(How I Write Compelling Characters in Spy Thrillers.)

Can two people love each other and still betray each other?  InThe Poet’s Game, Alex Matthews and his wife, Anna Kuschenko, are trained to use lies and deceit in the course of their intelligence work, and they ultimately contend with a dark secret that will forever keep them from being entirely truthful with each other. How does a couple that uses deception in the normal course of their professional duties, approach intimacy in marriage?  

The Secrets in Three Fictional Marriages

The marriages portrayed in The Odyssey, Rebecca, and Berlin Game artfully depict the tension between love and deception, and I studied the texts to see how the authors succeeded.

Odysseus’s wife Penelope, often described by the epithet, long-suffering, is surrounded by suitors seeking her hand in marriage during her husband’s 20-year absence. He is gone and presumed dead. Penelope defends against the suitors’ entreaties, but it becomes increasingly difficult for her to remain steadfastly faithful. When Odysseus returns, he appears in disguise as a beggar, recognized only by his household’s elderly swineherd. He hides his identity from Penelope. Is he suspicious that she betrayed him and he doesn’t want to reveal himself while he investigates? His deception is one of the epic’s curiosities, but Odysseus’s withholding makes their ultimate reunion more satisfying and Odysseus’s deceit adds dimension to his character.

Odysseus’s behavior is a good example of what John Le Carré said of complex characters: “The more identities a man has, the more they express the person they conceal.”

Rebecca, Daphne Du Maurier’s 1938 romantic thriller, uses suspense and deceit in a marriage differently. The unnamed first-person narrator, a naïve young woman in her 20s who is a companion to an older woman in Monte Carlo, happens to meet a vacationing wealthy Englishman, Maxim de Winter, a 42-year-old widower. They fall in love, marry, and he brings his new wife back to his estate in Cornwall – Manderley. Maxim’s household servants, and particularly his spinster housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers, take an immediate dislike to the young wife—comparing her disparagingly to the first Mrs. de Winter, Rebecca, who died a year earlier in a sailing accident. 

At Mrs. Danvers’s suggestion, the new wife dresses in Rebecca’s clothes to please her husband, who mourns the dead Rebecca. But rather than please Maxim, he is angered. The new wife suspects something is not right in their marriage, but she is helpless to discover what is wrong. Only a freak storm one night that sinks a ship off the coast results in the discovery of the missing sunken sailboat, and Rebecca’s body. The discovery causes Maxim to confess to his new wife that his marriage to Rebecca was a sham. Rebecca was cruel and selfish, took many lovers, and on the night that he murdered her, Rebecca confessed she was with child from a beau.

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Layers of deceit are drawn back in the final scenes and all that was hidden from the narrator about Rebecca’s death comes to light, drawing Maxim and the narrator closer together. Jeopardy of the shared secret deepen their bond.

Len Deighton’s 1983 novel, Berlin Game, features the loving couple of Bernard Samson, a middle-aged British intelligence officer working for MI6, and his wife, Fiona, also an MI6 intelligence officer. They have two children, live a respectable middle-class London life that is filled with the demands of parenting, family and friend obligations, and office scandals of adulterous colleagues. Samson is charged with exfiltrating an important East German asset and in the process confronts uncomfortable evidence that there may be a KGB traitor among his MI6 colleagues. Samson’s suspicions of treachery are confirmed when he is arrested in East Germany as he helps his asset escape, and is confronted by his wife, Fiona, dressed in a KGB uniform. She joined the enemy as a young college student drawn to communist ideology.

The villain in Berlin Game is the wife. But, in spite of Fiona’s treachery, her relationship to Samson has all the appearances of an affectionate marriage with young children, an active social life, and the little intimacies of a hard-working couple. 

How the Secrets in Fictional Marriages Move Stories

In each of these marriages, one character’s lies and deceptions deepens the complexity of the relationship, and provide the surprises that make for a compelling story. One partner hides an important detail of their life, and the revelation of that detail operates to bring the couple closer together, or thrust them irreversibly apart. The reveal provides an insight into what a character wants from the spouse—Odysseus wants to test Penelope’s fidelity, Maxim wants to protect his new marriage, Fiona wants to hide her treason. Deception and a surprise reversal in the relationships propels the plots of these stories.

Exposition is helpful to establish scenes and context, but dialogue provides the beating heart of the relationship and deployed effectively reveals the dynamic between husband and wife. Dialogue is used to imply, suggest, and hide and always for the purpose of adding to the unstable relationship between spouses. When characters come in contact with each other, sparks fly and the reader is riveted by the uncomfortable arguments and unexpected intimacies. The appearance of trust masks the inconsistencies and lies that point to betrayal. The best scenes are laden with uncertainty.

A character’s hidden motives make use of complex maneuvers to maintain the dark secret, all the while under cover of a gauzy film of intimacy and love. The layering of intimacy and artifice creates three-dimensional characters who come alive on the page. 

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(5 Tips for Building Suspense in a Spy Thriller.)

Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley, John le Carré’s Alex Leamus, Frederick Forsythe’s The Jackal, and Shakespeare’s Hamlet are all examples of this haunting type of character. Hamlet isn’t usually thought of as a thriller, but it has all the hallmarks: seven murders, a climatic action scene, betrayal, revenge, unscrupulous conniving. Compelled to avenge his father’s death creates a terrible conflict for Hamlet—he is asked to commit the cardinal sin of murder, which is antithetical to his Christian faith. As he says, “Oh, cursed spite that I was ever born to set it right.”

A few highly-regarded thriller writers take a different view of the importance of character. Steve Berry, a New York Times bestselling author, who speaks to audiences of aspiring writers, has said, “Plot trumps character every time.” James Patterson, in an interview, reflected on his successful writing style: “My strength is that I keep people turning pages and that’s my greatest weakness because I don’t go deep.”

Competent thrillers become memorable page turners when the reader is deeply engaged with the characters. I try to develop compelling characters who live on in the reader’s imagination long after the novel has been set down by spending time getting to know my characters and introducing them like old friends. I make sure I bring them to life.

I start with setting, which might seem counterintuitive, but setting establishes a place at a certain time—the stage. Setting begs the questions: Why is a character there, what brings them to that place? It establishes the novel’s trajectory. For example, le Carré’s novel, The Spy Who Comes in From the Cold, opens with American and British officers at a Berlin Wall border crossing waiting for an East German spy to bicycle to the West. In one deft brush stroke, le Carré creates the grim, claustrophobic atmosphere in which the protagonist, Alec Leamus, operates.

Knowing the novel’s setting makes it easier to know the character. It requires that you answer the questions: Why here? Why now? I operate on the principle that the more I get to know a character, the longer I spend with them, the more likely they’ll have the complexity, humanity, intelligence, and cleverness that will engage the reader.

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Before I start writing I create a dossier for each character: name, age, birthplace, work habits, religious beliefs, favorite drink, family history, desires, fears, tics, speech habits, education, motivations, and vulnerabilities. I visualize a character’s entire life. Most of what I develop never appears in the novel, but knowing it allows me to give a character depth and gravity. Characters in a novel are like strangers we meet in life—we get to know them through the telling surface details that make us curious about who they are. Hints and suggestions often work better than flat observations, but to credibly hint and suggest, you need to know the deeper person.

Character descriptions help the reader ‘see’ a character, but writers often make the mistake of overly describing their characters, pointing out hair color, tone of voice, clothes worn, and irrelevant details of mood and manner. As the adjectives pile up, the character is lost in a distracting amalgam of unnecessary words. My approach, to paraphrase James Baldwin, is to write a description that is ‘as clean as a bone.’

Speech brings a character to life. Give a character something to say, and you’ll reveal them in two or three lines. Accents and speech patterns help make a character stand out. Language, for me, is a bit like terroir for wine. Where a character comes from helps define who they arevalues and sensibility. A Scotsman speaks differently and has a different outlook than an Englishman. Cadence, phrasing, accent are helpful tools to distinguish one character from another and give each personality.

Conflict, choice, and interiority help bring a character to life. Flat characters who react to situations are stereotypes, but the character who confronts a crisis and struggles with it, feeling a tug on her conscience, becomes sympathetic. Interiority gives a character wholeness and dimension. Hamlet’s interiority comes in each of his seven soliloquies and through his thoughts we understand his struggle.

I don’t draw portraits of spies, but I draw portraits of people who happen to work as spies. The choices they make in their lives emerge from who they are, and those choices might conflict with the requirements of their spy work. The spy’s job may be to suborn friends, lie to adversaries, betray a trust, but it is the spy’s nagging, perhaps inconvenient, humanity that makes them suffer their choices, and excites the reader’s empathy.

Ultimately, when writing character, I always try to keep in mind F. Scott Fitzgerald’s timeless admonition: “Character is plot. Plot is character.” 

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