In EQMM’s upcoming September/October issue (on sale August 13), talented new writer Kai Lovelace has a story in the Department of First Stories. Entitled “Head Start,” it’s a scary Halloween tale of the psychological suspense variety. When he isn’t writing fiction, Kai works at an independent bookstore and as an entertainment journalist. He tell us that he’s been attracted to the macabre, especially the work of Edgar Allan Poe, from an early age, and when he decided to start writing seriously he found that many of his ideas fit into our genre due to the complex psychological exploration involved in many mysteries. That aspect of the mystery is his theme for this post.  —Janet Hutchings

On some level, all narrative storytelling utilizes an element of dramatic thrust based on tension and release. Whether it’s Stephen King or Sally Rooney, the question remains: what’s going to happen? Suspense and crime fiction taps into a heightened form of this dynamic by accessing the shadow realm of the psyche—characters who embrace moral relativism and indulge in criminal behavior raise the stakes and create catharsis for the reader. Escapism can simultaneously provide relief from life’s horrors while grappling with them allegorically, as this form of storytelling mirrors the basic way our brains function in daily life, piecing together information and anxiously awaiting various outcomes, ideally learning something in the process.

Genre itself is an elusive term, sometimes tapping more into commercial than creative spheres, yet the specific pleasures from experiencing the archetypes of a beloved milieu (well-executed, that is, saving them from cliche) can be acutely joyous, and blending genres sometimes risks tonal imbalance. Suspense is one of the most enduring and malleable forms of storytelling as it contains that basic structural element of narrative momentum translated an infinite number of ways, engaging the reader in carefully balanced mental exercises. At its heart is an exploration of personality and what makes us human.

Traditional whodunits literalize this concept and use unique characterization (usually of a professional or amateur sleuth) as a vessel for exploring the plot, so that as the strands of a narrative come together to reveal the perpetrator of a crime, we are also privy to the specific world view of an eccentric personality. However, those specifics are often only as interesting as the lens through which they are depicted. The labyrinthine plots of Raymond Chandler play second fiddle to Philip Marlowe’s running commentary on the world around him, his cynical heroism exposing all manner of personal and societal hypocrisies via exquisite prose. Chandler pushes the boundaries of formalism within the whodunnit, often creating situations so complex as to ironically approach a greater realism than other tightly-constructed stories wrapped up more cogently (the unresolved fate of a certain chauffeur in The Big Sleep is a dangling thread apparently not even Chandler knew the answer to). But even in the case of more old-school practitioners such as Agatha Christie or Georges Simenon, the plot details of each book often grow hazy in memory while the personality of the protagonists remains palpably sharp, emphasizing the paramount importance of character.

Considering story-tellers who utilize suspense in subtler, abstract ways illuminates the wide-ranging versatility of the genre. Chester Himes’ Harlem Detectives series creates dramatic irony by blending elements of traditional mysteries with action and social commentary. As his two protagonists pursue cases, intercut scenes often reveal events and create new plot wrinkles many steps ahead of his recurring detectives, whose single-minded brutality is neither endorsed nor condemned. Len Deighton’s spy novels tend to rely on a detached, heady form of suspense, with plots so confusingly opaque that his characters rarely even know exactly what’s going on until the very end, if ever. This vicarious effect mirrors the reader’s perception and increases psychological realism.

These more abstract techniques are essentially character-based. Clues are dropped in the form of actions, memories, quirks, lines of dialogue, which covertly point towards decisions characters will make, setting up future payoffs organically and gradually forming a blurry picture that will ultimately come into focus, ideally as late into the narrative as possible. With an engaging story short-circuiting the analytical part of the brain and enough balls in the air, so to speak, it’s virtually impossible to anticipate where things are going and much easier to go with the flow and allow yourself to be surprised. In this way, the formula never stales despite untold iterations of similar story elements.  

Many novels of Vladimir Nabokov, not typically associated with crime or suspense fiction, nevertheless hinge on a criminal act. Murder is the linchpin which provides underlying structure to the plots of Lolita, Laughter in the Dark, and Despair, the latter of which is a particularly interesting example of a genre-bending suspense novel. Much like Lolita, the protagonist is a uniquely delusional misfit whose sociopathic tendencies compel him to carry out a sinister plot for personal gain, and Nabokov takes advantage of the first person format by creating a false sense of security and empathy before pulling the rug out from beneath us with a painfully hilarious twist towards the end. It’s hiding in plain sight for the entire story, but by exploiting the readers’ blindspots, comes as much a surprise to us as to the pathetically endearing anti-hero, and completes our understanding of his character. Unreliable narrators are another added complexity, as we are simultaneously viewing the world from their eyes and from our own, hopefully more rational, perspectives, creating uneasy dissonance. This is also a technique cleverly employed by Donald Westlake, Charles Willeford, and Lawrence Block in various misanthropic first-person narratives.

Flannery O’Connor is another literary giant whose work hinges on subtle psychological suspense. Her classic story “A Good Man Is Hard To Find” is a clear antecedent to everything from Psycho to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, wherein ordinary, flawed, supposedly “civilized” people stray from the beaten path and encounter dangerous outsiders who embody the id. I would argue that O’Connor’s Catholic themes are not at odds with this interpretation. 

In most of Elmore Leonard’s novels, information is never withheld from the audience. The suspense generates from wondering what decisions the characters will come to and how their personalities will clash or mesh to result in unexpected alliances, betrayals, and reverses of fortune. No traditional storyteller could get away with his feints, anti-climaxes, and dropped threads without acknowledging that the entire plot itself is one big MacGuffin, an excuse to explore the personalities of his central cast. Yet the effect of his stories is almost always satisfying because of the destinations of his character arcs. In The Switch, afrustrated housewifefinds personal liberation through total abandonment of her law-abiding domestic life, an outcome slowly brewing from the first page. Bandits depicts a ragtag group of petty, borderline incompetent criminals in New Orleans ultimately devoting themselves to humanitarian causes, serving as the pay-off to a complex robbery gone wrong.

Roald Dahl’s adult-oriented short fiction also explores twisted psychologies by layering subtle clues, testing and prodding his characters until their neuroses explode in surprising, disturbing ways. Although there is no mystery in such stories as “The Way Up To Heaven” and “Georgy Peorgy,” there is still tremendous suspense generated in the way he tightens the screws on his characters until they snap, arriving at destinations which logically conclude their journeys in ironic, tragic fashion. In “The Landlady,” the dark fate of the protagonist becomes clear to the reader, but never to the character himself, equally hilarious and creepy.

At the farther end of this spectrum, Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy and James Sallis’ Lew Griffin series knowingly embrace the idea of mystery as a purely abstract exploration of identity and eschew literal plot entirely, a risky endeavor that sometimes pays off enormously. 

In any case, the engine driving these explorations of the dark side is always character, and so suspense and crime fiction’s enduring and versatile appeal is due to the way it grapples with the ultimate intellectual puzzle, the mystery of the human mind.