Five rules for a sympathetic killer protagonist

These days many thrillers have protagonists who, if you stand back for a moment, are only marginally better than the people they are hunting down or trying to escape from. This is particularly the case when they are cold-blooded killers. Most of us as readers would never dream of killing anyone, and wouldn't hang out with killers. As an example, if you were in a tight and dangerous spot, you'd be forgiven for wanting Jack Reacher on your side. But if things were going just fine, I'm not sure you'd want him to come babysit your kids every Thursday...

As a writer the trick is to make such characters 'sympathetic'. This is writing jargon for 'likeable', or at the least, forgivable. It means you can relate to, or admire, or simply respect something about the character, which means you care what happens to them. Don't care = stop reading.

Take Jack Reacher, for example. On the one hand, once he gets going, he's a lethal killing machine. But on the other hand he can be very respectful and non-judgmental with ordinary people, and absolutely a gentleman with women, never assuming anything, never taking advantage. He is also entirely self-reliant, and never blames others for his misfortunes.

For my own protagonist, Nadia, I was inspired by Stieg Larsson's The girl with the dragon tattoo, and his world-famous female protagonist Lisbeth Salander. But I wanted to explore Nadia's transition from normal country Russian girl, to killer, while still keeping her sympathetic. In the first book, during the prologue, she is trapped into working for a gangster, Kadinsky, and from that point on, she finds herself in increasingly dangerous situations where the easiest way out is to kill, the one thing she does not want to do. At the very end of the book, she accepts her fate, and having crossed that line in order to save her sister, is promptly thrown into a secret prison.

So, at the beginning of book 2, I needed to do two things: introduce her, and make her sympathetic, even though she is now a killer. I employed 5 rules, based on everything I'd ever read about hard-nosed heroes who had a dark side:

1. Make her fiercely independent
2. Make the odds stack up against her
3. Don't let her blame others for what has happened
4. In the event of a 'fight or flight' situation, she always chooses fight
5. Show the reader how she can nevertheless be fragile

I then wrote the following short scene where we first meet Nadia, at the beginning of the novel 37 Hours:


Nadia heard the familiar rattles and clanks down the corridor. Steel bar gates unlocked, opened, locked again. Distant footsteps. Coming her way. She stopped her third round of push-ups and sat back on the wooden bench in the cell she’d barely left in almost two years. No visitors, no phone calls, no internet, no television, no papers. Books occasionally, classics. Minimal human contact.
They kept her in the dark, because they still weren’t convinced she’d given up all her secrets, and had classified her ‘need to know’ status as zero. They kept her hidden, afraid she’d talk about the Rose, and shame the British government over what it had created and almost let loose on its own kingdom. Afraid she’d let the public know they’d narrowly dodged a nuclear war with Russia. The government could invoke plausible deniability. Just another foiled conspiracy. But it wasn’t over. Cheng Yi was dead, but the unknown client was still out there. The threat was still real.

He would try again.

Maybe they’d keep her there for good. She’d killed two people. The world was better off without them, but British justice took a dim view of unlawful killing. British justice… She’d not seen a lawyer, nor been charged as far as she was aware. No visitors. She tried not to reopen that particular can of tarantulas; it never helped.

In the first six months, the thought of someone visiting her, Jake, maybe, or Katya, kept her going. But after a year the pain became unbearable. Nobody came. Nobody cared. And so she worked out, she read, and the rest were just bodily functions. She often sang the Cossack lullaby before lights out, just to practise using her voice, and to reach out to her older sister who used to sing it to her when they were young, soothing her while their parents screamed at each other downstairs. Nadia prayed Katya was all right, and comforted herself that above all, Katya was a survivor.

The sounds drew nearer, the telltale rattle of iron keys on a large ring. She knew the routine. She wiped sweat from her forehead with a mouldy towel, and stood to attention at the end of her cot, next to the washbasin. No mirror, no glass anywhere, a metal sink and lavatory in the corner. Light filtered through the misted glass and steel bars. She faced the solid metal door. Maybe she’d get coffee today. It would be cold, but that didn’t matter.

Footsteps grew closer. Two sets, not one. Another routine medical inspection? There hadn’t been an interrogation for months. Jake’s ice-bitch ex-lover and current boss, Lorne, had come regularly in the first nine months, until she could extract nothing new. Initially Nadia had played tough, until Lorne showed her photos of Ben’s funeral – the man who had helped her so much in the Scillies, yet asked for nothing in return – whereupon she’d cracked and told Jake’s MI6 handler everything she knew.

Lorne informed Nadia she would receive no visitors, because no one knew where she was: some British military high-security facility. Probably not even on the books. Nadia doubted anyone would visit even if they did know, after what had happened back in the Isles of Scilly. Unless it was to spit in her face, something she’d welcome after two years of solitary. But Jake must have known, and yet he never came. That was a kick in the stomach. And inevitably, she’d become angry. Now, after two years, it had cemented into a deep resentment. She might just lash out at the first unfortunate soul who came to see her.

The footsteps stopped right outside the door. A double-clank as the deadbolts retracted. A small scratchy noise as someone slid the latch and peered through the glass eyehole. The door didn’t open. Nadia stayed absolutely still. Come on, you bastards, give me my bloody breakfast! The routines of each day were sacrosanct, propping up her sanity. Still the door didn’t open. Voices, muffled, she couldn’t make anything out. A high-pitched cry, female, stifled.

Nadia was suddenly gripped by panic. What if they were going to kill her? Take her outside, shoot her and bury her? Nobody would know; no one would care. She clenched her teeth and fists, suppressed the fear. This was England, not Russia. But her arms and legs tensed like coiled springs, just in case.

The heavy door swung open slowly. She smelled her sister Katya before she saw her, the perfume she knew so well. Katya walked around the door, into full view, tears sliding down her cheeks as she held out her arms.

‘God, Nadia, I’m sorry it took so long.’

But Nadia was already in her arms, squeezing her, gripping her, two years of pent-up emotions erupting. The anger fled, chased away by a deluge of relief. She shook so much she couldn’t speak. Katya whispered soothing noises while the guard waited patiently. Nadia’s face was wet, like the rain she hadn’t felt in two years. She gathered herself, knowing this visit would be kept short. She wiped her eyes and cheeks, and spoke to her sister urgently, taking in every line of her face, details she might have to remember and savour for another two years.

‘How long can you stay?’ Nadia asked. ‘How long have we got?’

Katya bit her lip then pulled Nadia’s face tight to her chest, struggling to get the words out. ‘Time to come home, my Cossack,’ she said.

Nadia’s legs gave way.

66 metres here
37 hours here
Now working on the third instalment...

Why I wrote 37 Hours

Why did I write 37 Hours? Well first, of course, it’s a sequel. At the end of 66 Metres Nadia has succeeded, but the Client is still out there. In fact the first scene in Chapter One of 37 Hours was originally the epilogue to 66 Metres, but the editor and I decided to leave Nadia languishing in prison.  And so the readers demanded a sequel... 

But there were five other reasons.

• Jack Reacher
•  Diving a nuclear sub
• Shark-attacks
•  Chernobyl
•  London

1. Jack Reacher

The title 37 Hours is a tribute to Lee Child’s book titled 61 Hours. This was the very first Jack Reacher book I read, and got me hooked and back into thrillers. I love the relentless pace and minimalist style, and how Jack is uncompromising. Of course Nadia isn’t Jack, but another character, Vladimir, is close, and the book starts with him in the Prologue. I’ve already had a number of readers tell me the book starts just like a Reacher novel. Couldn’t ask for more! Here’s the opening of 37 Hours:

Vladimir was cuffed and hooded, but his guards had made a fatal mistake. His hands were behind him, but not attached to the inner structure of the military van, a standard Russian UAZ 452 – he’d know those rickety creaks and the pungent blend of oil and diesel anywhere. The vehicle trundled towards some unknown destination where he would be interrogated, beaten some more, then shot in the back of the head.

Three of the four men chattered as they picked up speed down a straighter road. Their second mistake. Clearly they weren’t Special Forces – Spetsnaz – like he’d been until recently. They were regular army. He’d only seen the two heavies who’d snatched him from breakfast with his daughter. Now he knew there were four – one other had engaged in the banter, another had remained silent but was referred to as the butt of several bawdy jokes. The hierarchy of the men was also clear. The leader was in the front passenger seat, the silent one the driver, leaving the two musclemen in the back with him. He waited. They’d been driving for an hour or so, initially dirt tracks, now a highway, which meant they were on the E119 to Vostok. If they turned right, he had a chance, as they would have to cross the Volga River. Then he would make his move.

If they turned left, he was a dead man.

Vladimir wasn’t one for options, or for hedging his bets. Not a question of making the right choice, but of making the choice right. In all his missions he’d never cared much for a Plan B. Leave too many options open, and events control you. You invite failure.

            The van would turn right.

2.  Diving a submarine

66 Metres covered a lot of diving aspects, but there were two I hadn’t touched. The first is diving a submarine. The first time I did this was the M2, a submarine wreck off the Dorset coast near Weymouth. There is something stunning about coming across a submarine underwater, like a giant metallic whale. I tried to capture the way I felt in chapter three, when Nadia comes across a hijacked Russian nuclear submarine:

They hit thirty-five metres and levelled off. Still she saw nothing, but the sleds both slowed, and then she saw why. The forward light picked up the huge black tail-fin of the Borei Class nuclear sub, like the fin of a shark, which happened to be the nickname for this class of sub. Sergei’s sled circled behind, his forward beam illuminating the massive propeller. She tried to gauge how long each blade was. Maybe three metres.

           Sergei took point again, and fired a flare that fizzed forward like a lazy yellow firework. The sub was one hundred and seventy metres long, only slightly shorter than its predecessor, the Typhoon. But seeing it, positioned at one end while the flare swept forward over its dark beauty, was something else. The flare continued its arc over the conning tower, all the way to the prow, her destination. The light faded and plunged them back into darkness save for the sled’s lights. But the after-image was etched onto her retinas. Russian subs didn’t really go in for names, they were usually referred to as Projects and given a number, but Sergei had told her this one was the Yuri Gagarin. He’d have been proud. 

3. Shark attacks

There were no sharks in 66 Metres, so I wanted to include them in the sequel. In the second part of the book, Nadia and Jake dive in the South China Sea off the coast of Borneo, on a remote island called Anspida, which is an anagram of one of my top 3 diving destinations in the world, and a place where you can encounter large man-eaters, as well as hammerheads. Some of the dive instructors there used to play a game (the diving equivalent of Russian Roulette), where you swim away from the reef, out into the blue, and wait for the sharks to find you. Here’s where Nadia gives it a try…

  She glanced back several times, the reef just in sight, somewhere between fifteen and twenty metres away. Jake kept them at the same distance, two divers in perfect orbit around the island, two thousand feet of ocean beneath them. She stared straight ahead, into the blue. The sun’s rays lasered through the water, playing tricks on her brain. Several times she thought she saw something, and her heart skipped a beat, but it was nothing.

And then it came for real. A shadow at first, morphing into a blue nose, the curved line of its mouth, its eyes, and its pectoral fins, outlining an ellipse just like in Jake’s drawing. If it opened its mouth she would fit inside. Fifteen metres away, closing. Not on a swing-by. Coming straight at her. Ten metres. It was massive, she could now see the dorsal fin and her brain extrapolated the rest; it was easily five metres long. Its pectoral fins dropped, its mouth opened a little, revealing racks of backward-sloping teeth...

The actual shark attack scene which comes a little later, was hard to write. Mostly sharks leave people alone. But if you’re bleeding in waters like these, you’re in serious trouble. As a diver, even now when I read the scene in 37 Hours where two lives are claimed in a feeding frenzy, my blood still runs cold.

4. Chernobyl

I used to work in the nuclear industry, trying to make it safer. Chernobyl was such a shock to the world at the time, but I was also impressed by the heroism of the soldiers and others who worked manically to contain the radiation leak after the initial explosion, many of whom died shortly after from radiation poisoning, or later from cancers. There was also the lesser known story of heroism concerning shutting off an underwater valve to prevent a secondary explosion which would have re-opened the wound and irradiated half of Europe. This story was part-truth, part myth, and I included it as a story-within-a-story. It was the motivation behind the original title of the book, which was to be ‘One-Way Dive.’ And so the third part of the book takes place in Chernobyl, in Reactor 4. I was really pleased when the publisher decided to put Chernobyl on the cover.

5. London

I live in Paris, which is a great city, but I still miss London where I used to live. When writing a thriller, you have to put what the hero/heroine values most on the line. Nadia is Russian. London isn’t her city. But, to an extent, it’s mine, and I care about it. London is where 66 Metres started, and it’s where 37 Hours ends. In the final chapter, when the 37 Hours has almost run out, there’s a short scene where London is almost a character, one that Nadia wants desperately to see one last time. I think that scene, only a couple of paragraphs, is one of the most powerful I’ve ever written, and as an ex-Londoner it chokes me up every time I read it.

That’s it. I wrote 37 Hours in six months. For me that’s very fast (I have a day job!). It poured out of me, demanding to be written. If you do read it, I really hope you get some of the same satisfaction I got out of writing it!

You can get 37 Hours from Amazon here, and it's also available in other digital formats. You can get 66 Metres here

Inside a killer's head

When writing a thriller, there needs to be a sense of jeopardy for the protagonist. Perhaps a killer is after her, maybe more than one. The killer can be left vague, abstract, distant, and this allows the reader to imagine how terrifying they can be. [nice image by Jiceh, by the way]

Or...

The author can go inside the killer's head, show the reader what is in there. This approach is less followed, for several reasons.

(1) The writer is not a killer (well, usually, one hopes), and writers should 'write what they know'.

(2) In explaining what is inside the killer's head, the reader may actually begin to understand the killer, and so there is less fear.

(3) By showing what is in the killer's head there can be less suspense than when the protagonist is running from unknown motives and plans.

Two recent examples I read of both approaches are David Baldacci's Memory Man and Lee Child's... well, pretty much most Lee Child's Jack Reacher series. Baldacci's Memory Man is a masterpiece of suspense because it is actually pretty difficult to work out who the murderers are, and how and why the killings are happening. However, once the motives were revealed at the end, I felt a little short-changed, because so much trauma had been caused for what didn't seem quite enough pain to twist two minds so badly. Having said that, I'm going to read another one, because he's such a great writer and the suspense, plotting and sense of jeopardy are masterful.

With Child/Reacher, we get glimpses into the minds of the perpetrators, as in 61 Hours, and recognize how evil they are. Child keeps it brief. Short passages, usually a page here and there, to let us know that the baddies are after Jack and they are real bad. When payback finally arrives, it feels satisfying because the villains aren't abstract.

So, when I wrote 66 Metres (and yes, the title is partly a tribute to Child and 61 Hours), I wanted to go further. I wanted to climb into the heads of three villains and maintain the fear and suspense. One of the villains in particular is warped and twisted, and you wouldn't want to spend any time with him or get stuck in a lift with him or be alone in an underground parking lot with him. His name is Danton.

The first time we meet Danton, he's about to kill someone, so rather than give a spoiler, here's the second time we meet him when he's arrived in the Isles of Scilly to find Nadia and kill her. He's just a dude sitting in a beachside cafe watching some kids playing. Harmless. Unless you know what is going on in his head...

There was a ruckus outside, a couple of young kids, both with toy machine guns.

‘You’re dead!’ one of them yelled, the taller one, eyes full of fire.

‘I shot you first!’ the younger one pleaded.

The older one raised his gun as if to smash the other boy’s face with it. ‘I said you’re dead.’

The younger boy looked as if he might cry, then lowered his gun and lay on the floor. The older boy grinned and put his foot on the chest of the other boy, raising his own gun in the air, and yelled something Danton didn’t understand, maybe a reference to a video game or a movie. He saw the look in that boy’s eye, the feeling not only of triumph, but power through domination. Being able to make another person obey you, submit to your authority through fear. The kid probably didn’t understand it fully, nor the fact that he should relish it before life – society – would chisel it out of him or put him in prison, unless the kid became either a soldier or a boxer or a killer, like Danton.

The waiter shooed the kids away. The younger boy sprang up and both ran off, as if pals again, but Danton knew harm had been done, the younger kid had been made to eat shit. His spirit would remember it. If he was smart he’d have learned a lesson today, that rules don’t mean anything where raw power was involved. And if he was dumb, well, he’d just end up another sad loser like most people, and vent his frustration on anyone who was vulnerable later in life.

Danton remembered the second time he’d killed, after some punk had cheated him in a high-stakes poker game. Danton had lost a year’s wages, knew the fucker had cheated, but the entire game was rigged, and there were too many heavies around. He waited outside the backstreet gambling joint for two hours, hiding behind the rubbish bins, then followed the guy from a distance until he neared the deserted docks at 3am.

Surprising the guy and beating the crap out of him had been easy, but he’d only gotten a fifth of his money back – obviously the others had shared the winnings. Anger brewed in Danton like a firestorm. He tied the schmuck’s hands behind his back, using the guy’s own belt, and shoved a handkerchief in his bloodied mouth to stop him begging for mercy. That was when he spied a run of rusted chain nearby. At first, he did it just to scare the crap out of the guy, which worked, as Danton wrapped the heavy chain around the guy’s legs in a crude knot, and rolled him closer to the water’s edge. The pure terror in the guy’s eyes drove Danton on. It was like a kid’s game: see how much he could frighten the dolt. To top it all, Danton heaved the guy up, doing a deadlift with him, chain and all, and staggered over to the drop.

The guy and chain weighed a lot, easily two hundred and fifty. Danton thought about the weightlifting championships, how a shot at an Olympic title had been torn away from him a year earlier, and in that moment all the pent-up rage from being screwed over in life too many times surged through him, and he felt so good, holding this man’s life, writhing and squirming and whimpering in his bare hands, felt the absolute pure God-like power of life over death. He tossed the guy into the cold water below.

Never even knew his name.

Danton didn’t sleep that night, dizzy with elation, and ended up in a brothel in the red light district, taking one hooker after another till dawn, fucking like a lion. In a way, looking back now, he’d been like the smaller boy, but he’d managed to gain the upper hand and kill the older one. Would that younger boy have gone so far? Course not. Unless he’d been shafted by life again and again. Danton hadn’t had a great life, but after that first kill, word had got around once the bloated body was found and the local mafia put two and two together. Nobody messed with Danton any more. In fact they gave him work. Respect. That was what mattered.


The second killer is less frightening, perhaps more atypical. His name is Lazarus, because he died and was brought back by medics before brain death set in. Here's the second time we meet Lazarus. He's a really big guy, and while he's not scary the way Danton is, you wouldn't mess with him...

Lazarus crunched his way up the gravel pathway to Kadinsky’s dacha, aware there would be a marksman upstairs training cross-hairs on his face. Americans aimed for the heart, Russians for the head. The gravel was thick with pebbles, impossible to run on, and Lazarus’ significant weight left dimples in the circular path surrounding the empty clay-coloured fountain, a statue of Pan in its centre. The Greek god of mischief’s flute was bone dry.

Lazarus had to leave his car and the key with a guard down at the estate entrance, and trek the remaining three hundred metres alone. He didn’t mind the walk, but he detested the psychology. Everything about Kadinsky was a reminder of who was boss. As if on cue, two men in identical dark suits came down the stone steps from the front door, carrying a black body bag. Lazarus slowed. The bag was moving. Something – somebody – writhed inside. The end of the bag slipped from the front guy’s hands and fell with a sickening thud onto the gravel. The man at the front gave whoever was in there a good kick, yelled a few expletives and told him to lie still. Lazarus heard a man sobbing.

Someone who had let Kadinsky down, had almost certainly been beaten to a bloody pulp by Kadinsky himself, and was going to be taken into the woods and buried alive. Lazarus would have liked to put the victim out of his misery. But no doubt Kadinsky was watching. So instead he walked on, not meeting the eyes of the men carrying the bag. The body had stilled, at least.

A gruff man with designer stubble, wearing a suit stretched tight by muscles on top of muscles, held open the wine-red door. The goon inspected Lazarus, taking in his sheer size, probably wondering how much was lean, how much was fat, and where best to pop him with his .38 if necessary. The face, or the back of the head, as always. He patted Lazarus down while another watched from the upper landing, a Kalashnikov hanging from his shoulder. Lazarus wasn’t carrying a weapon. He didn’t need one. There were plenty around. And his hands could snap necks when required. Not that he enjoyed killing, but he preferred it to being killed.

Whenever he was in hostile terrain he made rapid assessments of opponents, putting them into one of three categories: commas, semicolons, and full stops. Commas could be scared off, they’d turn and run, and didn’t need a bullet. Semis, when wounded, would go crying to their mommas, no longer a threat. Full stops needed to be put down quickly, a head or neck shot so their finger couldn’t pull the trigger in that last second of shocked clarity. These two were semis. One shot, one bone broken, they’d call it a day. They weren’t in it for love or loyalty, just dreaming of an early pension. Lazarus never dreamed. He was saving that for when he was dead.

The search over, the goon jerked his thumb towards a set of double doors with frosted glass to the left on the ground floor. A golden Labrador intercepted him, and Lazarus squatted down, held his hand out, waiting while the dog hesitated then came over and sniffed his hand. Lazarus stroked him. The dog lapped it up. If only humanity were gone, just animals. The goon nudged Lazarus in the back with his knee. Lazarus rose and spun around on the spot, towering over him, making him step back in surprise. Lazarus heard the swish of the Kalashnikov being unshouldered and clicked into readiness, trained on his face, but he didn’t look up. Nor did he glare at the goon who had fumbled for his gun, he just loomed over him, the dog at his side sensing who was master.  

‘Lazarus,’ a voice came from the room, ‘stop shitting around and get in here.’

He turned to see Kadinsky – expensive baggy suit, chunky gold jewellery – in the doorway, before he turned and went back inside. Kadinsky was fixing the back of his collar over his tie. His shirt looked fresh. No doubt he’d just changed due to spattered bloodstains. Lazarus followed, the dog too.

In the scene above we also see another killer, Kadinsky, who's head we never go inside. There's no need, you already know it's pretty nasty in there. There's one other killer, but that would be a spoiler.

Of course the book is mainly inside the head of the protagonist, Nadia, the target of all these men. She has never killed, but will she have to in the end? And what will be in her head when she does so?

66 Metres is available from 25 August