Your crime stories will live or die by the villains you come up with. Bestselling crime writer Helen Fields tells you how to create a convincing killer in fiction
There’s been so much media about serial killers in the last twenty years that you’d be forgiven for thinking you pass one on the street every time you go outside. From Mindhunter to the meteoric rise of true crime podcasts, from Happy Valley to Hannibal Lecter, we love peering into the darkness of murderous souls. But writing serial killer thrillers means you constantly teeter on the edge of stereotyping killers and glamourising the worst of all crimes. Either can be disastrous.
Whether you’re writing a police procedural where the killer’s identity is hidden until the final chapter or you’re penning a first-person novel from the perspective of a mass murderer, you need to be fiercely aware of who your antagonist is, and that’s a very different thing from knowing what they do.
Your job is to create a whole person with a complete life. To put this in context, it’s helpful to think of your serial killer in terms of statistics. Consider this – if your character is 30 years old and has killed five people, they will have been alive for 10,950 days and only committed a murder on five of those days. Your job as a creator is to know and understand what the other 10,945 days of their life were like.
It’s worth remembering too that some of the most notorious killers in history had partners, children, pets, jobs and hobbies. Family and friends will swear blind that they had no idea of their crimes. Bad people live among us wearing the camouflage of normality.
This is why, when I start to form an idea for a serial killer, I begin by sorting through their dirty laundry. The most helpful exercise for me is to have a rummage around in their cupboards, and this is something I recommend. Want to write a convincing serial killer? Then you should be able to imagine what’s in their pantry, bathroom cabinet, wardrobe and attic. This gives us a treasure trove of information and the sort of detail that will ground your character in reality. If you’ve ever been left alone in someone else’s house for a few hours, you’ll know how much can be hidden behind a closed cupboard door.
So start in the kitchen. Are the cupboards crammed full of out-of-date spices and half-used tubes of tomato puree, or is there almost nothing there? Is everything neat and tidy, perhaps obsessively so, or are there things you wouldn’t expect to s
