Trama Idiota

So how often have you seen, or read, this?

Your stalwart detective protagonist is on the trail of the bad guys, who are maybe serial killers, or anyway are known to kidnap and torture people.  The bad guys then threaten not the detective, who is of course too stalwart to pay attention to such threats, but the detective’s spouse and/or children.  The detective pays no attention to the threat, because he’s stalwart I guess, and maybe doesn’t even warn his family about the threat because . . . because something, we don’t know what.

And then of course the bad guys kidnap the detective’s wife and/or children, so there can be a thrilling rescue scene when the detective charges to the rescue.

This is what is known as an “idiot plot,” because it only works when everyone in the story is an idiot.

I just finished reading a novel with this plot, and it made me crazy.  The craziness was exacerbated by the fact that the novel was otherwise very, very good, with well-drawn characters, taut writing, and a vivid sense of place and time.  And I know the author isn’t an idiot, because I’ve read other books by the same person, and they were pretty good.

But the idiocy just took me right out, and here I was shouting at the characters in the book.  “You deserve to die!” I’d shout.  “You’re a complete moron!”  And, “Two and two make four.  Ya dipshit!“

(If you’re an author, you probably don’t want someone shouting at your book that way.)

So the stoic detective learns that his wife and daughter have been threatened by a homicidal sociopath who seems to have a kink for torturing and murdering women.  Now any real husband or father would either get his wife and kid out of town, or put guard on them, or both.  But no, our guy does nothing, at least for several days, and then he mentions the threat to his wife and suggests that maybe she and the daughter should leave.

“We’re not going anywhere!” the wife proclaims, because responding rationally to threats means Osama wins, or something, and the detective just sort of shrugs and gets on with his life, which is all the more unbelievable because the character has already lost a family member to a killer.  He doesn’t even warn his own daughter.  Now here’s what I would have said:

“Okay, you can stay.  But when you’re down in the cellar tied into the fetal position with barbed wire, and you’re watching our daughter being raped by a guy who’s cutting her nipples off with garden shears, I want you to just keep repeating that.  ‘We’re not going anywhere.  We’re not going anywhere.’  Because by then it will be true.”

Okay, so maybe most parents wouldn’t be that graphic.  But if my spouse continued to be stubborn, I would have sapped her behind the ear with a blackjack, stuffed her in a trunk, and paid some bush pilot to fly her to the middle of the Everglades for a week, along with my daughter.  Better to eat gator than to sleep with the fishes, I always say.

And then the big action finale was so confusing that I still can’t quite work not not what happened, but why it happened the way it did.

I dunno, maybe the writer was up against a deadline and couldn’t think of anything smart for his character to do.  But it’s sad when someone with a lot of talent lets you so completely down.

Which is why I work really hard on my endings, trying to make sure that they are exciting and surprising and true to the characters and action-packed (assuming action is appropriate, which it sometimes isn’t).  I’m not the best judge of my work– well actually I am— but I’m willing to admit that my judgment might be flawed along with my finales, but I really do work on them, and I almost always know how the work is going to end before I start writing, so that I can build to it as I go along.

So jeez, lazy writers, work a little harder, will ya?  I never want to see this lazy, cliche ending ever again.  Capisci?

(And by the way, I had to look up “capisci” to make sure I had it in the informal second person, not “capisce,” the way lazy writers have it.  So, lazy writers, fix that too, while you’re at it.)