All the lying and the hiding and the subtext of theater add up to the best elements of a good crime story. Many novelists, like David Mamet and Theresa Rebeck, have launched their novel-writing careers from a background in theater. Theater has taught them how to tell a story. Is it any surprise then that the most dramatic of novel genres—crime fiction—is oftentimes written by people with a theater background? Lee Child was a presentation director for the BBC. Nancy Martin majored in theater. Kathryn Miller Haines is an actress and playwright. Action, subtext, characters in trouble—those are hardwired when you work in theater.
Martin, creator of the Blackbird Sisters mysteries and of the Roxy Abruzzo series, says, “If you sit at a table with a bunch of writers at any conference—mystery, romance, science fiction, whatever—way more than half will have theater backgrounds of some kind. We know how to communicate the drama.”
Haines writes a series in which her protagonist, actress Rosie Winter, has a habit of running into murder in the theater in New York during World War II. Says Haines says, “Theater teaches the crime novelist to think more carefully about what motivates human behavior and how easy it is to cross the line between acting and overreacting when the stakes are high.”
Engaging the Audience
Imagine a character onstage—let’s say a woman of 20, we’ll call her “A”—who says to “B,” “I have to drive to Philadelphia.” The audience knows it’s a lie because either her eyes cast to the side as she says it or because in a previous scene the audience just learned she is planning to stay in town and hole up at a friend’s house. The fact of this lie engages the audience and they wait for the lie to be found out. The young woman begins to tremble and sinks onto a chair. She’s frightened. The audience doesn’t know what has so frightened her but wants to know.
The two moments—her lie, her fear—are in a word (or three) dramatic irony and suspense. In plays, these two relationships with the audience are interwoven. Either the audience knows something that another character, B, does not, and the audience waits for the discrepancy to be resolved: Dramatic irony. Or there is something the audience doesn’t understand but wants to understand. They feel the nervousness of not understanding and they wait and watch to find out what they don’t know. Suspense.
Never Waste an Entrance or Exit
When someone comes on stage—bam, it has to mean something. It has to happen memorably. Or someone exits. In a good play that person gets a good exit line. The character doesn’t just fade away.
Chris Grabenstein spent a lot of time in the ’70s and ’80s doing improve in Greenwich Village and on the college tour circuit. He writes richly comic crime novels that are surely indebted to the inventiveness of actors who have to leap into action because to work in improv is a real test of acting wit. Says Grabenstein, “I still use the #1 rule of improv in all my writing: never deny. Say ‘Yes, and . . . ’ and see what happens. I typically create a couple characters, toss them into a scene, sit back and let my mind and fingers (on the keyboard) take me where the scene wants to go.”
There is also no such thing as “just talk,” “just dialogue.” Talk in a play is made of: people trying to do something, trying to change something—often by lying or obfuscating in some way—trying to win or seduce or persuade or kill. Theater is about people being active.
Pity the Spear Carriers
Actress-turned-mystery-writer Harley Jane Kozak says, “A background in theater taught me many valuable lessons, not the least of which is: my prime directive is to entertain. You know the physician’s motto, ‘First, do no harm’? The actor’s version of that is, ‘First, keep them awake.’”
Kozak’s mystery novels include Dating Dead Men and Dead Ex. She says, “I always have one eye on the imaginary readership, checking for sleepers. Not in the early drafts—these make me drowsy too—but as I revise, I’m looking for those extra words, the information that nobody needs to know, the stuff that, once you take it out, no one misses. As I revise, I hear in my head the voices of long-forgotten directors, yelling, ‘Faster! Funnier!’ And I wonder, ‘Shall I kill another spear-carrier, throw in some sex, bring on the dancing girls?’”
Once More, with Feeling
As a theater director myself, I always need to guide the audience to look where I wanted them to look—to catch certain expressions. So I definitely learned focus. I also cast characters in my works in a way similar to the way I cast them for stage. When I see who could play the roles, suddenly the character comes alive. I’m writing but also I’m in a kind of rehearsal, and I can watch the characters moving and talking and sometimes doing what I want and sometimes not, but best of all surprising me with what they do.
—Kathleen George
Kathleen George has directed plays for university theater and for the Three Rivers Shakespeare Festival. She teaches Theatre and Writing at the University of Pittsburgh. She is also the editor of Pittsburgh Noir and the author of Taken, Fallen, Afterimage, The Odds (an Edgar® finalist for best novel), Hideout, Simple, A Measure of Blood, and The Johnstown Girls.
Great article! I was at CrimeCONN in Westport, CT yesterday, and it struck me that quite of few of the writers there had acting and/or theater backgrounds. I, too, started off as an actor, and now write mysteries. I also found that doing improv really, really helped me out as a writer!