Or a how-to on undercover villainy.

Anyone here watch Modern Family? Anyhow, in the latest episode Gloria flunks out of jury duty because she’s really good at picking out bad guys (what with having experience on a firing squad and all). My first thought was, we’ve all been there haven’t we?

Not in real life obviously. In real life, unless I am benevolently spying on people in a coffee shop, I am blissfully immune to noticing stuff. I once walked into the middle of a protection racket shake down (it wasn’t, it was more the petty cash pick up of a protection racket) and didn’t notice until I had already ordered my chips and me and the thug had to stand and wait.

Let me tell you – that makes for some awkward small talk.

No, I mean when you’re reading a book and/or watching the TV (Christmas is coming, sometimes you gotta multitask) and you just know. The main character is there bemoaning the fact that they will never find out who the villainous, vile, vituperous villain (I’ve previously mentioned my issues with alliteration right?) and you’re going ‘It’s him. The one chewing on a cracker piled with puppy pate’.

It doesn’t always spoil the book, but sometimes it can be hard to have much respect for a character who seems about as observant as a lump of wet toast. In my case, I usually end up rooting for the bad guy. I had this issue on Major Crimes, the bad guy was so much smarter than everyone else that, despite the fact he was a murderous rapist, I kinda felt he deserved to get away. He’d put the work in, the main character hadn’t.

That also makes for awkward small talk when you try to explain it to people, by the way.

The problem is that creators fall into a Catch-22 when they’re writing anything with a not immediately revealed villain*. They need to be obvious enough that the readers are maybe one step ahead of the main characters but not so obvious that the readers are off smoking a cigarette while your main character is still scratching their head. Part of that is obviously in how the plot unwinds, dropping clues like bread crumbs in front of the book worm Hansel and Gretels reading along. A lot of it, however, is in the character themselves.

The guy who eats puppies, cuts line openly in queues, and constantly has ominious shots of them touching themselves as they look over tiny copies of their cities? Bad guy (or not the bad guy, and everyone is annoyed because the guy was such a shit it seems implausible he’s not behind everything from traffic jams to serial murders).

Guy too good to be true? The one that the book makes clear couldn’t possible be physically or morally capable of committing such grotesqueries as the main character is wading through? Totally the bad guy – look at that asshole helping nuns across the road like he’s fooling anyone!

So how to straddle that divide with dignity intact? First of all, shorts under skirts help with that a lot. There are, however, some tricks that I’ve picked up over years of being both a reader and a writer (although I am not nearly as good as a friend of mine whose husband thinks she sneaks out to watch movies without him, because she always picks out the plot points two minutes ahead).

1: Keep ’em guessing. No character – no actual person – is unrelentingly good or bad. Even the most saintly nun in the world sometimes farts and blames it on the novice who’s taken a vow of silence; even the biggest asshole in the world sometimes takes a break from putting a luxury tax on tampons to compliment their secretary on their new hair-do. It doesnt change their essential character, it just makes them believable. So make sure your villain is likeable sometimes, don’t have them behave obnoxiously to the main character without a good reason.

2: Give them a good reason to dislike the main character. Nothing throws doubt on a character’s motivations like giving them a perfectly justified and established reason to dislike the main character. On Sherlock Sally Donovan’s dislike of Holmes is so well established that no one would question her being obstructive and unpleasant to him.

3: Use the character’s POV to show why he suspects everyone. Yeah, he thinks that the hot dude with the glasses might be his supervillain in disguise, but he also suspects that the traffic warden who gave him a ticket that morning is the bad guy. He might be a bit paranoid, but spreading the suspicion around helps**.

4: Your villain might need to be the most likely suspect in the end, but make sure that all the suspects are viable. Sometimes you make things too neat when you’re writing: this character could have done but was in Paris!; this character has the motive and was in the area, but it turns out they can’t raise their arm above 90 degrees so couldn’t have bludgeoned a taller man! The ONLY real suspect is….puppy pate man! Sometimes things aren’t that simple, and it can me more satisfying to uncover the villain through action rather than investigation. He’s caught in the act, he attacks the detective, or he gets angry enough to drop himself in it with an incriminating detail.

I’m currently obsessed with Quantico. It’s a show that has its faults, but it has so far done a great job of making everyone a suspect. They all have secrets, they all have the capability, and we can’t trust anyone – but they’re still likeable enough that we want to. I’m not even entirely sure that Alex (main character) is innocent even though she’s the viewpoint character.

So it can be done.

*this still counts for villains where the consumer knows who the bad guy is but the main character doesn’t (Columbo style). It can’t be too easy to identify the bad guy or the detective looks bad at their job; it can’t be so hard that the writer has to hand the answers to the detective in the last quarter of the book.

** In a romance you have to be careful here, you don’t want your character sleeping with some guy he suspects of an atrocity. There can still be some doubt, but there’s an equation where you have to balance the ick factor of the crime (petty theft – low, murder of puppies – high) and the percentage of suspicion (pretty sure they didnt, actually think they did) against your character’s good judgement.