Villains Who Don't Think They're Villains
The antagonists in Shadows of the Fathers believe they're doing the right thing. That turned out to be harder to write than any of the book's action sequences, and it's one thing I spent the most time getting right.
The cardboard cartel villain problem
Espionage and cartel thrillers have a well-worn shortcut: the antagonist exists to be defeated. He's cruel because cruelty reads as menacing, ambitious because ambition justifies the plot, and largely interchangeable with the antagonist from the last book you read in the genre. It works, in the sense that it moves a plot forward. It doesn't work in the sense that it costs a reader nothing when he goes down in the final act.
I didn't want that. Not because every thriller needs to be a character study (plenty of great ones aren't), but because the version of this story I actually cared about telling only works if the people on the other side of it are real. If they're not, the whole "family secrets and inherited war" idea at the center of the book collapses into set dressing.
What "real" meant in practice
It didn't mean sympathetic in the sense of likable. It meant legible: a villain whose logic you could follow even while you're hoping Hunter puts a stop to it. Every antagonist in this book is, in his or her own account of events, the person trying to protect something: a family, a legacy, a country's interests, a version of order they believe is worth the cost of enforcing it. None of them wake up and decide to be evil. That's not a moral argument for what they do. It's just true to how people actually justify the worst things they're capable of, and it's a much more unsettling thing to put on the page than a mustache-twirling monster ever is.
That shaped some research choices, too. Part of what I was after with this book was operational and psychological texture that felt earned rather than imagined, which meant listening carefully to people with real-world experience adjacent to this world, and asking not just "what happens" but "how does someone end up here, and what does he tell himself about it." Some of that shows up directly on the page. Most of it just shaped how I wrote the people who aren't Hunter.
The geopolitics had to follow the same rule
This mattered just as much at the state level as it did at the personal one. The book's antagonists aren't backed by a single unified "evil empire." That's a comic-book version of how this actually works. What's actually happening in Shadows of the Fathers is closer to the truth of how these things tend to work in reality: overlapping interests, not shared ideology. Different actors converging on the same outcome for entirely different reasons, none of whom would describe themselves as allies of the others. That's a less tidy kind of villainy than "the bad guys," and it was important to me that the book not flatten it into something simpler than it is.
One example, without spoiling anything
Take Santi. He is, by any plot-summary description, a man responsible for real violence. But he doesn't experience himself that way. In his own account, he's protecting what's his, and everything he does downstream of that belief follows a logic that makes sense to him, even when it shouldn't make sense to anyone else. I'm not going to tell you where that leads, because the place it leads is one of the book's better turns. But I'll say this: the version of Santi I wrote in an early draft, before I'd figured this out, was flatter and less dangerous than the one in the finished book. A villain who knows he's a villain is, paradoxically, less frightening than one who's certain he isn't.
That's the sentence I keep coming back to when people ask me about the antagonists in this book: the most dangerous villains don't necessarily think they're villains. I don't think that's a particularly original observation about human nature. It's an underused one in this genre, and getting it right, or at least closer to right, was some of the work I was most proud of once the book was finished.
Shadows of the Fathers is out October 20. You can preorder now at crowleyclark.com/shadowsofthefathers, where all the current retailer and format options are listed. Three weeks out, and I'd love for you to be one of the first to tell me whether Santi landed the way I hoped he would.
CC
