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?