Tue 7 Aug 2007
Character vs. Plot in Detective Fiction, by Bill Pronzini.
Posted by Steve under General[4] Comments
A character-driven detective novel is one in which the plot develops entirely from the people who inhabit it, protagonists and secondary characters both — their psychological makeup, strengths, weaknesses, vulnerabilities, etc. The plot is not created first and the characters inserted to fit the prearranged storyline.
Whodunit, howdunit, detection are all less important than what happens to the people themselves; the impact on them of the crime(s) in which they’re involved; how they and/or the world they live in are altered by these crimes and by other external events, some within their control, some beyond it.
In a character-driven series, the protagonists and those close to them have personal as well as professional lives. And they do not remain the same from book to book; they evolve, change, make mistakes, better their lives, screw up their lives, love, marry, grieve, suffer, rejoice, you name it, the same as everybody else.
A plot-driven detective novel is just the opposite. Characters are subordinate to plot; the mystery, the gathering and interpretation of clues, the solving of the puzzle are of primary focus and importance. If the detectives have personal lives, they’re generally mentioned only in passing and treated as irrelevent.
This is not to suggest that this type is inferior to the character-driven variety; far from it. I’m a great admirer of the Golden Age writers — Carr (particularly), Queen, Christie, Stout — but their books mostly fall into the plot-first category.
The puzzle, the game is everything. Sir Henry Merrivale, Dr. Fell, EQ, Poirot, Nero Wolfe are all superb and memorable creations, but each remains essentially the same from first book to last. There is no evolution, no significant change. The crimes they solve have no real effect on them, or in other than a superficial fashion on the people good and bad whom they encounter.
One reads their adventures mainly for the cleverness of the gimmicks and the brilliance of the deductions (and in the cases of Wolfe and Archie for the witty byplay, and of H-M for the broad and farcical humor). With the exception of Wolfe and Archie, we never really get to know any of them all that well; and even with that inimitable pair, there are no significant changes in their lives or their relationship with each other.
The private eye fiction of Hammett and Chandler is likewise plot-driven (remember Chandler’s oft-quoted remark that when he was stuck for something to happen, he brought in a man with a gun?). The mystery is dominant. As memorable as Sam Spade and the Continental Op and Philip Marlowe are, they’re larger-than-life heroes who remain pretty much the same over the course of their careers.
This is true even in The Long Goodbye, which many consider to be Chandler’s magnum opus (I don’t, but that’s another story); Marlowe’s complex relationship with Terry Lennox and its results, while a powerful motivating force, has no lasting or altering effect on Marlowe’s life.
Ross Macdonald’s novels, on the other hand, are character-driven to the extent that the convoluted storylines devolve directly from the actions past and present of the large casts of characters; but Lew Archer is merely an “I” camera recording events. His life and career remain unaltered by the crimes he solves or any other influences. We hardly know him; he hardly seems real.
Contemporary private eye fiction tends to be primarily character-driven, in the sense that I used the term above. The cases undertaken by Thomas B. Dewey’s Mac, for instance, evolve from the complexities and eccentricities of the individuals he encounters; crime and violence have a profound effect on him as well as on those individuals, in subtle as well as obvious ways.
The same is true of Hitchens’ Long Beach private eye Jim Sader in Sleep with Slander, a book I’ve called “the best traditional male private eye novel written by a woman.” And of Lawrence Block’s Matt Scudder. And of Marcia’s Sharon McCone (see Wolf in the Shadows, her Shamus-nominated Vanishing Point). And of my “Nameless” series (Shackles, Mourners). All, for better or worse, character-driven and character-oriented. Which is why our readers continue to read us.
August 13th, 2007 at 12:01 pm
Excellent article, but… EQ “remains essentially the same from first book to last”???
August 14th, 2007 at 11:53 am
Xavier is right up to a point — Dannay and Lee did make an effort to update and “humanize” EQ (for me he was an insufferable elitist in the 30s), and to some degree they succeeded. But essentially he remained the same purely deductive sleuth solving the same sort of plot-driven mysteries throughout his career. Even what I consider to be Dannay and Lee’s finest effort, their scathing and dead-on indictment of McCarthyism in THE GLASS VILLAGE, is plot-driven; the characters are memorable and EQ is certainly affected by the events depicted, but the novel is nonetheless intended and presented as a carefully constructed allegory.
August 16th, 2007 at 12:19 pm
Mr. Pronzini —
Ahem… The Glass Village is a standalone – the only one Dannay and Lee ever wrote in my knowledge. No EQ in sight thus, but I can see your point. 🙂
Out of curiosity, how would you label Georges Simenon’s Maigret novels? The Commissaire remains mostly unchanged throughout the series – some cases actually affect him but as with Marlowe in The Long Goodbye there is no genuinely lasting effect: he’ll be back to his usual self in the next book.
Still, many of the Maigrets cannot be described as “plot-driven” since they have no plot to speak of, at least in the orthodox meaning of that term. “Maigret” for instance mostly consists in a psychological study of a retired Commissaire back on the beat to save his nephew from the guillotine. Books like “The Yellow Hound” on the other hand are almost Golden-Age like in plotting.
August 16th, 2007 at 3:26 pm
Oh boy, is my face red! Of course THE GLASS VILLAGE is a stand-alone. Of course it is. No excuse for the error. My only defense, and a weak one it is, is that I wrote the paragraph late at night after more than one glass of wine, and in trying to make my point about the novel being plot-driven rather than character-driven, I somehow allowed EQ to slip in. The example I should have used is CALAMITY TOWN, in which events have a strong impact on Ellery as well as the other characters (though he remains unchanged in any fundamental way). Let me repeat that I greatly admire the Queen novels, one and all; and that THE GLASS VILLAGE impressed me tremendously when I first read it many years ago. I need to reread it, obviously, to refresh my memory and I’ll do that in short order. EQ instead of Judge Shinn, indeed. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
I agree with Xavier that many of Simenon’s novels are character-driven. But Simenon was first and foremost a writer of psychological suspense stories, and only secondarily a detective novelist. Queen, Christie, et al were first and foremost detective story writers. Again, I make no quality distinction between character-driven and plot-driven fiction; one type can be just as good, or just as bad, as the other, depending on the skill (or lack thereof) and the intent of the author.