Category Archives: Clare Langley-Hawthorne

The Ideal (Fictitious) Villain

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By Clare Langley-Hawthorne
www.clarelangleyhawthorne.com

John Mortimer, creator of Rumpole, wrote that “most of the interest and part of the terror of great crime are not due to what is abnormal, but to what is normal in it; what we have in common with the criminal rather than the subtle insanity which differentiates him from us.” I couldn’t agree more – for me, it is the commonality rather than the abnormality that makes a villain truly villainous.

Take Doctor Crippen – an unremarkable man in real life, the least likely man perhaps to have poisoned and dismembered his wife or to have been pursued across the Atlantic with a young mistress in tow disguised as a boy. Part of the fascination with this case is the sheer ordinariness of the supposed murderer – and now, with DNA evidence casting doubt on whether the woman whose body was found was that of Doctor Crippen’s wife, Cora, the mystery of what actually happened may never be solved.

In fiction of course, some of the most fantastical crimes that occur in real life can never be used simply because readers would never believe them. Take for example the man who murdered his wife over an affair that happened 40 years before and then left her body as a gift beneath the Christmas tree. Writers have to walk a fine line with villains too, making them both believable as well as intriguing. Are they merely the flip side of the protagonist? Are they an ordinary person pushed to the brink? Or does some deep psychological wound create the monster within?

As a historical mystery writer and fan, I have a preference for the enigmatic ‘villain or not’ character. I still recall the terror I felt as a twelve year old reading Daphne DuMaurier’s Rebecca late one night when I realized Maxim de Winter may have murdered his wife.
Part of the pleasure of reading Dickens, for me, is his rendition of such memorably odious characters as Mr. Murdstone, Uriah Heep and Steerforth (and that’s just in David Copperfield!)

As for female villains, I love Annie Wilson in Dorothy Sayers’ Gaudy Night. Even though no murder is committed her vitriolic outburst and her ability to mask her hatred beneath sheer ordinariness and subservience made her a perfect villainess in my book. Then of course there’s Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca and that other Annie in Stephen King’s Misery…now they’re just downright bloody terrifying.

So what makes the ideal ‘fictitious’ villain for you?
Please also join me as I guest blog at Good Girls Kill for Money where I discuss what makes the ideal ‘fictitious’ husband…which is in no way inspired by my musings on villainy…

There’s No Place Like Home?

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By Clare Langley-Hawthorne
www.clarelangleyhawthorne.com

I did a radio interview on Friday and the host asked me “you were born in Canada to British parents, grew up in Australia and now live in America, so where’s home?” It took me just a few seconds to answer because as my children were born in America, for me, wherever they are is home. Yet the question has a deeper resonance in many respects. As a writer I get to determine where my characters live and what their heritage is. I get to decide whether, for them, they ever find ‘home.’

My parents and I arrived in Melbourne in 1973 when Australia was a far cry from the cosmopolitan place it is today. My mother thought it parochial and frightening. In many respects it was as alien to her as the moon would have been. A clear vaulted endless sky to her beloved green England that was (more often than not) shrouded in cloud and rain. I grew up with the image of England firmly entrenched in my head. Canada (which I left when I was a year old) was little more than a place on a map, but England – that was the place of my ancestors, the place of all my parents’ memories and the stories I read as a young child. When I left Australia to come to America I didn’t really have any misgivings and since living here I have had few hankerings for the place – preferring to make my home wherever I lay my hat. For my husband, however, Australia remains firmly rooted in his consciousness. There will never be another place that’s home for him.

I found it intriguing that as soon as I started to write my first novel, Consequences of Sin, I knew it would have to be set in England and I knew I would be drawing upon my parents’ experiences, in both the North and South, rather than my own. I also found that my main character, Ursula Marlow, was in a similar predicament to me – she was effectively homeless. Lancashire, the place of her childhood, was no longer home. Her father, having made his fortune, moved to London to show the world that he had finally made it. Yet London was not her home either. Not being a member of the aristocracy (her father is bourgeois ‘new money’ after all) she has an entrée into society only by virtue of his money and she will never be truly one of them. Essentially, she roams the earth as a perpetual outsider.

If you look up the word ‘home’ in the dictionary you will find a myriad of definitions – concepts which I get to toy with in my books to keep my characters off guard. At least my characters haven’t started to complain about my treatment of them like they do in Spike Milligan’s hilarious book Puckoon – well, not unless I’ve had one too many glasses of red wine (drinking, now there’s an Aussie trait if ever there was one!)

I’ve been doing a number of library panels this summer and most of the authors seem to agree that their characters are outsiders. More often than not, this is what provides them with the ability to observe and solve a mystery in ways that those characters who are at home within themselves and society cannot. I like the idea of the homeless character constantly searching either for a sense of self or reconciliation with their own past. I wonder, though, how much I am projecting my own search for home in my books. Perhaps it provides a unique perspective as, being essentially nomadic, I am just as happy to immerse myself in researching another time and place as I am to board a plane and go live in another country.

Will my children feel the same? Will America be their home or not? Will I ever let my fictitious children find that comforting ideal? In short, will Ursula Marlow find her home before me?