Conjuring Up a Villain

Years ago, when I wrote A Stranger Here Below, I didn’t really know how to craft a mystery. I didn’t realize how helpful it would be to develop a detailed biography of my villain, then let him talk to me and explain himself in his own words. But I did find an image of his face. 

In the first Gideon Stoltz mystery, the evildoer – the character whose actions, both past and present, drive the story – is a powerful, imperious man in his late middle years: Adonijah Thompson, who owns and runs an ironworks in my fictional 19th-century Pennsylvania county.

John C. Calhoun, 1849, photo by Mathew Brady. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

Doing research into the early 1800s, I came upon a picture of John C. Calhoun (1782-1850), the slave-owning South Carolina politician who served as the seventh vice president of the United States. Calhoun descended from tough, rugged people who had left the war-torn borderlands between England and Scotland several generations back. His craggy, somewhat baleful countenance, wrote the historian David Hackett Fischer, testified to his “strength of character and force of will, and also to [his] courage and cruelty” – qualities I wanted my villainous ironmaster to possess. 

John Calhoun’s face was what I saw when I thought of Adonijah Thompson, when I wrote scenes in which he dealt with and confronted others, when he offered misdirection and menace to my young sheriff, Gideon Stoltz, in his brave and often fearful pursuit of the truth. 

The plot of a mystery can be likened to “the Hero’s Journey,” the traditional, old-as-time story of a person venturing into an uncertain realm and overcoming obstacles and dangers to achieve a goal or claim a prize. In the case of a mystery, the hero must try to solve a crime and bring a culprit to justice. 

A mystery can also be thought of as “the Villain’s Journey.” If not for the evildoer, there would be no triggering event, no puzzle for the hero protagonist to figure out. The villain is dangerous, a threat to the hero’s and others’ lives. This anti-hero is every bit as important as the hero, maybe more. 

In my mysteries I don’t want to create cardboard-cutout villains any more than I want Gideon Stoltz to be stereotyped and predictable. Just as Gideon has a backstory that defines what kind of person he is, so does the villain he must face. 

Developing a villain has become a two-step process for me. First, I write a thorough profile, including a physical description, how the person dresses and behaves and talks, their parents and siblings, education, religious leanings, core beliefs, formative experiences, fears, secrets, and desires. It’s like writing a profile of a real live person. This summary sketch also includes important elements of the plot. 

Second, I write a passage in the villain’s own voice: the anti-hero talking directly to me, telling me what their life has been like, what they want in the world, how they’ve been thwarted or harmed or demeaned, how and why they feel justified in taking someone else’s life. This exercise invariably yields new and often surprising insights into what makes my villain tick. 

I do something similar for the other major characters in my novel as well. For all my characters, including the hero and the villain, only some of their backstory – maybe a minuscule amount – will actually appear in the narrative. But knowing my characters fully gives me a strong sense of how they will behave, what they will do and say in any situation, including when they interact with each other. In a way, they write the story for me.