PLOT vs CHARACTER: Guest Post by Will Ferguson

WILL FERGUSON is the author of the literary thriller 419, which won the prestigious Giller Prize for Literature, and The Finder, which received the Arthur Ellis Award for Crime Fiction. His new novel, Officer Shimada and the Disappearing Girl, is out now. He lives in Calgary, Canada, and is the father of novelist Genki Ferguson.

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“People pick up a novel because of the plot. They keep reading because of the characters.” 

This was the sage advice I received from an editor when I first moved from travel writing to crime fiction. I’d worked as a travel writer for many years, and although it shares a lot of similarities with fiction—a central protagonist, a journey, a sense of place, the artful use of the telling detail—travel writing was still constrained, at least partly, by the truth. If I was writing a memoir about hitchhiking across Japan or walking across Northern Ireland, I could tweak the timeline, juggle events, exaggerate some of the encounters for comedic effect, but I couldn’t, say, kill someone along the way just to liven things up. Not unless I really did it, which would have been frowned upon. 

In contrast, crime fiction—or murder mysteries, or detective stories, or thrillers, or cozies, or whichever iteration you prefer--requires a corpse. Impossible crimes, or “locked room” mysteries as they are known, fascinated me. These are the ultimate puzzle mysteries, not so much a whodunit? as a “How’d they do it?” John Dickson Carr was the master of the locked room mystery, outselling Agatha Christie in his day, yet he is now all but forgotten, while Christie’s novels continue to be read, adapted, celebrated. Why? The problem lies in the nature of the locked room genre itself. Carr’s plots involve complex solutions that are often too clever by half. He gets so caught up in the mechanics of it that he forgets the human element. He tends to employ stock characters—the sassy flapper, the harumphing British uncle, the reclusive wealthy heir—to the detriment of the story itself. Christie’s characters are more layered, more eccentric, more contradictory. It’s why she is still read and Carr, for the most part, is not. It was a lesson I took to heart. 

I’d become obsessed with a news story I misread while living in Japan. A young woman, working as a hostess in a club on the fourth floor of a bar building, had gone missing. Her friends came by to meet her at the elevator after her shift, but she had, in their words, “disappeared.” They meant it figuratively. When they showed up, she was already gone. She had “disappeared.” The story ended tragically, but that initial misunderstanding on my part stayed with me. How could someone disappear from inside an elevator?

I set about solving this conundrum, first sealing off the elevator from any escape hatches or back doors, and then adding witnesses at each floor to ensure she didn’t slip out along the way. I wanted to eliminate the obvious, and eventually I came up with a solution to the puzzle. But that’s all I had: a puzzle. In my editor’s words, I had a reason for people to pick up the book—“A girl disappears from a crowded elevator late at night,” is certainly a solid hook--but did I have a reason for them to keep reading?

I spent years with that puzzle percolating in the back of my brain, but it wasn’t until I asked the crucial question, “Who was she, this girl on the elevator? Who was waiting for her at the bottom?” that the story finally came into focus. I had lived in southern Japan for five years, the first two on the remote Amakusa Islands, so I made her the daughter of a fisherman, a domineering man who sends her fifteen-year old brother over to bring back his sister after they’ve found out she’s been working as a hostess. The brother arrives, but the girl vanishes between floors. The boy returns to face his father’s ire. What would that do to you? It haunts the boy. He becomes a police detective specializing in missing persons cases. 

And from these characters came the heart of the story. Officer Shimada and the Disappearing Girl is meant to be that rarest of creatures: a character-driven impossible crime novel. I leave it to readers to decide whether it succeeds.