Writing popular fiction

Fireball, and Four for the Money), he will not kill unless forced to do so to save his own
life. Usually, he does not kill innocent bystanders or policemen (those he
simply outwits), but he will use bullets on other criminals and crooked cops who
have him marked. After killing, he will evidence either overt or covert remorse
for what he has had to do, though he will always be too pragmatic to moan and
weep about death.
    If you choose to use a protagonist who is
an admirable crook, do not fall into the moralistic trap of using the cliché
ending in which, after all his trials and tribulations, the lead loses the
stolen loot either through a quirk of fate, the machinations of an even more
crooked partner, or the cunning of the police. If you have established your
crook as a sympathetic character and have gotten your reader to root for him
throughout the bank robbery (or whatever), your audience will only be frustrated
when he loses everything simply because you feel that you must prove "crime
doesn't pay."
    Do not confuse your reader by trying to
establish a sympathetic criminal protagonist who commits a crime that is grossly
unpleasant—stealing from hardworking folks, stealing from invalids, rape, murder
of innocent bystanders —and at odds with what is expected of a hero.

SUDDEN TERROR STORIES
    In these tales, the protagonists are ordinary, everyday people, going about average jobs, minding their own business—but are suddenly thrown into a violent confrontation that shatters their complacency. The appeal in this kind of story lies in its verisimilitude, the readers' certainty that this kind of thing might happen to anyone. Few of us ever meet spies or know professional crooks, but any one of us might become the victim of a psychotic killer.
    John D. MacDonald's
The Executioners
is a sudden terror story of formidable proportions. Sam Bowden is the protagonist, fourteen years out of the service after having testified against a shipmate who criminally assaulted a young girl. The rapist, Max Cady, was sentenced to life at hard labor; in the intervening years, Bowden has married and fathered children including a lovely teen-age daughter. When Cady gains his freedom, he has only one desire: revenge on Bowden for testifying against him. Cady is a dangerous man, clever enough to work clandestinely and keep the police out of the picture, unsettled enough to want to kill Bowden's entire family and rape his young daughter. As the story unfolds, Bowden can find no help from organized authority and must learn to overcome his natural decency in order to fight for the lives of his loved ones. The heightening suspense and hard, reasonable climax are unforgettable.
    The most famous suspense novel in this form is Joseph Hayes'
The Desperate Hours
, which has sold nearly four million copies, world-wide. The story deals with a fine, happy family whose home is taken over, without warning, by a desperate group of sadistic escaped convicts who have nothing to lose by murder and much to gain if they can use the Milliard family to prepare and accomplish their own escape from the search area.
    In all of these sudden terror tales, the main theme is that, in this less-than-perfect world, the completely civilized man cannot survive unless, in times of peril, he can reject his civilized veneer and act with the cunning and the sense of self-preservation that for most of the tale has made the villain superior to him. The protagonist should triumph. The writer who lets him die is, in effect, saying that the civilized man
never
stands a chance against the savages in society, and the reader will rarely
tolerate such a frighteningly pessimistic attitude.

WAR STORIES
    Here, the heroes are soldiers, and the values portrayed are nearly always pure black and white, good and evil. The Second World War is the most popular background for novels of this nature, perhaps because the Nazis were so inexcusably evil that the reader can easily draw lines between the protagonists and antagonists. This simplicity of moral judgment is necessary, because a war story requires so much killing: if the reader is not comfortable with the clear-cut assignments of guilt and virtue, from the very start, he may be revolted rather than entertained.
    By leaving your villains somewhat shrouded in mystery and giving only your heroes well-rounded personalities, you can contribute towards this black-and-white situation. Your heroes should be intricately detailed,