character. The issue for her: Which one is her real husband?
Even without wealth and great houses, fear that a marriage is not what the wife thinks it is makes for a compelling story. Marilyn Wallace's So Shall You Reap examines a Hudson Valley wife's increasing doubts about her husband in a modern variation on the gothic tradition. See Jane Run, by Joy Fielding, is a fast-paced, intense psychological study of an amnesic woman with a husband she can't remember whether to trust.
Personal Jeopardy
Personal jeopardy is at the heart of most gothic-tradition suspense novels. A child is kidnapped, a woman is stalked, a man is targeted by very bad dudes for reasons he can't explain. An ordinary person must pit his or her entire being against powerful enemies, and the suspense lies in whether or not our hero will survive and prevail. The person in jeopardy is not always the protagonist; parents become heroes to rescue their children, a husband or wife fights for a spouse captured by the enemy.
The key is the struggle, the David-and-Goliath confrontation in which a person very much like ourselves must become braver, stronger, more heroic in order to win the unequal fight. Watching the transformation from victim to victor is the heart of the reader's joy in this kind of book.
Why is this ordinary person suddenly the target of Really Bad Dudes?
Sometimes the protagonist made bad choices. The young lawyer in The Firm chose to work at The Firm not knowing the full truth about his new employers. In other books ghosts from the past come thundering into the present, as happens in Carla Neggers's romantic suspense novels. A child is kidnapped for ransom, or a wife is held captive to put pressure on the husband. Alfred Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much put James Stewart's life (and that of his wife and child) in danger because he heard a man's dying words—even though he had no idea what those words meant. Ignorance is no defense in the world of personal jeopardy.
Jan Burke turned the tables on "husband rescues kidnapped wife" by having her reporter-hero Irene Kelly free her police officer husband in Hocus (he'd already done the same for her in Dear Irene). Worse than being in jeopardy ones elf is having one's child in jeopardy. Judith Kelman, Meg O'Brien, and Aljean Harmetz have all covered that heart-stopping territory in their suspense novels.
What all these subgenres have in common is that the immediate danger is limited to a single person, a family, a small unit within the larger world. Even the fanatics who plan to blow up the Texas state legislature in Mary Willis Walker's All the Dead Lie Down won't wipe out more than a city block or so if they succeed. The world is not at stake.
Spy Fiction Offshoots _
In spy fiction, the world is at stake. The danger has implications for entire countries, not just the protagonist and her immediate family.
There's an abstract quality to spy fiction that arises out of that fact. If I tell you 5,000 children a month are killed in the United States, you're shocked but not emotionally engaged. If I start telling you about the child in northern San Diego who's been missing for two weeks, if I show you her school picture and the video of her running through the garden hose-spray on a summer afternoon, you'll feel pity and sadness. (In fact, since I wrote those words, her burned body was found in the woods and you probably saw the news on television and can perhaps recall her name even now.) One child captures our attention far more than a mass of children.
That's human nature. So one challenge for the spy branch of the suspense tree is to make the conflict personal without losing the big-picture impact of its high stakes. Giving the reader a character to identify with at every turn helps a lot. Don't just tell us a bad apple in the CIA barrel is about to rat out our man in Moscow; introduce us to that man so we will grieve his death and hate the traitor for causing it.
Even before the end
Even without wealth and great houses, fear that a marriage is not what the wife thinks it is makes for a compelling story. Marilyn Wallace's So Shall You Reap examines a Hudson Valley wife's increasing doubts about her husband in a modern variation on the gothic tradition. See Jane Run, by Joy Fielding, is a fast-paced, intense psychological study of an amnesic woman with a husband she can't remember whether to trust.
Personal Jeopardy
Personal jeopardy is at the heart of most gothic-tradition suspense novels. A child is kidnapped, a woman is stalked, a man is targeted by very bad dudes for reasons he can't explain. An ordinary person must pit his or her entire being against powerful enemies, and the suspense lies in whether or not our hero will survive and prevail. The person in jeopardy is not always the protagonist; parents become heroes to rescue their children, a husband or wife fights for a spouse captured by the enemy.
The key is the struggle, the David-and-Goliath confrontation in which a person very much like ourselves must become braver, stronger, more heroic in order to win the unequal fight. Watching the transformation from victim to victor is the heart of the reader's joy in this kind of book.
Why is this ordinary person suddenly the target of Really Bad Dudes?
Sometimes the protagonist made bad choices. The young lawyer in The Firm chose to work at The Firm not knowing the full truth about his new employers. In other books ghosts from the past come thundering into the present, as happens in Carla Neggers's romantic suspense novels. A child is kidnapped for ransom, or a wife is held captive to put pressure on the husband. Alfred Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much put James Stewart's life (and that of his wife and child) in danger because he heard a man's dying words—even though he had no idea what those words meant. Ignorance is no defense in the world of personal jeopardy.
Jan Burke turned the tables on "husband rescues kidnapped wife" by having her reporter-hero Irene Kelly free her police officer husband in Hocus (he'd already done the same for her in Dear Irene). Worse than being in jeopardy ones elf is having one's child in jeopardy. Judith Kelman, Meg O'Brien, and Aljean Harmetz have all covered that heart-stopping territory in their suspense novels.
What all these subgenres have in common is that the immediate danger is limited to a single person, a family, a small unit within the larger world. Even the fanatics who plan to blow up the Texas state legislature in Mary Willis Walker's All the Dead Lie Down won't wipe out more than a city block or so if they succeed. The world is not at stake.
Spy Fiction Offshoots _
In spy fiction, the world is at stake. The danger has implications for entire countries, not just the protagonist and her immediate family.
There's an abstract quality to spy fiction that arises out of that fact. If I tell you 5,000 children a month are killed in the United States, you're shocked but not emotionally engaged. If I start telling you about the child in northern San Diego who's been missing for two weeks, if I show you her school picture and the video of her running through the garden hose-spray on a summer afternoon, you'll feel pity and sadness. (In fact, since I wrote those words, her burned body was found in the woods and you probably saw the news on television and can perhaps recall her name even now.) One child captures our attention far more than a mass of children.
That's human nature. So one challenge for the spy branch of the suspense tree is to make the conflict personal without losing the big-picture impact of its high stakes. Giving the reader a character to identify with at every turn helps a lot. Don't just tell us a bad apple in the CIA barrel is about to rat out our man in Moscow; introduce us to that man so we will grieve his death and hate the traitor for causing it.
Even before the end
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