ME vs. THE MASTER CRIMINAL



From Wikipedia



By E.E. Kennedy

As you may have deduced from the title, as a writer, I’m not fond of the concept of the Master Criminal. You know the ones I mean: Wo Fat, Dr. No, Goldfinger, Red John, Mr. Hyde, those guys. Vindictive, relentless and merciless, they are responsible for a list of despicable fictional crimes as long as your arm.

I blame Conan Doyle. He was probably among the first to introduce such a character in his Sherlock Holmes stories: Professor James Moriarty. “He is the Napoleon of crime, Watson. He is the organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city,” Holmes declares in The Final Problem. This fellow held all of London’s criminals in his sway. No crime, however petty, escaped his knowledge and was likely launched at his instruction.

If you want me to stop watching a TV show or quit reading a book, simply introduce a criminal mastermind rubbing his hands together and cackling in fiendish glee and I’m outta there. Why is that, I wonder? And why is it I am loathe to have such a villain in the mysteries I write?

That’s not to say that my villains aren’t intelligent. One can be extremely evil and highly intelligent at the same time. In fact, a bright villain makes a better adversary for my hero or heroine to engage and makes for a more challenging puzzle for the reader. So that’s not the problem.

So why don’t I have criminal masterminds in my books? Here are a few of my reasons:

1)      My villains are amateurs. They only dabble in murder. I did a brief mental review of my books to date and realized that in only one of my books does the central villain commit more than one murder. This makes them harder to detect, of course. These villains aren’t like the lions and tigers in stories who, having once tasted blood, are ravenous for more. No, these folks simply used rather extreme means to eliminate an inconvenience. Which is pretty chilling, when you think about it.

2)      Master criminals aren’t cozy. They are extraordinary, larger than life. They make a profession of crime and may even be rather proud of their purported accomplishments. They wouldn’t like the small-town life of my characters, no matter how colorful and appealing my townspeople might be. A master criminal wants a Bigger Canvas on which to paint his Masterpiece of Crime.

 

3)   So much for red herrings! As most mystery readers know, red herrings are part of the fun of deducing whodunit. Derived from the practice of dragging a fish along the ground to deceive hunting dogs, in a mystery, a red herring is somebody who might have dunnit, but we're just not sure. Authors love to sprinkle these diversions throughout their stories to fool the reader. Sometimes it works, sometimes not, but if there's a master criminal doing the crimes, you lose that mysterious element.

4)      Master criminals require big guns. It will probably take a government agency or at least a spy with a 00 designation to defeat somebody like that. In my books, all that is required is an English teacher with a conscience and a sense of justice. I think part of the appeal of the cozy mystery is that the reader can put him/herself in the place of the amateur detective. They can help figure out whodunnit along with Miss Prentice.

5)      For me, a master criminal is a copout. Let’s say that there’s a mysterious death in the small Adirondack town where I set my stories. As we follow the plot, we meet all kinds of people who might be guilty--the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker—ordinary folks who, when you meet them make you think Hmm, could he have done it? Now, imagine your frustration when at the end, I pull a Columbian drug lord or Mafia chieftain out my hat and blame it all on him? Nope. Won’t work. It’s got to be the high school art teacher…or is it?

6)      The Master Criminal is possibly too realistic. You have only to watch the news to realize that in the real world, evil has a huge footprint. Look at North Korea, for instance. It’s troubling and diverting to a reader who only wants a few hours of light entertainment.

So when you read a Miss Prentice mystery (or hopefully another book in some one of my future mystery series) don’t wait around for a devious puppet master directing a team of deadly Ninjas or a squad of machine-gun-carrying goons to show up. You’ll find them in some other book. What you are far more likely to find is a corpse in the copy room of the public library or maybe a body in the root cellar of the local B&B. The villain is no less evil. Just, perhaps, a bit less ambitious.

 

 Ellen Edwards Kennedy, aka E.E. Kennedy, is the author of a cozy mystery series about a high school English teacher. The stories are set in the Adirondack region of NYS, where she grew up. The fourth one in the series, Incomplete Sentence, will be released February 1 by Sheaf House Publishers. Ellen and her husband live in North Carolina. Her website is www.missprenticecozymystery.com

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