There’s Nothing Better In A Thriller

Than A Really Good Bad Guy

From classic Greek tragedies to Shakespeare’s plays to film noir, To Kill A Mockingbird, Lord of The Rings or Stars Wars or Game of Thrones—something has been stolen, someone has been killed, loyalties have been tested, and it’s up to the reader to set their own moral compass before the story ends. As bestselling author Tim Maleeny recently noted in Crime Reads, “The tension in any great novel, whether a locked-room mystery or global thriller, comes from the struggle between good and bad. The plot is driven by a hero trying to overcome a series of obstacles in his or her quest for a happy ending. One of the biggest obstacles in a thriller is time, as the clock ticks down to Armageddon. Of course, the biggest obstacle facing your protagonist is your villain—an adversary waiting at every turn to bring the hero’s journey to a tragic end. But what is a villain? Certainly not someone who merely wants to stop something, a speed bump on the road to happiness. The antagonist is working just as hard as your hero, maybe even harder, because they, too, want something to happen. Storytelling is about movement, so the difference between your hero and villain is that they’re traveling in opposite directions, usually at high speeds. Thus, the next time you stream a movie at home and wonder why the car chase was boring or you can’t remember much of the story a week later—or a book you really wanted to read turns out to be a disappointment—ask yourself the question an actor might ask if given the chance to play any role. Would you want to play the villain? If the answer is no, then the bad guy isn’t good enough.”

From Tiger Excrement To Skyhooks,

The CIA Had Plenty Of Secret Gadgets

Ever since its inception in 1947, the Central Intelligence Agency has its fingers in many pies, from counterterrorism to offensive cyber operations and covert paramilitary actions. The mere mention of the CIA brings with it a certain mystique, conjuring up images of secret agents, globe-trotting spies, clandestine activities—and a good number of secrets. Here are just a few:

• Secret Gadgets: These included silver dollars for holding messages or film, miniature compasses hidden in cufflinks, pigeon-mounted mini cameras, and listening devices disguised as tiger excrement.

• The CIA Used the “Skyhook” Before Bond and Batman: In 1962, the CIA launched a mission to investigate an abandoned Soviet research station on a floating ice island in the Arctic. Getting there was easy enough for two Navy pilots, but extracting them involved a helium balloon that lifted a 500-foot line into the air. A slow-moving B-17 plane, with the Skyhook device attached to its nose, then flew overhead and snagged the line with the agents attached to the end of it.

• Archaeologists Made Great Spies: The CIA routinely enlisted archaeologists, anthropologists, art historians, and other academics for intelligence-gathering purposes, since they had a perfect reason to be conducting fieldwork in foreign countries.

• Some Highly Trained Spies Weren’t Human: The agency trained birds to take secret photographs, cats to eavesdrop with recording devices, and dolphins to attach explosive devices to enemy ships.

From Le Samouraï To Kill Bill, These

Are 10 Of The Greatest Hitman Films

Hitmen make for truly fascinating protagonists in film. By nature, they tend to be absorbing characters, as they go about killing people with expert precision, which would usually mark them as deadly villains. No matter whether a film is an action blockbusters, meditative drama, or a black comedy, many feature contract killers as the main attraction to delve into the human condition and explore moral conundrums surrounding life and death. As Ryan Heffernan recently wrote in Collider, “Hitman movies focus on contract killers for criminal associations rather than political assassins or government operatives, reveling in the shady underbelly of the world where violent and ruthless characters wait around every corner." Example: John Wick, the bloody 2014 revenge movie that became an instant pop-culture phenomenon starring Keanu Reeves as the titular hero, a legendary hitman grieving his wife’s death in retirement when the son of a Russian gangster steals his car and kills his dog. Then there’s 1989’s The Killer, which follows Ah Jong (Chow Yun-Fat), an elite hitman who decides to take one final mission after retirement to secure medical treatment for a nightclub singer he accidentally blinded with his muzzle flash in a gangland shootout. And who can forget Leon: The Professional, Luc Besson’s 1994 film that follows 12-year-old Mathilda (Natalie Portman), whose family is murdered by a corrupt and volatile DEA agent. She finds shelter with her neighbor, a professional hitman by the name of Leon (Jean Reno). Ranging from Quentin Tarantino classics to masterpieces of international cinema, these 10 hitman movies are among the very best ever made, and they have the high IMDb scores to support them.

The Biggest Plot Twists In Movies

That Left Most Viewers Speechless

When it comes to movies, there is something exceptional about a giant and totally unexpected twist. Sure, there are times we like to guess the ending, but what about the times we’re left with our jaws well and truly on the floor? Thankfully, some directors really know what they’re doing. As Bradley Marshall noted recently in an article in Cinema First, “The biggest plot twists in movies that left viewers speechless come in all shapes and sizes, but they all have one thing in common: they have moments that almost no one saw coming—and that’s what makes them so great. Example: Jordan Peele’s Get Out, a psychological thriller that makes no secret that the Armitage family are the bad guys…but we don’t know how bad until Chris Washington tries to flee after finding a box of incriminating photos and turns to his girlfriend Rose for help. Another major twist comes hurtling at us in M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense, a horror mystery in which we see the life of child psychologist Dr. Malcolm Crowe (played by Bruce Willis) fall apart after his marriage dissolves and his wife refuses to acknowledge him. To say anything more would require a major spoiler alert, which is one of two reasons I won’t say much about the twist that comes at the end of Fight Club, either. [The other is, of course, that the first rule of Fight Club is we don’t talk about Fight Club.]

The Best [And Worst] Recurring

“Constructs” Found In Mysteries

All genre fiction has recurring plot constructs, and as readers, we have expectations that murder mysteries especially have an abundance of them. These constructs [or building blocks, if you will] help to establish characters or themes without a lot of legwork or boring backstory. As Elisa Shoenberger noted last month in Book Riot, here are some of the more popular themes that drive a good mystery story forward [and, at times, backwards]:

• Locked Rooms/Isolated Murders: There’s something appealing about limiting people’s options, whether by setting up an impossible crime or restricting the number of possible suspects in a tight, confined place. Tempers get frayed, secrets come out, and it makes for tense, suspenseful reading.

•Self-Defense/Can You Help Me Hide The Body: Many books use this construct to force the main character into an increasingly difficult situation, and then figure out how to get out of it.

• Using The Mystery To Comment On Society’s Ills: Mysteries in all subgenres are now talking even more about societal issues like gentrification, domestic abuse, police brutality.

• Using Mental Illness, Race, or Gender Identity As The Villain: Sadly, there's a long history in mysteries where the villain is overtly or coded as trans, gay, or suffering from some mental ailment. As Shoenberger points out, it’s a lazy construct—and there are better ways to create villains without throwing communities under the bus.

Coming March 19, 2024

BEYOND ALL DOUBT

It’s been a year since Cameron Kane’s wife Alison died in a fiery car crash. He and his seven-year-old daughter Sabrina are trying to start a new life when he brushes past the man who killed his wife a year ago, and who also died in the same horrific accident. The chance encounter quickly propels Cameron down a rabbit hole as he begins to question everything he knows about the events of that night. The further he digs, the more he becomes convinced that there’s a deeper conspiracy at play—one that quickly leads him to a complex tangle of devious schemes and murder. Cameron knows there’s no price he won’t pay for the truth, but as the deadly threats continue to mount, he realizes that price may be his very life…and that of his daughter. [By Reed Bunzel, writing as Hilton Reed. Published by Crooked Lane Books.]