The Victim

I was listening to mystery author Laura Lippman on the radio a long while back and she said something that was rather an epiphany for me. She writes bestselling crime novels and I guess I would consider them the “literary” kind in the same sense that a “literary novel” is one that appeals to a wide range of readers.

Specifically, she was talking about her murder victim. She doesn’t put her murders in the first chapter because, she says, she needs the reader to get to know them on an intimate level, to mourn their loss, to make it important for the reader to want to have the murder solved.

Now I write genre mystery. It’s almost the opposite from “literary” because in a sense, it appeals to a finite set of readers, those who like history with their mystery. In all my historical mysteries, I have to say that the victim is just about the least important to me and the plot. Sure, there needs to be a murder, the impetus for the action to begin. After all, in my Medieval Noir series, my detective, Crispin Guest, a disgraced knight, is hired by a client and if that client ends up dead, or his associate, or wife, or…well, you fill in the blank, then it seems even more imperative that my detective, a man of honor with a keen sense of justice, feels doubly compelled to bring this culprit in for his crimes.

And in my Tudor mystery series, it’s the court jester that investigates, firstly because he had an intimate relationship with the first victim, and in later volumes because he is either ordered to or feels compelled to help.

And finally, in my Sherlockian mysteries, my protagonists are hired, in most cases, because they style themselves as private detectives.

Since all my mysteries are a series, I feel it more important that my readers have that visceral and intimate relationship to my protagonists rather than a fleeting victim, who will, after all, have little importance as the series progresses, because by the next book we are on to the next body.

So is that what it is that makes the difference between literary and genre? Is it that the victim is second to the puzzle and characters? This isn’t true for all genre series or all books, but it seems that way for me, since I have always written them in this way, as if the victim was the MacGuffin, the term filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock used to suggest the thing that propels the plot but could be anything and soon forgotten in the race to discover the culprits.

Just as Dorothy Sayers said that her story the BUSMAN’S HONEYMOON was a love story interrupted by a murder mystery, I think of my three main series in much the same way: an interesting day in the life of a disgraced knight or a court jester or two blokes in late Victorian London mentored by Sherlock Holmes, interrupted by an inconvenient murder. I want to know what happens next in their lives and how their next mystery will shape them in who they are slowly becoming as opposed to what they once were. And though I may never be a bestselling author while working on my novels, I am having the time of my life writing them.