New documents have emerged from the archives of the
Kansas Bureau of Investigation to show that Capote changed the chronology,
inflated the importance of his central character (a man he liked), and cut a
lot of people out of the story whom he didn’t like. What’s more, he invented
entire scenes and passages of dialogue.
Capote might have believed he was writing the truth.
But as he never took notes or recordings and relied on his memory to write the
book several months after doing his research, fiction was the inevitable
result. And it worked. For nearly fifty years, his readers believed the book
was honest. It wasn’t. But Capote had successfully created a “truth effect.”
That’s our job as writers of crime fiction, to
create a “truth effect” that readers will buy into. Here are three tested ways
to do it:
1. Give the story a verifiable setting.
One strategy is to set the story in a real location,
populate it with true events that the reader can easily find on Google, and
drop in a wealth of other authentic minutia. David Lindsey’s detective novels
are located in Houston, Texas. He knows the place intimately. Local residents
would recognise every road junction. Those are real. So the story must
be too...
Daniel Defoe fooled the world for many decades that A
Journal of the Plague Year (1722) was an eye-witness account. It’s packed
with body counts, real statistics, the grim trivia of official records. Yet it
was a work solely of his imagination.
Mix real details in with imaginary ones and readers
will buy into your “Big Lie.”
2. Invest your characters with a complex
past.
Our characters gain dimension when we give them a
rich and varied past but we allude to it casually. Peter O’Donnell did
this very well in his Modesty Blaise thrillers. The hero Willie Garvin is a
supreme martial artist who faces every dangerous event with a biblical
quotation. The formidable Modesty has the gift of escaping into a meditative
trance whenever she’s tortured (which is often).
Why do these traits produce a “truth effect”? They
allude to previous events in the characters’ lives. Garvin spent many years in
a Thai jail with only the Bible for company. Modesty learned deep meditation
from a mystic in a desert cave. These people clearly have a complex past, as we
all do. But they don’t flaunt it, any more than we do. So they’re “real.”
If you can produce a “truth effect” with characters
developed from a cartoon strip, as O’Donnell’s were, you can do it in any
crime novel!
3. Convey the emotional truths
behind events.
Our plot may be absurd (“the moon landings were a
Hollywood invention”) but our stories will still work if our characters are
driven by recognisable emotions. The reader needs a character viewpoint in the
story that they can identify with, even if that viewpoint’s weird.
No character could be weirder than Grenouille in
Patrick Suskind’s strange novel Perfume. Grenouille is a psychopathic
perfumier who kills young girls to collect their odours. Creepy! But the reader
can still inhabit his point of view across 260 pages, albeit uncomfortably,
because Grenouille is a tragic orphan, grossly abused as a child. He never had
a chance at normality.
We can identify with that. His mind may be
incomprehensible but his character is emotionally true.
As crime fiction writers, our job is to create an
illusion. But the illusion won’t work unless it’s grounded in truths that
readers create out of their own experience, from the hints we give them. Truman
Capote wrote fiction and called it fact, just as Daniel Defoe had done two centuries
before. Both created a “truth effect” and readers believed them. Job done.
Readers - Which stories have brilliantly persuaded you they were 'true'? And how did the author achieve that effect?
Writers - What methods do you use yourself to convince the reader: 'this can't be fiction. It's too real'? Share your thoughts with us!
