Writing popular fiction

the city's slums where he can find no succor and make no friends.
    Few suspense novels generate narrative tension exclusively through the chase. A rare exception is Alan Dipper's modern chase story,
The Paradise Formula
, which seems to have been modeled on the more famous but inferior
The 39 Steps
by John Buchan. The new suspense writer is on more solid ground if he augments his chase sequences with other tension-generating techniques.

THE RACE AGAINST TIME
    Setting a time limit for the events of the story creates an urgency that adds to the suspense page by page. For example: "Unless he located Hawfield in twenty-four hours, the girl would be killed," or "He had six hours to reach the rendezvous point, and if he did not make it, he would be left alone behind enemy lines without resources of any kind." As the minutes tick by, each obstacle to the hero's progress is magnified and made more (pleasantly) frustrating for the reader.
    Two novels which make superb use of the time limit are John Lange's
Binary
(in which a federal agent must find two hidden tanks of deadly nerve gas, in the center of a city, before their scheduled time of detonation) and Michael Mason's 71
Hours
(in which Secret Service and FBI agents have exactly seventy-one hours to locate a hired assassin before he shoots the Russian Premier at a scheduled diplomatic mission landing at a Washington airfield).
    Be certain that your time limit is a genuine restriction on the development of the plot. Don't send your hero racing towards a place when, in actual fact, there's no reason for him to be there in two hours instead of two days. Something drastic should transpire if he fails to reach the place in time.
    If you have set a time limit for your hero and propelled him into a breakneck journey, don't put more than one accident of Fate in his way. If he is delayed by a long freight train crossing the road, don't repeat a similar incident with a herd of cows, and don't confront him with a landslide across the highway after those first two unexpected delays; the reader will stop believing your story. You must build obstacles from the hero's own actions. For example, if he is reacting to the pressure of the situation by driving too fast for the road conditions, it is logical for him to wreck the car. He will then need to find another vehicle or continue on foot. If he is in a blind rush to get where he's going, he might steal a car that's parked nearby with the keys in its ignition, and a confrontation with police might ensue, further delaying him. The reader would not mind this sort of obstacle, for he can see cause and effect, which are missing when the obstacle is a trick of Fate.

ANTICIPATION OF A VIOLENT EVENT
    The third method of creating narrative tension—anticipation of a violent
event—should
be implicit in the first two techniques. The man being chased is trying to avoid his own death or trying to keep information from the antagonists which would allow them to wreak havoc on other people. The race against time is entered for the express purpose of preventing some deadly, disastrous event. If this violent event is not his own death, it should be something that will have a grave effect on the hero—such as the death of the woman he loves.
    The bestselling novel,
The Day of the Jackal
by Frederick Forsyth, builds narrative tension in all three ways. The protagonist is a clever French policeman assigned the
job of tracking down a hired killer who intends to assassinate the President of France on a certain day, at a certain place: the race against time. The antagonist is the assassin who is almost as clever as the policeman and is being hunted across the entire European continent: the chase. As the story builds and builds, the reader begins to wonder if the assassin might not kill
someone
, even if not the President: anticipation of a violent event. Forsyth employs the three methods to the last page, resolving the story in the very last paragraph.
    Once you have chosen the type of suspense story you want to write, have picked and researched a background, have plotted your story, and have decided how you will build narrative tension, you should ponder these three less important but still vital questions:
    1.
Should my story be told in first or third person
? There is no hard and fast rule for this, in any genre; every story demands its own voice. However, a good rule of thumb is to use third person for a story whose hero is hard-bitten and extremely