I was reading a thriller from the early part of the 21st century, “The Accident Man.”
It’s a pretty good thriller, and the beginning seems to keep going for pages without taking a breath. A handsome British hit man teams up with a beautiful Russian spy to find out who hired them to kill Princess Diana, then tries to kill each of them.
But the author keeps doing the thing that makes me crazy in these kind of books. He keeps making perfectly sane, maybe even savvy characters do stupid things. Things that even I, who at best worked at the lowest level of the spy business (I was a radio operator in the Air Force in 1975), would know not to do.
They keep getting into the car.
The bad guy, some Russian baddie who smells bad and looks disgusting, will make arrangements with a character to retrieve some information or a document or a puppy or something. He will meet said character at a remote assignation point (also a bad idea) then tell them that he needs them to get into the car.
The first character who gets into the car gets shot. Then the main character meets the baddie and he gets into the car, too. He is whisked away to a location where he is brutally tortured and would have been killed if the beautiful Russian spy had not fallen in love with him and rescued him.
I know that as a writer, I have to keep the suspense going and the story moving. But why do it by making people do stupid things?
If I knew the guy I was dealing with is a no-good bad guy who probably never even writes to his mother to let her know how he’s doing, why would I trust him by getting into the car? A car is a rather limited space. Hard to run off. Hard to even make a spy move which incapacitates the henchmen around me. I doubt they’d even let me make a cell phone call to my dog to let him know I’d be home late.
If I knew the guy I was dealing with is a no-good baddie, when he told me he needed me to get into the car, I would say, “No thank you. I’m pretty good right here.” This might frustrate him. He might even pull a gun on me. You’d think if I was an experienced action hero, I’d anticipate him pulling a gun on me and plan accordingly.
The one thing I would not do: Get into the car.
It soured me on this author. He/She (the author later translated himself into a woman in real life) wrote seven of these books. I’m not sure I’m going to read any more if the main character, who is supposedly the best at his deadly trade, is going to get into the car just because a bad guy says “I’ve got the money back at my house. Left it on the kitchen table. How forgetful of me. Let’s go back together and get it and we can have tea and cakes.”
I’d bring my own cake. And I’d tell him, “I’ll wait right here while you go and get it, bro.”
Mark Bruce, Writer 