CALL THE DAMN POLICE ALREADY!

In January of 2020, on this blog, I published a list of ten rules for writers. I urged writers to eliminate dreams from their stories, to throw out much of their research, to be wary of using addiction as a plot point, to avoid the use of psychopaths as antagonists, to eschew stream-of-consciousness writing and graphic sex scenes. I urged writers not to give their characters illogical wealth. I urged them to eschew the use of dumb luck and implausible intuitive leaps in solving mysteries. I advised them not to give their protagonists amazingly helpful skills (such as the ability to pick locks) just when they need them most. And I advised them to keep their characters off the internet and away from smart phones and computers as much as possible.

After the list was published, another rule occurred to me, which I call the “Don’t Call the Police” rule. Oftentimes, in novels, films, and TV shows, a blackmailer or an extortionist or a kidnapper or some other sort of miscreant will tell his victim, “Don’t call the police or I will [fill in the blank: kill the child I’ve kidnapped, release the compromising photos I’ve stolen from your cell phone, expose your own criminal wrongdoings, etc.].” This tired trope is usually just a lazy way of forcing ordinary people with no sleuthing skills or law-enforcement experience to take on a dangerous criminal themselves. And it just isn’t very believable.

My wife and I have seen this ploy used numerous times on TV and, whenever we do, one of us invariably turns to the other and says, “If I’m ever kidnapped and the kidnappers tell you not to go to the police – call the police immediately.” There is a reason why criminals don’t want you to go to the police: the police are well-trained crime fighters. They know how to deal with kidnappers, blackmailers, extortionists, and all manner of other villains. If I am ever kidnapped (unlikely, considering how impoverished I am) I’d much rather have the police trying to rescue me from my abductors than have my wife trying to do it. And I don’t believe that I am the only one who feels this way. I believe that the vast majority of people, having just received a ransom text from a kidnapper who has taken their child, would immediately contact either the local police department or the FBI, even if the kidnapper has specifically instructed them not to. It is human nature to seek professional guidance in a situation like this. If you are a writer and you want me to believe that your protagonist isn’t going to report her child’s kidnapping to the police, you had better give me a better reason for believing it than: The kidnappers told her not to. Even if you comply with the kidnapper’s request and drop off a suitcase full of money in a pre-arranged location, the kidnapper has a tremendous incentive to kill your child anyway. The child might be able to identify the killer’s face, or his voice, or his hideaway. The child is going to be a goldmine of information once she is interviewed by the police. Paying off a kidnapper is no guarantee that your child will be released unharmed. Your best bet is to get a team of law-enforcement professionals on the case as quickly as possible.

Blackmail, of course, is a slightly different animal than kidnapping. Presumably the blackmailer possesses compromising materials about you, evidence that could destroy your marriage, cause you professional and/or personal humiliation, or actually send you to prison. It is understandable why, in many cases, a person who is being blackmailed would not want to go to the police. Nonetheless, in many fictional blackmail scenarios, refusing to call the police makes little sense. If the blackmailer has actual proof of criminal wrongdoing on your part, then you too are a villain and generally I’m happy to let you and your antagonist destroy each other’s lives. But if he has proof that you have been cheating on your wife, it doesn’t make sense to pay him off. In this day and age it is nearly impossible to verify that someone has destroyed all the visual evidence of your adulterous affair. Often, in TV shows, you see the blackmailer handing over a flashdrive which purports to contain all of the incriminating evidence. But this is just silly. Anyone with brains enough to put the material onto a flashdrive also has brains enough to keep a copy on his own computer, or stored in a cloud, or on three or four backup flashdrives. Paying this type of blackmailer is only going to lead to more blackmail. Or else, just out of spite, after accepting the payoff from you, the blackmailer may go home and post the compromising videos on YouTube for all the world to see. What are you going to do at that point, sue him?

If your marriage is unsatisfactory, you may as well just call the blackmailer’s bluff. The worst that can happen is that your unhappy marriage ends unhappily. You should also go to the police. They are not honor-bound to inform you wife of your adultery. And perhaps they can catch the blackmailer without your wife ever finding out. If, on the other hand, your marriage is important to you and the adultery was just a horrible mistake, you are almost certainly better off coming clean to your wife. Having to confess to an adulterous affair may well harm your marriage. But you will only compound your problems if you deplete your family’s finances by paying off a blackmailer. Better to confess to one horrible mistake than two. And if you are going to confess the adultery to your wife, you have no reason not to inform the police of the blackmail attempt. In fact you have plenty of incentive to do so. The blackmailer put your marriage in jeopardy. Why not avail yourself of a chance to put him behind bars?

I enjoy crime and mystery dramas that pit ordinary civilians (as opposed to cops) against villains. Perfectly valid reasons exist for why a civilian might go up against a villain without seeking the assistance of the police. Perhaps the civilian suspects the villain of wrongdoing but doesn’t yet have enough evidence to bring the cops into the matter. Perhaps the villain operates in a small town with a corrupt police force. Perhaps the civilian actually believes he has a foolproof plan for foiling the kidnapping, a plan that the police will be sure to reject. Any number of reasons might explain why the civilian doesn’t bring the cops into the matter. But the fact that the villain has told his victim, “Don’t call the police” simply isn’t strong enough for me. If the villain didn’t believe the police could foil his plan, he wouldn’t bother with such a warning. The fact that he has issued the warning should be reason enough for the victim to contact the police.

Recently I read a novel by Adrian McKinty that violated nearly every one of my rules. The novel is called The Chain. It was published in 2019 and, to date, has sold approximately a jillion copies, in 37 different countries, won a half dozen awards, and has been optioned by Universal Pictures for a major motion picture production. The novel includes dream sequences. It includes a major character who struggles with addiction. Its villains are clearly psychopaths and serial killers. The main characters don’t seem to work much but have plenty of money and time on their hands. Dumb luck and intuitive leaps figure into many of the protagonists’ successes (these include guessing a computer password and figuring out a highly quirky numerical code). Unbelievably convenient skills also come into play, including a teenage girl who almost inexplicably is an expert at escaping from handcuffs. Almost all of the interaction between the villains and their victims takes place via the internet, thus our characters spend a lot of time on cell phones and computers. And, most unbelievably of all, the villains have been running a kidnapping operation for ten years, an operation that has involved hundreds of victims, and yet none of the victims, apparently, has ever gone to the police or the FBI for help. And why not? Because they were told not to by the bad guys. As if!

I found McKinty’s novel gimmicky, silly, and highly improbable. But I nonetheless enjoyed it a great deal. Like various recent TV shows – Netflix’s The Night Agent, FUBAR, and Clickbait, for example – the secret to The Chain’s success is speed. McKinty’s 356-page book consists of 77 short, rapid-fire chapters. McKinty throws a lot of improbable stuff into his story, but the pace is so fast that the reader doesn’t have time to ponder just how crazy some of it is. The masters of the Victorian sensation novel had a motto – “Make them laugh, make them cry, make them wait” (the phrase has been variously attributed to Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, Charles Reade, and many others). The idea was to keep your readers pining for each new monthly installment of your novel by constantly forcing them to wait for the resolution to some fascinating new development. Writers like McKinty employ the opposite tactic. They throw fascinating new revelations at you so frequently that you don’t have time to ponder just how far-fetched many of them are. This has worked for Harlan Coben for years. And the late Mary Higgins Clark employed much the same strategy. Give your readers short chapters, a rapid pace, sympathetic protagonists, and a really good hook and you can break pretty much every one of my rules.

I still insist that my rules are good ones. Adrian McKinty apparently disagrees. But who are you going to believe – me (a random guy on the internet) or the author of one of the most successful pieces of pop fiction published in this century?