This will be a mini-review. I’ve reviewed one of Stephen J. Cannell’s novels already, and will doubtless review more (I’ve become a fan). Final Victim isn’t a world-changing novel, but I thought it very well crafted, and I just wanted to meditate on its virtues.
Cannell, as you likely know, is one of the most successful television producers in the industry. He’s also a prolific script writer (though, interestingly, he’s dyslexic). As a professional, he knows how to tell a story, seizing the viewer’s (or reader’s) attention with a wrestler’s grip, and never letting go.
What we’ve got here is basically your garden variety psycho killer book. We’ve got a clever, cunning nut job who’s murdering a series of women for very twisted reasons, and a team of “loose cannons” trying to hunt him down—a male/female U.S. Customs agent team, plus an infamous computer hacker, now incarcerated. Many rules are bent—and broken—in the course of their pursuit. (Not that it spoiled the book for me, but I’d just once like to read a mystery about a cop who isn’t a loose cannon.)
What impressed me was the skill with which Cannell constantly ratcheted the action up. As in a good TV script, every scene either depicted action or advanced the plot by increasing our knowledge of the characters. The tension increased beyond anything I expected, leading to a point where two of the three protagonists were lying in hospital beds, incapacitated, shortly before the remaining one walked into a life-threatening situation.
I came to an epiphany about plotting as I read this book. What do you do, as an author, if you’re planning a story, and you can’t figure out a way to resolve the plot without cheating a little? What if you can’t save your hero without inserting a small miracle, or a deus ex machina of some kind?
You can get away with that by making things really (and increasingly) hard in the plot buildup. If your hero suffers so many setbacks and frustrations that he seems (like Job) to have been specially singled out for undeserved suffering, and if he seems on his way to inescapable doom, then you can pitch him an undeserved spot of luck when he needs it, and the reader will figure he’s got it coming. Universal balance demands a break, eventually.
And as a bonus, you will have riveted your readers’ attention in the process.
One final point about Final Victim. As is so often the case in stories about psychopathic killers, childhood abuse by a religious parent is offered as an explanation for the villain’s wickedness. This could easily have led to a conventional dismissal of religion as harmful, stupid, and irrational. Cannell (to his great credit) avoids this through including a couple positive references to a couple of the characters’ Christianity. At one crucial point, a character prays a prayer that might have come right out of a Crossways novel. I have no reason to think Cannell is religious himself, so I give him special credit for that decent act.