What Makes A Good Novel For You?

For this week's blog we are pleased to turn our page over to one of our authors, Chris Graham, for his take on what makes a good novel.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this blog post are those of the blog's author and are not necessarily those of Selfishgenie Publishing.

Your kind of book…
 
What is it that makes a novel your kind of book?

Is it the ‘main man’ (or woman), whether it’s a villain or one of the good guys, or is it the settings and the whole ambience of the book?

Do you like the mystery aspect of the plot? Are the ‘whys’ and the ‘whos’ more important than the ‘hows’, or do you want every drop of spilled blood to splash off the page or dribble from your Kindle into your lap? (Editor's comment: Gross Chris, tone it down a bit!)

​Do you like to hear every crunch of bone as our bad guy brings down his cudgel, or as the hero breaks the villain’s jaw with a well-placed uppercut?

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On the other hand…
 
Maybe you’re not into ‘derring do’ or the crime fighting. Maybe it’s the interaction between the characters that floats your boat: something that I assume is the attraction of romance fiction, or even erotica, but which can be just as prevalent in crime writing.

Do you like every nuance of the characters’ feelings to be clarified? Or perhaps you prefer to work it out for yourself, or even be surprised when two characters end up in bed, or even walking up the aisle?

When they do get it together, should every glistening bead of sweat or running teardrop of happiness or remorse be turning the page to a soggy mess? Should every pant of passion be spelled out in breath by breath detail till the lovers can hold it no longer?

On the other hand, their feelings may take a different turn, and they begin to disagree about everything, or even start taking swings or kicking the crap out of each other.

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Variety is the spice of life… or death.
 
As well as writing, I read too, both for my own pleasure and when proofreading other authors’ work, and it’s fascinating to see how different writers go about their craft.

This is for my own interest as a reader as well as from a comparative perspective, to aid my own writing. Yes, I suppose it could lead to plagiarism, but we writers prefer to call it ‘influence’. Everyone from Shakespeare and before, through to Barbara Cartland and her legions of imitators, has done it. Whether they knew it or not.

It’s interesting, being a crime writer myself, to note the different types of protagonists in crime fiction.
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There are the lucky sleuths, often living in tiny communities, who regularly get a nice juicy crime dropped right into their laps. These can be local police officers, like Tom (and John) Barnaby of Midsomer fame, or they can be amateurs like Agatha Christie’s aged spinster, Miss Jane Marple, and Chesterton’s meddlesome priest, Father Brown, but the one thing they share, is an unfeasibly high serious crime rate for such small communities.

Then there are the professionals who aren’t limited to their own small localities, like Poirot or Sherlock Holmes, and those ‘big city’ coppers like Lynda la Plante’s Jane Tennison, John Creasey’s Gideon, Biba Pearce’s DCI Rob Miller, or even civilised Oxford’s Morse, from the pen of Colin Dexter, all of whom at least have a reasonable catchment area for their crimes to occur in.

With the professionals, we must also include those specialists who assist the police, like the CSI teams, the forensic scientists, as in TV’s ‘Silent Witness’, the psychologists like Thea Hartley’s Resa James, or Fitz from TV’s ‘Cracker’. 

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Anti-heroes
 
Somewhere between these ‘good guys’ and our criminals, come those in a grey area. Working on the side of the ‘good guys’, but often from the wrong side of the fence, and bending, or even completely smashing, the rules.

​Characters ranging from Leslie Charteris’s urbane Simon Templar, or my own call girl, Lena Fox, to far more violent heroes like James Mitchell’s Callan, Lee Child’s Jack Reacher, and Frank Westworth’s JJ Stoner (a particular favourite of mine).

It seems that the men and women in the white hats can be even more varied than the criminals they hunt down, but they usually fall broadly into two types: the ones who the reader identifies with and actually likes, and the absolute evil bastard who’s too far gone for legislative punishment to be enough for. The ones who deserve whatever sticky and often painful end that the author can dream up. 

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Lena

Back again… and again…
 
So, what’s been the common denominator between all these characters I’ve outlined? Yes, they’re all series characters. All of them appear in multiple stories (or are destined to.)

More interestingly, they all have quite complex ‘back stories’ running throughout the books or TV dramas. From Fitz’s gambling and tenuous family relationships, or Barnaby’s cosy village idyll, to Resa James and her tangled family and romantic life, and my own Lena and her friends (who very often are more important to the investigation that Lena herself).

It’s a little like having your own private soap opera running alongside the crime novel. A soap that continues on from the last story in the series that you read, with a cast of familiar characters that the readers can know and love… or even dislike… maybe even starting out likeable, then becoming that ‘evil bastard’ that we all know and love.

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Fun Friends

Incestuous relationships…
 
People do say that we writers have a relationship with our characters… especially those of us who write the aforementioned ‘series’ books with regular characters who appear from book to book.

The characters you write become like your mates… even the dodgy ones. We’ve all got dodgy mates, haven’t we?

But with my ‘Lena’ novels, in some cases all I can say is “The chance would be a fine thing” ’cos there’s a couple of characters in them who’d be an awful lot of fun to have a relationship with.
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However, we live with these characters all the time, because we’re creating their lives and their futures, so yes, I guess we are in a relationship with them, but wouldn’t that be some kind of incest? I mean to say… these ladies are my own offspring I suppose, so it makes it a bit suspect really.

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Killing off your creation…
 
I can remember one point in time when this relationship thing was hammered home to me. I’d decided that one good way to develop the plot of the novel I was working on would be for one of the characters to be murdered. (Not a regular character… This is the first book this one had appeared in.)

I’d worked out why she should be murdered, and how it would affect the way I would end the novel (which was why she had to die) so I went ahead and wrote her death scene, even though the plot hadn’t quite reached that point yet.
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I could then steer the plot towards that point, and then onwards towards the final ending I had in mind. That's how I work. If I have to keep ‘turning the pages’ to find out what's going to happen, then hopefully, so will my reader. It’s only when I’ve got a fair way into the story that I decide how it might end… and even then it can often change.

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Guilt…
 
So, I’d done the grisly deed, initially anyway. However, I hadn’t been bargaining for this ‘relationship’ situation.

After I’d written the scene, I began to feel really guilty, because she was such a nice character; one of the good guys, who’d already had some real crap chucked at her in the story… and I’d now become the nasty bastard who’d just murdered her in cold blood (well, in a lift, really… but you know what I mean.)

It felt like bumping off a daughter.
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I wasn’t sure whether to use the scene or not. Should I just file it for later use? I can always change names and other minor details to slot it into another book later. Maybe use it to kill off a nasty scheming little slapper or something

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I’ve done similar things with a couple of bedroom scenes that were cut from the original ‘Transactions’ manuscript because it was thought by a publisher that the mighty Amazon (no, not the river) might not be happy about too much description when the character has been clearly defined as ‘underaged’. (Her age was necessary to the plot).

Apparently anything goes for grown ups, but teens need to be handled with care.
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As it turned out, leaving some things hinted at, or wondered about by the reader, made the scenes work even better.
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The original scenes were saved, then later had names, and in one case the character’s physical stature, changed to slot them into a later book (‘Deadweight’ - “Not too bad at all for a big girl”…due to appear under Selfishgenie’s banner soon). They worked perfectly. 

So, did I have a pang of conscience? 
 
What did I do with my charming, ‘good guy’ character? Did I decide that I couldn’t subject this delightful young lady to a nasty messy ‘choking on her own blood’, ‘bladder letting go’ death in a lift? 

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Chris Graham

Did I hell. I used the piece, getting straight down to writing the scenes leading up to it, and following her death, her killer being hunted down by her boyfriend, fuelled by a dangerous and unstable high octane brew of agonising pain, intense hatred, and adrenalin. 
This writing lark can be so much fun sometimes.
 
Over to you, blog readers…
 
What kind of novels float your boat?  What kinds of characters appeal to you? Which kinds of settings, locations, and situations?
I’m sure that’s a question that all authors and budding authors out there would love to know the answer to.
 
To find out more about Chris Graham and his books, click here.
 
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