There’s something about flawed characters that crime and thriller fans love. Poirot and Holmes are brilliant, yes, but they’re also rude and arrogant; unpleasant people we’d steer clear of in real life. Rebus is a brooding drinker who can’t maintain a normal relationship. Tony Hill is a repressed abuse survivor. Freddie Venton is a selfish, impulsive narcissist.
But this psychological damage, these imperfections, is what makes them compelling. Who wants to read about a perfect person who never makes mistakes, is loved by everyone, and has no defects? How boring and lifeless. Flawed characters, by contrast, are unique and full of life — more interesting to read because we know those flaws might lead them to make a serious mistake, or suffer dire consequences.
Which also makes them more interesting to write.
When I created MI6 hacker Brigitte Sharp for her first book The Exphoria Code, I wanted to find a good balance, a competent character whose personal problems weren’t overwhelming or clichéd. I knew I would be spending a lot of time inside her head, so she had to be as interesting for me to write as for the audience to read. Thus Bridge is brilliant and intuitive, but she’s also recovering from work-related trauma, and is far from impulsive. If anything, she’s too logical for her own good, bordering on paranoia that makes her constantly second-guess her actions.
(Author bonus: because Bridge gets lost in her own head so much, writing her puzzle-solving thought processes is very satisfying for me!)
But impulsiveness is a beloved character flaw in protagonists. I couldn’t risk Bridge being an automaton. So she is impetuous and reckless… but in her personal life, not at work. Bridge’s relationship with her mother and sister is fractious, full of jealousy and resentment rooted in her father’s death when she was a teenager. Nobody can wind up Brigitte like her sister Isabelle, and she goes months at a time without even speaking to her mother.
But while this complex characterisation helped The Exphoria Code succeed, it felt like an own goal when I started to write The Tempus Project — particularly as the first book ended with the promise of promotion for Bridge, including greater recognition and responsibility at MI6.
Faced with a happy, well-balanced and contented main character, I did the only thing I could; I ruined her life. Within the first twenty pages of The Tempus Project Bridge is at the epicentre of a disaster which leads to demotion, ostracisation, and the return of all that juicy depressive paranoia.
If she were real, I’d apologise until the end of my days for putting her through the wringer every time we meet. But that damage, and those flaws in her character, are precisely what keep my writer’s fingers moving — and my readers’ pages turning. Sorry, Bridge. Maybe I’ll make it up to you in the third book…
…Oh, who am I kidding?
Antony Johnston is the creator of Atomic Blonde and The Exphoria Code, and hosts the podcast Writing And Breathing. The Tempus Project is published on May 25 by Lightning Books.
