When the killer gets away with it

By S. Lee Manning

I discovered mysteries when I was at the University of Chicago, finishing an M.A. in English literature. Bored with literary novels and wondering why I thought I loved novels or thought I wanted to write one, I picked up an Agatha Christie mystery--and that was it. I loved reading novels again. I soon expanded to other mystery authors, then to suspense and thrillers, knowing that these weren't just what I wanted to read, but what I wanted to write.

I could even explain my fascination in literary terms to fellow students at UC. Mysteries and thrillers, like many great Shakespearean plays, portray a world that has descended into chaos that has to be returned to order. Example--Macbeth. He kills the kind old king, and Scotland is plunged into darkness, until Macbeth is killed and the proper world is restored. This is also the pattern I found reading mysteries.

Of course, what restoring order meant in Shakespeare's time and what it means in ours are two different things. Shakespeare believed in a natural, God-given order, where everyone had their place. In our world, restoring order means a reality where things are understandable, reasonably predictable, and where a certain level of fair play and respect for other people exists.

In our world, when a murder occurs, it indicates a loss of that reality. The detective, private or police or experienced knitter, arrives on the scene, to analyze the clues and find the murderer. The killer is uncovered and stopped. Justice prevails and order restored. There's a similar pattern in thrillers. The villain threatens to destroy the world, the hero or heroes prevent the evil, and the villain is stopped—killed or imprisoned.

Except when it doesn't happen. Because sometimes the killer gets away with it.

I'm not thinking of noir mysteries and thrillers, where the view of the world is bleak and pessimistic. In noir, chaos is the rule, not the exception. Killers often get away with it in noir, but then, it's not unexpected. The world of noir is depressing and dark, nothing is fair or just, and that bleak reality exists at the end of the story. Noir was never my cup of tea.

I've always liked thrillers, suspense novels, and mysteries when the good guys prevail and the bad guys don't. There is a satisfaction, a feeling of completion that I enjoy, and that I don't get from reading noir.

That doesn't mean that there isn't some darkness or some sadness at what has been lost.

It's what I usually have in my spy thrillers. The good guys win the day, and the bad guys are vanquished. But some of the good guys may have died. And even those who survive have suffered losses. But (hopefully) the reader still has that feeling of satisfaction and restoration; it's just bittersweet.

However, sometimes, even in those good-prevailing-over-evil-kind of books that I love, the killer doesn't wind up in jail or dead. Sometimes the killer gets away. And that upsets the world order. Or does it?

 Characters can kill with impunity and not disturb the world order—if they kill the right people for the right reason. Reacher in Lee Child's novels leaves a trail of bodies in every book, but the readers still finish with the feeling of all being right with the world. So whether the world remains in chaos or not when the book ends depends on who is doing the killing and why. And whether there actually is a world order to be restored before the killing takes place.

 In my last thriller, Bloody Soil, Lisette beheads a man in the beginning of the novel, poisons a man, tries to poison the protagonist, and shoots several people. Yet, at the end, she walks away. And, everyone is pleased that she gets away with it. She's a sympathetic character who witnessed her father's murder, and the people she kills are neo-Nazis who've killed others and plan to overthrow the German government. Moreover, the order of the world was already disrupted. Her killings, rather than creating disorder, restored the world that should exist.

 My latest thriller, Deadly Choice, also starts off with a murder. A doctor is held prisoner by Patricia in a chilling chapter where she describes her daughter and describes what she's going to do to the doctor. And then she kills him. The dead man is a good doctor with a wife and a son, and his murder leaves them bereft. Patricia has her sights on new targets, while being hunted by an investigator who hopes to catch her.

 The usual expectation would be that Patricia needs to be caught—for the restoration of order, even though she's a sympathetic character—her daughter died needlessly and she's acting out of grief. But as the story continues, the reader discovers that the good doctor sent Patricia's daughter home when she was bleeding from a miscarriage instead of providing the care that would have saved her life. And Patricia's other targets were complicit in her daughter's death.  

 So is the world of the novel in chaos because Patricia committed a murder, or was she acting against a reality where chaos existed? Would catching her restore order? Or further the disorder?   

 You'll have to read the book to find out.

 A retired attorney, S. Lee Manning is the award-winning author of the Kolya Petrov espionage series: Trojan Horse, Nerve Attack, and Bloody Soil. Her latest release, Deadly Choice, is a stand-alone (or maybe the first in a new series). She and her writer husband J.B. Manning have started a YouTube channel that they're calling A Killing Couple where they investigate intriguing people and places that have connections to books and writing. She and J.B. live in Vermont with their two talky cats, Xiao and Dmitri.