Pivot Time

Actually, I already pivoted. I just didn't realize it until now. The pivot happened between the first book and all of the rest.

I thought it was changes in my writing, or perhaps the change in the character arc, but really what is going on is that the first book in the series is a different kind of book.

The Athens book is a thriller. And it isn't even that she is being chased (although she certainly is) but that she is fleeing. She's a neophyte tourist without any personal confidence, on her own in a strange place. She doesn't understand enough to properly grasp her situation or come up with better ideas -- she just runs. That's the strong structure, and those are things that aren't true for any other book in the series.

In the thriller model, the heroes are on the back foot for most of the book. They are reacting; it is the villain who drives the plot. Very close to the end of the book, the heroes are pushed into a final desperate confrontation -- often involving some long-shot gamble of a plan -- and the villain is finally forced to react to what the hero is doing.

I pretty much hit all the classic beats. This is thriller-adventure in an exotic location. And, yeah, there are places I lost the thread, there are places I went too slow or described too much, but the combination of thriller format and the inexperience of Penny acted to control the amount of "stuff." It is all unfamiliar to Penny and that unfamiliarity is the point. So the idiot lectures were -- mostly! -- toned down.

The later books are mysteries. Cozy mysteries, even. So that's already a more contemplative approach. And the very nature of a mystery, as opposed to an action-adventure, is that the protagonist is the driver. Penny is, despite some of the situations she ends up in, never quite pushed by the plot as she was in the first book.

Even in the Japan book, which brought back the action and the pressure, Penny made a choice to go up against the cult, to train, to go into their compound. The same happens in the London book; she isn't driven by outside forces, fleeing or struggling, she makes the choice  to go into the tunnels.

And the flavor of the choice wasn't good. In both cases, Penny doesn't leap at the adventure, she doesn't make a heroic declaration. She approaches what she knows is going to be a difficult task with resignation. That's never a good place for a story to be. Hell, I should have learned this back in acting class (I remember in particular a monologue I did and the teacher's suggestion of a very different way to approach it).

(The lesson was; don't play this monologue as despair. Play this as rage against the gods. Giant cow optional.)

But back to the essential idea of a mystery. These aren't just mysteries, or even cozy mysteries. These are regional mysteries. She's gone from being an outsider to whom Athens, and the other locations on her wild flight through Europe, are strange unfamiliar and frightening places, to staying in a place and learning enough to start fitting in.

Worse, the solution to the mystery often lies in a gestalt of her understanding of the place and people. This is most clear in the Japan book, where she figures our who sent the yakuza after her by understanding the Lost Generation and the effect of the collapse of the bubble economy on the Japanese psyche!

Which sets things up for info dumps. So very, very many info dumps.

So it wasn't the density, or the approach, it is the nature of the story itself that led to this kind of density.

I even had a map of a different way to handle it. Through the Japan book in particular, she is shown learning the things she later will use. There are three specific scenes demonstrating, dramatizing, the idea of the public to private spaces, though wood floors to tatami mat.

But she also has her magical language skill in picking up local idiom. Sure, in the Japan book she is shown learning (or, rather, being shown) "Chotto, matte." By the Paris book, she can instinctively come up with an "Eh nien quoi?" to maintain her cover, and that was absolutely not used at any point in the book before then.

I talked in my notes about being fair to the reader. About not having her suddenly drop some plot-important bit of historical knowledge that only she had, but to have the reader have the same information and grasp the same clues. That is, to treat it as a mystery, where it is considered unfair to the reader to have the murderer someone who wasn't even in the story until the reveal.

***

There are other differences. A mystery can indeed have adventure, and confrontations, and heroic actions. Sometimes a man does come through the door with a gun in his hand. But the essential format is one of a contemplative approach. While there might be a final action-filled confrontation, most of getting to that goal is the gathering of clues (and understanding), and few of those require heroics to gather. The hero earns the plot coupons to pay for a good ending not by fighting for them, but by being smart.

I understood what was happening in several of the books of the series. There are places where I knew there was no causal connection between the action and the gaining of the clue or other advancement of the plot. So I worked to forge an emotional connection; that she somehow earned the plot-important thing because she'd succeeded at some actually-not-important thing.

The clearest case is the radio in the London book. She turns on the radio after a lot of work. Later, the Whisperer in Darkness talks to her. It looks like connection because it is in temporal sequence and shares elements; cries for help, communication, etc. But he doesn't call on the radio. Nobody answers the radio. And it is hinted strongly in the text that she left it on "receive" and didn't, actually, even send a signal out!

So I was forcing action in, and it often felt disconnected. The Battersea jaunt felt out-of-place in the London book because even though more about Guy is revealed (she finds the shooter of the Highgate Cemetery incident) those discoveries are incidentals that just sort of happens during the urban exploration adventure. They could have happened just as well on solid ground.

***

There's usually a villain in a thriller. In a mystery, most often the point is figuring who did it. So the protagonist doesn't know, and the reader doesn't know, and the final confrontation is more often a "I know you are wondering why I gathered you all here today," not a sword fight on top of a burning dirigible.

In a thriller, even if the identity is unknown, there's an active presence pushing the hero, pushing at the story, shaping their choices. You could even say that in a mystery, the hero chases the villain. In a thriller, the villain chases the hero.

The Athens book is really the only one where she got to confront the bad guy and the Big Bad behind him, make a proper challenge, have a little fight (with someone else, but okay), and win. In the London book -- where, I now realize, things began to go wrong -- Guy comes almost out of nowhere. The mystery is about where the Roman coins came from. It was never really about who was fencing them across South London. It means that Guy feels disconnected from the plot; he isn't a resolution, he is more like another obstacle on Penny's epic sewer crawl.

Deacon at least is a strong and visible character through most of the Japan book. That book just whiffs the end as he turns into Hannibal; a charismatic guy, who is very possibly a bad guy, and who has some really nice moments with her earlier. But then who escapes at the end and didn't really have much to do with the resolution.

(Not helped that her resolution to the Japan book is to...do nothing.)

And as part of this package of villain, clear goal, and final confrontation, the hero gets to make their own declaration. It might be a simple statement, it might be a badass boast.

Penny is full of them in the Athens book. Even at her nadir of confidence, afraid and alone, she tells Newman that she will get the Athena Sherd back to Athens. She stands up to Satz in her first heroic confrontation when he tries to stop her at the airport. And she does The Line on the cigarette boat in mid-Adriatic; "My name is Athena Fox. I am an archaeologist."

(It's what her character said in her show.)

She gets a proper "I'm going to stop you" speech on the island and...she does. But the rest of the series?

She does tell the treasure hunters in Paris something along the line of "Try that again and I'll stop you." She does The Line in the climax in Kyoto, complete with hero pose, and she talks like a tough guy to get through the junior yakuza before that. But the closest she comes to the bad-ass boast is when she tells Ichiro -- very near the end of the book -- "I'll protect the Prince. I'll recover Kusanagi. I'll stop Deacon cold, if I have to. And then I'll come back to you."

***

Now, sure, a lot of these story elements are cheesy. But I set out to do cheesy. I set out to do Indiana Jones, but in a Romancing the Stone way; to have an ordinary person who thought they were living in a sensible universe thrust into full-on Hollywood action sequences. Stunts and all. And cheesy or not, that stuff can make for a good read.

(Yes, I did just watch The Stunt Man. As well as a couple episodes of Spenser for Hire, which has the same uneasy balance between a primarily mystery format, and random gunfights breaking out at intervals. And for that matter, a bunch of classic Doctor Who, which alternates a cerebral puzzle with chases down corridors. Like Chandler said, sometimes a Dalek comes busting through the door with a ray gun.)

And I knew I wanted these things when I was in the later books, and I was fighting hard against the material to get them in, and I was uncomfortable at how badly they often fit.

So I understand, now a lot more of why things went in certain directions and what forces were causing things like slow talky scenes, directionless plots without urgency, and a lack of strong resolution. Not to mention the terrible, terrible info-dumping. So much info-dumping.

Just on the urgency; I set a Ticking Clock in the Japan book. I started the clock too late; there should have been a deadline looming much, much earlier in the story. But it failed as a ticking clock because there was no bomb under the table. The framework was still mystery, and the mystery was not even what kind of bomb, but whether there was a bomb at all. That rather defuses any urgency of there being a deadline.

Now, thriller and mystery aren't hard definitions and there is blend between them. The question I have to deal with next, though, is whether the strengths of the mystery are things I want to keep in the stories. 

I rather do like her doing a deep dive into a culture, and solving a mystery with intellect. I am just more and more conscious of fighting the other things I wanted -- and that I feel where the later books are much better books, I miss the fun of the first book.