Chapter 28: Frame Jobs
Why, and how, to frame a character
Some Classic Plot Twists involve the Villain crafting a detailed and highly believable narrative right from the start of the story. This narrative shapes everything the characters think they understand about the situation, and drives their actions as they move through the plot.
In the next two chapters, we’ll deal with two Classic Plot Twists that do just that: Frame Jobs, and The Bogus Crime.
Frame Jobs
Frame jobs are murders in which the Villain creates a very particular narrative: “The Victim was murdered, by a specific person.” The person who is framed is known as “the Patsy.”
While a Villain may frame a Patsy simply to create a narrative that exonerates himself, there are also many reasons why he might commit a crime with the specific intention of getting the Patsy falsely convicted. Perhaps he wants:
To get the Patsy thrown in jail
To justify retaliatory action he wishes to take against the Patsy
To destroy the Patsy’s reputation
To cause specific people to lose affection for the Patsy
To prevent the Patsy from inheriting from the Victim
Whatever your Villain’s intentions, his crime—just like any other—will be rooted in one of the four primal motives: Love, Money, Power, or Fear. The Villain who wants to get the Patsy thrown in jail may be committing a Power frame, as revenge for some long-ago transgression. The Villain who wants people to lose affection for the Patsy may be committing a Love frame, so he can move in on the Patsy’s partner. And the Villain who’s trying to prevent the Patsy from inheriting is almost certainly committing a Money frame.
Anatomy of a Frame
To look at how a frame job is executed, we’re going to do a deep dive into an episode of Remington Steele called “Steele Framed.” In this episode, our Sleuth, Remington Steele, is alone at the office late one night when a man calls, desperately pleading for help. He identifies himself as Henry Spellman, and begs Steele to meet him out at the old Covington Inn in the hills of Los Angeles.
Steele heads off to the meeting, but while driving through a dark tunnel, a man suddenly appears in front of his car. He’s helpless to avoid a collision. Steele stops to render aid, and begs for help from a passing motorist—an ice cream vendor, complete with a jingle-blaring truck.
But when the police come, the ice cream vendor is nowhere to be found. The police identity the dead man as Henry Spellman—the very man whom Steele was supposed to meet. At this point, both Steele and the police believe that Spellman’s death is nothing more than a tragic accident. But that is about to change.
That evening, Steele receives a second call. The caller says she’s Mrs. Spellman, Henry’s widow. She tearfully tells him she doesn’t blame him for her husband’s death. On the contrary, she thinks Mr. Spellman was in some kind of trouble, which led to his death. She’s too scared to talk about it over the phone, but she begs Steele to meet her tomorrow, at the morgue where she’s going to claim her husband’s body.
Steele arrives for the meeting, but Mrs. Spellman’s gentle, understanding manner has undergone a total transformation. While the coroner watches, she tearfully curses Steele for Henry’s death, and warns him that he’ll get what’s coming to him—”Just like Henry!” she says. “Just like MacIntyre!”
Meanwhile, the police are proceeding with their investigation, and homicide Detective James Jarvis plays a call on Steele. He questions every detail of Steele’s story, especially the part about planning to meet Spellman at the Covington Inn. “It must have slipped your mind,” he says. “The Covington Inn? It burned down six weeks ago. It was in all the papers.”
Steele and his partner, Laura Holt, decide they better dig into Spellman’s background to get ahead of the police investigation. They turn up a host of tangible clues linking Spellman and Steele, including:
A record of phone calls between the two men—some originating from Spellman’s office, but others originating from Steele’s apartment.
Spellman’s datebook, which contains several meetings with Steele over the last few weeks.
And, most damning, a second bank account in Steele’s name, from which someone has transferred almost fifty thousand dollars, in small increments, to Spellman over a period of months.
Finally, they find press clippings detailing an investigation into a gem heist committed years ago, by a man named MacIntyre and an unknown accomplice. As the police started to move in, MacIntyre was killed. Neither his accomplice, nor the gems, were ever found. But a photograph in Spellman’s safety deposit box shows Mr. Steele sitting in a car with MacIntyre on the very evening he was killed.
To anyone impartially reviewing the evidence, it looks as though Steele was MacIntyre’s unknown accomplice, and killed him for the gems. Spellman somehow found out about this, and has been blackmailing Steele—until Steele decided to put an end to the extortion once and for all.
It’s all a very tight frame, constructed by an old adversary, Major Descoine. Years ago, the Remington Steele agency unmasked Descoine’s girlfriend, Lily, for bank fraud. Rather than go to prison, Lily took her own life, and Descoine has wanted revenge ever since. So how did he go about getting it? We’ll explore that in detail below.
Frame Tactics
In this plot, Major Descoine took advantage of the two major tactics for creating a convincing frame job: planting false evidence, and discrediting the Patsy. Let’s take a look at both of these.
Planting False Evidence
Of these two tactics, planting false evidence is the more important. The frame can’t succeed without it. So how do you figure out exactly what false evidence your Villain can, or should, plant?
Well, often the best way to do this is by coming up with a false Action Log for the Patsy—a list of the things he would have done, if he were guilty. If Steele really had eliminated Spellman to free himself of the burden of blackmail, here’s how his Action Log might look:
He communicated with Spellman over a period of time
He paid blackmail money to Spellman
He killed Spellman in a vehicular homicide
Descoine makes sure to provide clues to each of these actions, neatly establishing his frame. For “Steele communicated with Spellman over a period of time,” Descoine created Spellman’s phony datebook, and hacked into Steele’s telephone wires to place calls to Spellman’s office. And for “Steele paid blackmail money to Spellman,” Descoine created the secondary bank account which made regular payments to Spellman.
He added to the depth and verisimilitude to these clues by developing them over an extended period of time. The records of Steele’s association with Spellman range back many months, and that makes it harder for the police to dismiss the evidence as illegitimate.
But what about “Steele killed Spellman in a vehicular homicide?” Well, the biggest piece of material evidence there is the body, which Descoine stole from a city morgue. He transported the corpse to the accident site in an ice cream truck, then pushed it in front of Steele’s car at just the right moment. That ice cream vendor, who Steele encountered after the (seemingly) fatal accident? He was Descoine in disguise. In fact, Descoine has been so eager to watch Steele squirm, that he’s used disguises so he can appear as many of the characters in the plot—including the temperamental Mrs. Spellman.
So, if Spellman isn’t the body—who is he? No one—Spellman was an alias who only ever existed on paper. This is a bit unusual—in most frame stories, the Villain kills an actual Victim, whose death the Patsy can be blamed for.
However, Descoine did still link his frame into real-world events. To build his narrative of the crime for which Steele was being blackmailed, Descoine didn’t construct something out of whole cloth. Rather, he went looking for a real-world crime that Steele could plausibly be attached to.
Linking the Patsy to real-world crimes is very effective, because there will be a wealth of evidence and witnesses that the Villain doesn’t have to construct. No one can doubt that MacIntyre was in fact murdered; this is a matter of public record. All Descoine has to do is provide evidence that links Steele to his death.
Discrediting the Patsy
Supplying the police with false evidence is great—but to really make a frame stick, the Villain should also try to undermine the Patsy’s appearance of trustworthiness.
In his initial interaction with Steele, Descoine takes care to supply Steele with a story that sounds a little fishy. A meeting at a burned-down inn? An ice cream truck driving around a remote location at night? These weird details ensure that Steele will look like he’s lying, even as he’s doing his best to accurately recount events.
But that’s not all. Descoine also manipulated Steele into the meeting at the morgue—a meeting in which he comes off very badly. The coroner can’t help but conclude that Mrs. Spellman is truly terrified of Steele, and that Steele’s intention in coming to the morgue is to threaten her. This coroner has now become a witness to Steele’s shady behavior.
Discrediting the Patsy can be quite damning. If the Patsy was able to give a clear, sensible rundown of events, it would go a long way toward convincing the police to give him a little benefit of the doubt—and maybe examine the evidence a second time. But they become less willing to do this if your Villain can undermine the Patsy’s integrity by:
making his story sound confused or unlikely
putting him in a position where he must lie
manipulating him so his behavior comes off as strange or unseemly
The Villain often manages to discredit the Patsy not just with the police—but with their own friends and allies as well. For this reason, the emotional story in a Frame Job plot often deals with issues surrounding trust, integrity, and relationships. In “Steele Framed,” Laura comes up against her fears that Steele may not be the man she thinks he is. And for a while, the audience is left in doubt as to whether she will stick by him.
Breaking the Frame
Just as in any other plot, many of the clues that allow your Sleuth to unravel the frame will come from actions the Villain has taken, or narratives he has tried to maintain.
In this plot, Descoine’s Action Log includes, among other things:
hacking into Steele’s phone lines to place calls
stealing a body from the city morgue
faking a photograph that shows Steele with MacIntyre
setting up a bank account in Steele’s name
The first two of these provide clues for our Sleuths. We find the device Descoine used to place calls from Steele’s phone number, and we find a morgue attendant who admits that a body’s gone missing. It’s easy to imagine other clues that might result from this Action Log: maybe we could find the original photo Descoine altered, or a bank employee who can identify Descoine as the person who initially opened the account.
What about narratives? Well, here are a couple of Descoine’s:
Steele killed Spellman in a vehicular homicide
I am Mrs. Spellman
The Sleuths find a powerful disruption to the first narrative on this list: it turns out that the body is twenty degrees lower in temperature than it should have been, based on the supposed time of death. And it’s easy to imagine disruptions to the second narrative as well. Perhaps we could pick up on a clue that indicates “Mrs. Spellman” is really a man—such as unusually large feet, or a rather mannish gait.
Frame Jobs are always great fun, and in the next chapter, we’ll deal with another Classic Plot Twist that sends your characters chasing after a false narrative: the Bogus Crime.