Where do I get the inspiration for villains in my Rae Riley Mysteries? Well, my ideas come from a lot of places, but mostly from … me.
Once I establish the basic personality of my villain, I have to see if it’s believable for this character to commit the crime I’ve planned for the mystery. And the way to determine that is to climb into their skin.
G. K. Chesterton puts it so well in the his short story “The Secret of Father Brown”. Father Brown is one of my favorite detectives, an amateur sleuth featured in a series of short stories published between 1910 and 1936. In “The Secret of Father Brown”, the priest has gained a reputation for solving crimes and a visitor wants to know why he’s so successful. Father Brown says:
“I had planned out each of the crimes very carefully … I had thought out exactly how a thing like that could be done, and in what style or state of mind a man could really do it. And when I was quite sure that I felt exactly like the murderer myself, of course I knew who he was.”
I can’t say I like thinking like my villains. Because I know somewhere in the history, there’s been someone so miserably cold, calculating, or selfish, and that is so sad. Selfishness is what evil comes down to in the end. Someone wants what he wants at someone else’s expense. But there are different degrees that people allow themselves to go to in order to achieve their selfish desires. And I have to think and feel like each character to see if he or she is selfish enough to commit the crime.
I hope the exercise creates believable villains. Not mustache-twirling, cackling ones. But ones who, sadly, can exist in real life.
Who are believable villains from fiction?
Here are more ideas for writing mysteries.