Chapter 6: The Motive Triangle

Villain, Victim, Motive

Here’s a question for you to ponder. Is a mystery about the Sleuth—or is it about the Villain?

It’s not as crazy as it sounds. After all, the Villain’s actions set the plot into motion. His comeuppance is the novel’s climax. His cleverness determines how twisty the mystery will be—and thus, how clever your Sleuth will appear. And the Villain’s confession helps us to scratch at that question that underlies all mystery novels: why do people do bad things?

One thing’s for certain: without your Villain, your Sleuth wouldn’t be a Sleuth.

In this chapter, you’re going to be creating your Villain—or at least, the bare-bones version of him. But you won’t be creating him in a vacuum. Because, just as the Sleuth wouldn’t be a Sleuth without the Villain, there’s somebody who the Villain wouldn’t be a Villain without: the Victim.

We’re going to be creating your Motive Triangle, which will show how the Villain and Victim are linked by one of the four motives—Love, Money, Power, or Fear. It looks a little something like this:

To create your Motive Triangle, you can start with either top corner: the Villain, or the Victim. You’re going to take advantage of a couple of the tools we’ve already established: the Image Bank, and the List of Five. Look at the people listed in your Image Bank and pick out five that you think might make a good Victim (or, if you prefer, a good Villain).

If I were writing a mystery novel set in ancient Egypt, I might comb through my Image Bank and pick out, as potential Victims:

• priest of Ra

• prison guard

• scribe

• pharaoh’s cupbearer

• pharaoh

The next thing I’d do is to augment each of these roles with a brief description, something to get me thinking of it less as a role, and more as the beginnings of a character. These might become:

• doubt-stricken priest of Ra

• prison guard who takes bribes

• nervous scribe

• pharaoh’s loyal cupbearer

• a pharaoh who is beset by rivals

These short descriptions are what I call Character Seeds. They’re not fully fleshed out characters—not by a long shot. But there is enough there for you to start imagining how they might behave, how others might react to them, and—most importantly—why someone might want them dead.