December 7, 2005
A very long time ago, mystery author Robert B. Parker, who pens the Spenser private investigator novels, wrote a novel about a teenage girl who, at least partly in response to her parents, ran away and became a prostitute. I'm not sure, but I think this was "God Save the Child." I do know that he came back to this character in "Taming a Seahorse." Spenser is hired to find and return the girl. He does. She promptly runs away again and proceeds to be a hooker. This happens repeatedly. By the end of the novel, among other things, Spenser's solution is to take the girl to a high-end brothel run by a woman in New York, who takes the girl under her wing. The solution, as it were, is, if you're going to be a hooker, you might as well be the best hooker you can be.

The made-for-TV version, starring Robert Urich as Spenser, had--not surprisingly--a different ending. The girl is taken to a halfway house for teen prostitutes, and the last time we see her she is dressed like a clean-cut cherub in jeans and a loose sweater, looking not remotely sexy. Not, certainly, like we saw her earlier dressed like a little girl in a very short skirt, pig-tails, sucking a lollypop for the "real" sickos she was involved with.

Which ending is better? I know the book's ending took some hits from people who found it to not be a solution at all. I thought when I read it that it was provocative and interesting--troubling, too. Parker often looks for unusual solutions to these types of problems, and as much as the Spenser novels exist in their own sometimes surreal version of SpenserWorld, there is often a conscious admission that easy solutions often only work in fiction and that human beings are complex and that sometimes a half-good solution is better than no solution. And certainly, although the TV version of this story satisfies everybody into believing they all live happily ever after and a teenager who is so troubled that she intentionally pursues increasingly worse versions of prostition as a way of punishing both her parents and herself can easily and quickly be rehabilitated into a National Honors Society clean-cut teenage girl, at some level this rings horribly false. It's wish-fulfilment at its most dangerous.

At novel's end, we hope for some sort of closure, emotional, if not factual. In my novella, Catfish Guru, Theo MacGreggor finds himself investigating the murder of a biologist. The case involves blackmail and cover-ups and ultimately someone is killed by the supposed murderer. It all appears to be wrapped up nice and neat. There is tragedy, but Mac goes home. Then the cop involved in the case visits him and one of the questions he asks is, "Who really killed the scientist?" And Mac says he doesn't know. So the cop asks him the same question a little differently, which is, "Did the guy we arrested for the murder actually do it?" And Mac is more or less forced to say he doesn't think so. There is no evidence, either way, but Mac thinks that the person they arrested, and who did murder someone, did not actually kill the scientist. He thinks someone else did, someone close to him, someone he may have been in love with. The cop tells him there's no evidence. Mac, subtly, if not overtly, suggests that all the evidence he needs in this situation is in his heart.

So who killed the catfish guru? I left that up to the reader to decide. I was concerned when I wrote this that it wasn't decisive enough. And what's fascinated me is when readers read this--just as I had hoped--they all have different ideas on who did the killing. As my brother said, "I'm comfortable with a certain level of ambiguity." And although the ending is ambiguous, it's a story that seemed to have been well-received by readers.

Sometimes your story needs a straightforward solution. Sometimes you should be creative. Sometimes you should look at all the complexities you created and say, "Maybe there is no straightforward solution." And if there isn't, how can you bring the story to an end and still have it be satisfying?

Sometimes--particularly in traditional mysteries--readers want all the loose ends tied up. But in real life they rarely are (which is probably why we want it in our fiction). I think some loose ends can remain loose ends, or, if not that, can turn out to be distractions unrelated to the main knot you're trying to untangle.

Ever hear of the Gordian knot? That big hairball of a knot that Alexander the Great was supposedly going to unravel? Stephen King commented once that in his novel The Stand, his solution was to have Alexander pick up his sword, yell, "Fuck it!" and chop the knot to shreds. In King's case, he meant wiping out most of the planet.

In thrillers and mysteries, sometimes it's easy to just kill off the villain. There's a kind of vigilante satisfaction in that. Sometimes that works rather too easily, though. The case your detective makes doesn't have to be strong enough to convince anyone "beyond the shadow of a doubt" that you've got the right perp. He snarls in your sleuth's face that "I got away with it and I'll get away with it next time, too, copper," and your character pulls out a gun and blows the villain away and says, "Not on my beat, you won't."

Sometimes it works. But it's been done to, uh, death. Sometimes you need to find other solutions. It's not easy. You need to satisfy the reader. Closure, the bad guy locked away, the bad guy dead, the bad guy confessing, the bad guy actually coming to a bookstore so the sleuth can say, "I know you're wondering why I brought you here today." It's the responsibility of the novelist to dig a little deeper and come up with a solution to a story that satisfies, is logical, but isn't trite or simplistic.

You didn't think it would be easy, did you?

Best,
Mark Terry