-Smith, esq. turns out to be Saucy Jack, because… well… who cares? But if it makes a real argument about real historical figures (see Alan Moore’s From Hell), or if there are dire emotional consequences for the characters in whom I, the reader, have an emotional investment… well, that’s a different story entirely. Pun intended.

You know what I’d love to see, Sherlock-Holmes-wise? A story in which Dr. Watson turns out to be the villain, in a hmmm-maybe-we-all-have-to-reconsider-our-morals way rather than a “Mwahahahaha! I’ve been EVIL all along!” way. Actually, I’ve totally written a short story with a conceit like that: hero has to choose between revising his morals and losing his bestest friend. Actually, I think most of my stories have some sort of element like that, because I’m interested in the interplay between friendship and enmity and the tension between supporting people you love and negotiating your own morals.

Anyway, I got started on this whole topic because the ending of Brad Meltzer’s wonderful graphic novel, Identity Crisis, just didn’t work for me. I stayed up way past my bedtime to read the first three-quarters and kept sneaking peeks at the rest during class. But then I hit the end and just… well, I felt like the rug was pulled out from under my feet. Like, I was dying to know who was behind the murders/attempted murders, but, when I finally found out the villain’s motive, I just thought, “Why?” I mean, the initial motive seemed cool and chillingly rational and all, but then, for some of the most intriguing events in the plot, it was just like, “And I did those because I’m mad, MAD, I tell you!” To me, this felt kind of like, “It was the janitor all along!” It’s not that it’s not a fair explanation. It’s that, well, of all the other possible explanations, it seems like it’s the one that offers the least satisfying emotional impact.

* I forget who spoiled The Sixth Sense for me, but I still enjoyed the movie.

** Well, or you could make it a stop-this-killer adventure instead of a who-was-that-guy mystery. I don’t mind Sherlock Holmes battling against a wicked criminal mastermind whom he finally kills without ever learning the guy’s identity, as long as it’s clear the battle and not the unmasking is the point of the story. I do mind if it’s the literary equivalent of, “Gasp! The Ripper was none other than Sherlock Holmes’s never-mentioned-in-canon-and-hardly-mentioned-in-this-story Great-Uncle Fred!”