Writing popular fiction

saved, it must be by his own hand or by events he has initiated himself. Likewise, do not solve the plot problem by having the protagonist-antagonist clash turn out to be "one big mistake." A reader who has breathlessly followed the growing terror of your hero's condition is hardly going to be pleased when the villain opens the dungeon door, smiles, shakes hands with the man he has been persecuting, and explains that the entire affair has been a ghastly case of mistaken identity or misinterpreted motivations.

INADEQUATE RESOLUTION
    You must be especially careful to provide believable and interesting solutions to each of the hero's plot problems and, finally, to his major predicament. If you don't choose to work from a point-by-point outline (see Chapter Nine for a discussion of the pros and cons of outlining your plot), you can easily write your lead into a corner from which you can only extricate him by the most silly and artificial means.
    Edgar Wallace, one of the most famous adventure writers of the twenties and thirties, was once writing an adventure serial for a leading magazine in that field. The magazine rushed each installment into print almost as soon as they got it, before Wallace had finished the next part. Each installment ended on a moment of high suspense, in order to keep the reader coming back for more. At the conclusion of one installment, the hero was trapped in a smooth-sided pit out of which he could not climb. He was threatened above by the enemy, pressed at both sides by spikes that were slowly closing in from the walls, and endangered by a pipe spewing molten lead into his hole. The readers were all but salivating for the final installment to learn how the hero escaped
this
situation. In truth, the editors were salivating as well—for fear the author wouldn't be able to rescue his man in time. Evidently, the author himself was stuck for a while, but when he delivered the last part of the serial, he had overcome the problem handily in the first sentence:
With a mighty leap
[he] sprang out of the pit
.
    Today, no magazine publishes story installments before the author has finished the entire piece. And no book editor will be satisfied with rabbit-from-the-hat solutions. Your hero must be clever and bold enough to deal with obstructions you've placed before him, and he must deal with them
in an interesting, original manner
.
    There are seven different types of suspense stories, categorized by the occupation of the lead character. Each type has its own requirements and its own
clichés to avoid. Let's examine each:

SPY STORIES
    Stories of secret agents, counter-espionage, international intrigue, secret formulas, political prisoners, passwords, and dagger-carrying assassins are perennially popular, though the audience for the form
does
peak and ebb. The heroes here are spies—usually for the United States or for Great Britain—and are developed in one of two ways: (1) as another James Bond superhero who has access to fantastic gadgets and whose physical stamina and moral resources are without limit, or (2) as a realistic character with his own personal problems, doubts, ambitions, fears, and talents, like the lead in John Le Carre's
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
. Unquestionably, the second approach is more desirable.
    When building a lead character for your spy story, you must consider the subculture in which he exists and understand what character traits that strange milieu demands and forbids. For example, a successful spy could not be scrupulously honest, nor could he be a committed pacifist; in the line of duty, he will be called upon to steal, cheat, lie, and kill. Because espionage agents travel all around the world and are familiar with many other cultures which they often respect, they are not so opinionated, racially or religiously, as the average United States citizen. Sexual and social relationships that cross racial barriers would not be thought "abnormal" or even unusual by a spy. Furthermore, the spy has seen, in his job, that "moral" behavior is relative and that it rarely accomplishes anything, while Machiavellian techniques usually lead to the desired results. For this reason, he is not likely to subscribe to any formal religion. Unrestricted by religious taboos, and his sense of pleasure sharpened by the constant possibility of sudden death, the spy will usually be sexually liberated. If not, he may be the type of man who finds a sexual outlet in risking his life and