Phoebe Wynne on Writing Tricky & Unlikeable Heroines

Credit @Josephine Gronk

 When reaching for my next book to read I have a terrible habit of ignoring my TBR and rereading Jane Eyre. Until last year, when my first novel was published, and I devoured as many contemporary novels as I could. In those acclaimed bestsellers I discovered a wealth of spunky and funky heroines, who in their own various and brilliant ways seemed to have no flaws at all.

 Every protagonist is the main character of her story, the one that makes decisions and faces the significant obstacles within the plot. In my studies of writing, I have always understood that a heroine can do one of two things: be the driver that propels the action forwards and changes the world around her, or the reactor to the action that moves around her within her world. The gothic novel – the genre within I write – prefers the latter. In its simplest form, picture this: a young woman, hair streaming, standing in front of a doomed-looking castle, the victim of her circumstance, a desperate damsel in distress, a captive desperate to escape her fate. Her deepest desires tend to be different from her actual needs, but we as readers cheer her on and champion her as she makes dreadful mistakes and stumbles towards her inevitable fate.

I have seen a downward trend in this type of heroine. It is a shame, because we need her, because we are her. We cannot all be Katniss Everdene.

 A real woman is messy, complicated, tricky, moody, and surely more interesting. As a reader I am thrilled by particularly darkly lit characters that are morally problematic. Gone Girl’s Amy Dunne is a perfect example of this, as she reveals a third of the way through the novel that she is not only alive and well but had planned the whole thing. Her ‘anti-cool-girl’ declaration lit up almost every woman I know as we each recognised her furious logic glowing through the novel’s narrative. One friend of mine, though, threw the book on the floor in disgust and refused to read any further. We are not friends anymore.

 The protagonists of my two gothic novels are a troubled teacher in her mid-twenties, and a bratty young girl on holiday with her wealthy parents. In MADAM my first is an everywoman introduced into a monstrous boarding school world, in THE RUINS my second is a little girl that becomes a monster in response to the oppressive collective she is forced to live inside. Both find themselves on the edge of the world they inhabit, both struggle to properly interact with the other members of their society, and both find every day a challenge. In the end, these characters find what they need in a very messy, destructive, and beautiful way. My young women are brutal and brutalised – too much perhaps, for many readers. But they have come from an ordinary place, and they make themselves extraordinary by what they do and by what has been done to them.

There are gentler and more expert versions of this – Jo March of Little Women, Elizabeth Bennet of Pride and Prejudice, even Jane in Jane Eyre. Every one of them loved, adored, and celebrated even today – because they are versions of ourselves: foolish, loving, muddled, passionate, desperately happy and unhappy, both wrong and right. I would love to meet another one of these complicated heroines in contemporary novels, but I have not.

It might be because fundamentally, as a reader I am drawn to the real heroines – the ancient ones. Women in classical mythology suffered more viscerally and lived lives more colourfully outside of our regimented modern societies. These women have shouted loud at me from a young age, and as a result, I have based many of my characters on ancient women. There is a current trend to pick these characters up and guide them towards a warmly reimagined version of their story – and in almost every example they become more likeable. But I say, let them be. Let women be horrible if their story needs them to be horrible. Medea kills her children to save them from a disastrous future, to punish her husband, and to ensure a secure future for herself. Agrippina poisons the Roman emperor, her uncle, in order to place her own son on the throne and is tormented and assassinated as a result. There is little of this in today’s storytelling – but perhaps we need it. Let female characters be angry, unhappy, and violent if it is true to them. Let them scream and cry and fight back, while male characters rush horribly through their own stories as ever, like Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, Humbert Humbert in Lolita, and even Patrick Bateman in the American Psycho. I say, bring back our tricky and unlikeable heroines. Let us be rid of the superhero woman and allow ourselves to revel in the flawed everywoman.

 The Ruins by Phoebe Wynne (Published by Quercus Publishing) Out Now

Amidst the glamour of the French Riviera lies the crumbling facade of Chateau de Setes, a small slice of France still held by the British aristocracy. But this long since abandoned chateau is now up for sale, and two people are desperate to get their hands on it despite its terrible history.  Summer, 1985: Ruby has stayed at the chateau with her family every summer of her twelve years. It was her favourite place to be, away from the strictures of her formal childhood, but this year uninvited guests have descended, and everything is about to change...  As the intense August heat cloaks the chateau, the adults within start to lose sight of themselves. Old disputes are thrown back and forth, tempers rise, morals loosen, and darkness begins to creep around them all. Ruby and her two young friends soon discover it is best not to be seen or heard as the summer spirals down to one fateful night and an incident that can never be undone...  Summer, 2010: One of the three young girls, now grown and newly widowed, returns to the chateau, and in her fight to free herself from its grip, she uncovers what truly happened that long, dark summer.  With riveting psychological complexity, The Ruins captures the glittering allure of the Mediterranean, and the dark shadows that wait beneath the surface.

 More information about the author and her work can be found on her website. You can also follow her on Twitter @phoebewynne and on Instagram @phoebewynnewrites

 

 

 

Why did I (temporarily) leave my Detective Avraham to write "Three" by D.A Mishani

©Yanay Yechieli

The idea for "Three" came to me while boarding a plane back from a crime fiction festival I attended in Lyon, France. 

It presented itself - how and why I will never know, this being the most mysterious part of writing – not as a story but as a pure structure: a book in three parts, with three different reading-processes, about three women meeting the same man. Who the three women are and why they are meeting the man I didn't know yet – but when I got off the plane in Tel Aviv, I had no doubts that it would be my next book. 

There was only one problem with my idea: it didn't include the detective who appeared in my first three novels, Inspector Avraham Avraham. For the time being, I kept the idea for "Three" a secret from him. 

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In retrospect, I think I have identified a few of the reasons why I needed a break from Avraham. 

After writing three more-or-less classically-structured detective novels, I felt I needed an adventure. And I believe that for a writer, an adventure is almost always an adventure in literary form, or a literary experiment. I wanted to write a novel with a structure that was new to me, and its writing experience - unexpected. 

Moreover, experiencing a few sad departures of close family members and friends in recent years, I wanted to write a book that would recreate the true shock of violence and death that one feels in real life. 

In a classic detective novel, the readers (and the writer too) are somewhat protected from the shock of death by structure itself: you know, when you open the book, that you'll find a corpse on page 15 or 20 and so you're ready; and seeing it through the detective's eyes helps with distancing or ‘regulating’ death.

"Three" had to be something else. It needed to strike the readers with the real grief caused by violence, and to achieve that I needed to turn the classic structure upside-down, to tell the story from the victim's perspective alone, and also to make the readers lose some of the protagonists in the middle of the book, like we sometimes lose our beloved in the midst of life's journey. In order to that I needed to part with my detective. 

Starting "Three", I felt all was going well. 

Writing the first part, I was becoming more and more attached to its protagonist, Orna; I enjoyed the new pace I found for the book, a pace that wasn't Avraham's almost-famous – or infamous – sluggishness. When I had doubts – Am I really not writing a detective novel?! - I calmed myself down by defining "Three" as a crime novel in which it isn't clear if a crime will happen or not, or a detective novel in which the detective might never appear. 

Written under the influence of a shift in my reading-diet in recent years – less realistic-psychological detective novels (Simenon, Sjowall\Wahloo, Mankell) and more novels that use the mystery or the detective story as a starting-point for an adventure in form or in storytelling (From Patricia Highsmith and Friedrich Durrenmatt to Ian MacEwan, Julian Barnes and Ricardo Piglia) – I told myself, and Avraham, that a detective is simply not always needed.

And then I got stuck. 

Writing Part 1 and Part 2 was such a pleasure that I overlooked something: there's a killer on the loose and somebody has to catch them. But since I left Avraham out of my office, who the hell will do that?

For more than two months I didn’t write a single word. My new adventure had derailed completely. I heard knocking on my office doors and I knew who that person was, outside. 

It was Inspector Avraham and he wasn't just offering his services but also telling me in his newly-gained confidence (after all, there's a TV series and a movie now, based upon him): "Let me in. You'll never catch the killer without me. In fact, you've never written a novel without me and you won't finish that one, if you don't let me in".

The truth is that I was tempted. Isn't a detective always right? 

But I didn't want to give up my literary adventure so quickly and I honestly believed in my three female protagonists – Orna, Emilia and Ella. I knew they could carry the novel by themselves. I knew they could catch the killer without Avraham too. 

When the book was out - and found more readers than all of the Avraham novels I wrote before – the knocking on my office door stopped. Was Avraham somewhat embarrassed about his vanity? It was only then, of course, that I could open the door to him again and invite him in – to work together on his new investigation.

Three by D. A Mishani (Published by Quercus Books) Out Now

Three tells the stories of three women: Orna, a divorced single-mother looking for a new relationship; Emilia, a Latvian immigrant on a spiritual search; and Ella, married and mother of three, returning to University to write her thesis. All of them will meet the same man. His name is Gil. He won't tell them the whole truth about himself - but they don't tell him everything either.

Susan Wilkins on Women and Violence in Crime Fiction

The overwhelming success of Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on a Train, both as a book and film, following as it did Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl and the somewhat controversial BBC series The Fall, has prompted quite a bit of media musing on the subject of violence against women and how it’s portrayed in crime fiction.

On screen it is all too easy for violence and particularly its results to look graphic and gratuitous. When I worked as a scriptwriter on the hospital series Casualty and Holby City I saw at first hand the skill with which make-up artists and production designers recreated the most gruesome injuries.

It can also be alluring, particularly to directors, to have the camera creep through a scene like the ultimate voyeur, drawn to the worst of it, looking away, then going back for another peek, for yet more detail. Teasing the audience with the frisson of horror is a speciality of the medium.

The BBC’s excellent police drama, Happy Valley, showed a savage assault on a female police officer and came in for some flak. However, the writer, Sally Wainwright, directed the episode herself and explained that the level of violence was carefully considered. She went on to argue that it was depicted responsibly in that it showed the psychological as well as the physical damage suffered by the officer.

So what do we feel and what exactly is going on when we watch or read a scene of violence presented for our entertainment? Indeed, is it entertainment we’re looking for, or is it something a little more complicated?

 

Some argue it’s a way for women to explore our fears – the majority of crime readers are women – and come to an accommodation with them? With an increasing number of female detectives at the helm, bringing resolution and restoring the moral order for us, this is certainly one way to look at it.

However, writing about female detectives and specifically The Fall in the Observer (5th October 2014), Nicci Gerrard pointed out ‘there is a very fine line between exploring violence and male misogyny and simply portraying, even enacting it.’

Many women crime writers, including myself, find themselves teetering as they try to tread that fine line.

My personal view is that what draws female readers to the crime genre is anger as much as fear. Growing up female may or may not have exposed you to direct experiences of misogyny. But we’re certainly all witnesses to the patriarchal hatred of women and its need to control and contain femaleness that is out there to some degree in every society and culture.

We may fool ourselves that in the post-feminist West we’ve got beyond all that. This tends to ignore the ugly statistics that in the UK one incidence of domestic violence is reported to the police every minute and two women a week are murdered by their current or former male partners.

If we’re not angry, maybe we should be. But where can that anger go? Do we need a fantasy world to help us exorcise it?

It took a male writer, Stig Larsson, to offer us an uncompromising, unapologetic heroine, a victim who simply fought back, in the Dragon Tattoo books. The beauty of Lisbeth Salander is she really doesn’t give a shit and she’s got a few useful skills, which make her a very dangerous adversary.

And if we’re talking fantasy and entertainment, then I think there’s a lot to be said for dangerous women. Women, who can do all the things we can’t, who can look the rapist in the eye and pull the trigger.

Exploring this dynamic has been central to my trilogy The Informant, The Mourner and now concluded with The Killer. I hope, in Kaz Phelps, to have created a character who isn’t afraid to fight back.

The Killer by Susan Wilkins is published on 23rd March 2017 by PanMacmillian

She was a woman, so they thought she'd be easy to kill . . .

Kaz Phelps is on the run - from the past, from the legacy of her criminal family, from the haunting memories of her murdered lover. The police want her back in jail and her enemies want her dead. While standing by the grave of her gangster brother, Kaz realizes she only has one option. To fight back.  Nicci Armstrong was one of the Met's best detectives until personal tragedy forced her to quit. Now she's responsible for the security of the super-rich who use her city as a playground. She is one of the few people Kaz might trust. But Nicci's biggest mistake yet is falling in love with a man she knows is only using her.  Meanwhile, as envious rivals back home plot against him, a Russian billionaire searches for a special gift to keep the Kremlin onside, a disgraced politician dreams of revenge and a Turkish drug baron plots to purge his dishonour with blood.

More information about Susan Wilkins and her books can be found on her website.  You can also follow her on Twitter @susanwilkins32.  You can also find her on Facebook.

Women Writing Thrillers by Helen Giltrow

Today’s guest blog is by Helen Giltrow the author of  The Distance.  She was born and brought up in Cheltenham and read Modern History at Christ Church, Oxford. She has worked extensively in publishing, including ten years as a commissioning editor for Oxford University Press. Her work has been shortlisted for the CWA Debut Dagger Award.

The ‘hero from the wrong side of the law’ is a well-established figure in crime fiction.  The chances are you’ve met one, whether it’s in Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal or Jo Nesbo’s latest, The Son.  My lead character, Karla, is another: a woman who sells secrets to criminals, or manipulates data on their behalf.  You need the floor plans of a bank, or the contents of a government server?  You need to disappear?  You go to her.

She’s a professional who takes a cool, pragmatic approach to her business.  It doesn’t bother her that it’s entirely criminal.

Of course, as with so many criminal leading characters, she has admirable qualities too.  She’s fiercely loyal to the members of her team.  She protects those who are vulnerable.  And there are most definitely lines she won’t cross.  She doesn’t deal with psychopaths or terrorists, and violence is alien to her; to get the information she needs she’ll work on people’s trust, she’ll manipulate technology, but when all else fails, she must fall back on her wits.

She has a strong sense of empathy, too; she tries to repress it, but it’s always there, and sometimes it slips out, drawing her into an involvement that goes way beyond the professional.

So it came as a surprise when I met someone who obviously found Karla troubling.  The reason?  ‘She needs explaining,’ they said, adding, ‘in a way that a male character probably wouldn’t.’

In other words, she’s not just criminal.  She’s criminal and female.

Another reader – who personally liked and ‘got’ Karla – touched on the same point, but went further: ‘Some people might be more comfortable with Karla’s illegal activities if she had a mental illness.’  I was stunned – until I looked back at the female leads in the big crime novels of the last few years.  Gone Girl: Amy’s a sociopath.  Girl with the Dragon Tattoo: Lisbeth Salander’s borderline Asperger’s.

So did those two readers have a point?  Are characters judged according to a double standard, with different rules applied to women and men?

Cathy Rentzenbrink – interviewing Helen Walsh about her recent novel The Lemon Grove – would seem to think so.  She summed up the situation thus: ‘A transgressive woman is a transgressive woman where a transgressive man is just a man.’

And perhaps for some – maybe not many, but a few – there are acceptable ‘female’ reasons for criminal behaviour.  To mental illness we could add revenge; protection of a child; even simple lack of choice.

But Karla’s doing it because it’s her job.

And honestly – why not

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You can find Helen Giltrow on Twitter @HelenGiltrow 

The Distance by Helen Giltrow is published by Orion and is out now. Price £14.99