Do you love your protagonist?

  Michael –Alternate Thursdays

What makes
a great character readers are willing to follow through multiple books? No one knows the answer, and probably there isn’t any one answer
anyway. The examples are as diverse as Hercule Poirot and Jack Reacher. Poirot
is a brilliant detective. Reacher is smart, but he’s not into obscure
deductions. On the other hand, Reacher is a man of action. No one would accuse Poirot
of that.  Last week Caro mentioned the issue of how authors feel about their protagonists. My theory is that, before anything else, the author must be truly fond of
the character—maybe even love the
character. That doesn’t mean that she or he would necessarily even like the person
in real life. It’s more about enjoying time with the protagonist, offering
challenges, watching the character grow. Caring about them. After all, if the
author doesn’t feel that way, why on earth should the reader?

There are apparent
counter examples. Arthur Conan Doyle deliberately killed off Sherlock Holmes so
that he could move on to other things. Perhaps Holmes’ popularity came to
outshine his own to such an extent that a certain amount of jealousy was
involved? Still, nothing else he wrote had anything like the same impact and,
of course, he eventually resurrected Holmes. We'll never know if he missed
the taciturn detective or if he just gave way to public pressure.

Certainly,
there are a variety of classes of successful protagonists in crime and thriller
fiction. One extreme is probably the “action” protagonists, who usually have
enough weaknesses to make them real and slightly vulnerable. Reacher has no
home and no real life beyond his adventures. One feels sorry for him. He makes
connections, but soon they are broken and he travels on.

At the
other extreme are the “cozy” protagonists. They’re not necessarily all that
happy. Take Sally Andrew’s Tannie Maria who hides her emotional damage from an
abusive ex-husband behind her love of food and cooking. The murders that she
ropes herself into investigating are seldom cozy. But her life is rather that
way. A similar case could be made for Alexander McCall Smith’s wildly popular
Mma Ramotswe series set in Botswana. Sometimes, her cases are challenging but
hardly life and death. (But in her first outing she needed to prevent a muti
murder. That’s as dark as it gets.) There are a
host of classes in between. The “damaged” protagonist has typically lost his
(mostly it is a he) family, and abuses alcohol or drugs, but somehow manages to
turn the tables on the bad guys and stagger on to the next case. Deon Meyer's Bennie Griesel is an example. The personal
trials can be more tense than the criminal ones. We desperately want to know if
he will eventually make it through to the other side of his temptations. Roll
on the next book.

Our
character, Kubu, doesn’t really fit any of these molds. He’s certainly very
smart, and his family life has problems, but he isn’t an alcoholic or divorced.
Perhaps his attraction is that he's in many ways an ordinary family man whose
talent happens to be solving puzzles—detective puzzles in this case.
Physically, he's large and overweight motivating his Hippo nickname. Perhaps
readers like him because he’s comfortable to be with. He’s been described as “a sort of
Hercule Poirot of the desert”, and as “the African Columbo”. Maybe this should be called the
class of the “comfortable” protagonists.

Do we love
Kubu? I think so. In the long run, we wouldn’t want anything bad to happen to
him or his family, although they all have to put up with plenty of short term
threats and problems. 

Some of you
will know that Kubu was never intended to be the protagonist of A
Carrion Death . Instead, we had in mind a smart US-trained
ecologist who would solve the case while the police were rather inept about it.
Still, one has to have a police detective investigate a murder. Kubu left the CID,
climbed into his Land Rover with suitable provisions for the trip and headed
off. Along the way he thought about what had made him become a detective, and
what might lie ahead in the Kalarahi desert where the body had been found. He certainly wasn’t inept. He was smart and thoughtful and cared about his job. I guess we
fell for him rather hard. Eventually, the ecologist had to settle for Kubu’s sister-in-law
as a consolation prize. 

If you’re a
series author, do you love your protagonist? If you're a reader, what makes
you long for the next book featuring a protagonist you follow?