VILLIANS

by Melodie Johnson Howe

We tend to focus on the protagonists when discussing mysteries, but I think we should give the villains their do. Without them there would be no heroes.

Villains illuminate our fears more than heroes illuminate our bravery. There is a need to make our heroes more human, so many writers spend pages detailing their inadequacies which include drinking, drugs, bad marriages, affairs, or death of a loved one. Modern day heroes are so haunted by their past and present sins that they have become the poster children for moral equivalency. That is until they must face the villain. At the end of the story the hero has to find a moral code, however compromised it may be. But the villain does not. He is anarchy interpreted through characterization.

The villain has the knowledge of his evil doings and therefore the power over the protagonist who does not. The villain in essence is the plot. Know what your villain is thinking and planning and you’ll know the story you’re trying to tell. The villain and the hero are the yin and the yang. The dark and the light. Hannibal Lecter knows. But the young FBI agent doesn’t.

I have always been fascinated by villains. As a child I sensed the villain was having more fun than the hero. In the movies I grew up watching, the villain had all the great lines. And the female villains wore the best clothes, and they could kill as easily as any man. There was a subversive power in their acts and I felt every dramatic moment of it. Maybe that is why most of my villains are female. I don’t intend this, but I am drawn to the light and dark side of women

Gutman may be a great villain, but Brigid O’Shaughnes- sy is even better. She is relentless. Moriar- ty was brilliantly evil, but so were some of the women that Holmes had to defend against. However, the most repugnant bad woman is Mrs. Murdock, the wealthy Pasadena mother, in The High Window. A lump of aging female flesh, attached to a lounge, guzzling sherry. She still makes my skin crawl and I love her (and Raymond Chandler) for it.

In Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson created two fearsome villains that were physically handicapped: Blind Pew and Long John Silver. What could be more terrifying than the power of the crippled and the weak? We fear these two characters in a visceral, nightmarish way. With the thumping sound of a wooden leg on the hard wood floor Stevenson has us running from our own personal fears.

There are two villains in James M. Cain’s Mildred Pierce. Monte Beragon, the charming seducer, and Mildred’s daughter Veda. As with all charming seducers Monte feels for no one but himself. And it is the same for the ruthless Veda who feels that she is owed what she wants. Cain is at his best when these two self-absorbed characters end up doing each other in. The anarchy of evil implodes!

Hitchcock on the other hand does not have great villains, except for Norman Bates and his most notable villain, and my favorite, Joseph Cotton in “A Shadow of a Doubt”. Hitchcock takes another charming seducer, who happens to be a serial killer of older woman, and places him in the middle-America, middle-class home of his sister. The presence of this suave but unfeeling killer turns everything that is normal, even prosaic, upside down. Especially when seen through the eyes of the killer’s young niece.

The villains I don’t like, except for Hannibal who is a full blown, complicated character, are serial killers. (In “A Shadow of a Doubt” the serial killings are dealt with so briefly and deftly that it doesn’t really count.) Most serial killers are idiot savants. They are repetitive. They create the same murder over and over. They are not brilliant. They are obsessive and compulsive. They are gore for the sake of gore. I think I would get bored writing about a serial killer. No, I just don’t want to spend my time with one.

I want a villain that somewhere deep, dark, down I can relate to. What could be scarier than that?