Michael Caleb Tasker on criminals, grifters and noir

Crime thriller writer Michael Caleb Tasker pens a piece for us about the intricacies of the crime thriller villain.

I don’t like criminals. By and large, I don’t find them interesting. Not in real life, not in the news, and seldom in fiction. I need some moral backbone in my reading. That said, I have often been drawn to a certain strain of noir fiction. Or what I see as noir fiction. It’s a question of focus.

Novels like Slam the Big Door by John D. MacDonald, Memory by Donald E Westlake, and the hypnotic The Alcoholics, by the usually brutal Jim Thompson, are all seemingly crime novels. However, in each of these little to no crime is ever committed. A punch is thrown, lies are told, the bad intensions are vast, but the criminal act is minimal. Sometimes non-existent. Instead, the novels focus on emotional or nervous breakdowns (MacDonald), a search for a lost sense of selfhood and meaning (Westlake), or existing and simply getting by in a haunted world of chaos and lies (Thompson). There is no criminal, no crime-solver, no crime-stopper. They are stories of ordinary people and the fallout of turning the wrong way in a bad situation. Yet while these novels don’t focus on crime or criminals, they still carry the tension, the knuckle-gnawing suspense, the unstoppable narrative propulsion usually reserved for the best of crime stories. And I can’t recommend them highly enough.

Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye is a wonderful novel. At the surface it is a murder story, but also it is a novel of Chandler’s detective, Marlowe, ever the outsider, longing for a friendship. The crime plays second fiddle in thematic importance if not narrative drive. When Marlowe is alone, as he so often is, the crime is not his focus. A malformed and malfunctioning friendship is. I find that with Chandler, a chaotically drawn crime is a simply tool, or sometimes even window dressing, for telling a story of intense inner turmoil or loneliness. It’s a major reason his novels are so good. That same question of focus.

This often makes me wonder if criminals are in fact, the most interesting aspect to crime fiction. Perhaps it’s a magicians misdirect. We see the crime, but the real story is under the table. Behind the curtain. In the shadows. Where’s the focus?

In turning over issues and questions of morality, of actions and consequences, of accountability and responsibility, criminals and con-artists and grifters can be useful. Particularly if the cons and grifts, the criminal acts, are secondary to the character, secondary to their motives and intentions and desires. I like to see how good people will handle bad situations. I like to see the ramifications of bad choices, the consequences of choosing wrong over right. I like to see if and how a character changes when bad decisions and repercussions stack up.

For my part, whether reading or writing, I’m more interested in how a character will be affected by committing a crime, or how a character will be affected by immoral choices and immoral actions, than I am interested in the mechanics of a crime. Likewise, I am less interested in seeing a character get away with a crime than I am with seeing how a crime might impact various characters, and how will someone scrape their way back to decency.

I’ve played (and lost) enough poker and blackjack and done just enough bad magic to know how to describe the mechanics of a card game, the mechanics of a sleight or a cheat. That’s window dressing. The focus, the interesting part, is the character. And here, a transgressor can often provide more fodder than a victim. So long as the transgressor is not a moral vacuum but someone with an ethical centre, wavering or under attack though it may be.

How do small crimes alter a soul or a psyche? How will the choices, the actions, spiral, and will the character wrestle their way out of the ethical cesspool they stepped into?

And that wrestling is important to fiction. That wrestling is conflict. There’s the focus.

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Just Like the Night

by Michael Caleb Tasker

A gripping exploration of loneliness, conscience and the ties that bind.

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