by Teddy Wayne
author of The Winner
I’ve always been less drawn to novels in which a detective investigates a homicide or a missing persons case than those in which the heretofore noncriminal protagonist is responsible for a murder, or suspected as culpable for a missing person, and must either cover up the crime or prove his innocence. I find it even richer when the murder is in the second degree—that is, without premeditation—or if the missing person has, it turns out, planned her disappearance herself and is framing the main character.
What intrigues about the former category is the reader’s unsettling identification: that, under similarly straitened circumstances, or with just bad luck, we too might somehow end up in the same awful position—and that we too might not turn ourselves into the police, but instead try to sweep our misdeeds under the rug. Conscienceless serial killers don’t interest me, but rather protagonists who have a touch—just a touch—of the sociopath about them, a seed of violence that, upon rereading, was present all along.
Watching this seed germinate is the most entertaining part of these novels. Their newly criminal mind must work to strategize and deceive in the aftermath of the crime, sometimes digging their hole deeper by murdering other potential witnesses, always sinking further into the muck of their compromised ethics, cold calculations, and secretive alienation. And then the flip side of all that tactical energy: anxiety and paranoia and guilt, perhaps for the rest of their days.
As for those who are unjustly blamed for a missing persons case, it’s even easier to situate ourselves in their predicament. Up against a dastardly mastermind who is somehow able to engineer her disappearance (it more often seems to be a woman who does this in literature), we know that we wouldn’t stand a chance, either. It occasions a difference sort of metamorphosis. The naif comes to understand he never really knew someone he thought he knew intimately, and he must start thinking like the genuine sociopath who betrayed them if they’re to survive.
Here are eight thrillers that put the reader in the disquieting shoes of someone hiding their responsibility for a death—or for desperately proving their innocence for a disappearance:
- Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoeyvsky
- The Talented Mr. Ripley – Patricia Highsmith
- Hawk Mountain – Conner Habib
- Social Creature – Tara Isabella Burton
- Beautiful Animals – Lawrence Osborne
- I Know What You Did Last Summer – Lois Duncan
- Gone Girl – Gillian Flynn
- Who Is Maud Dixon? – Alexandra Andrews
Author bio:
Teddy Wayne is the author of the novels The Winner, The Great Man Theory, Apartment, Loner, The Love Song of Jonny Valentine, and Kapitoil. He is the winner of a Whiting Writers’ Award and an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship as well as a finalist for the Young Lions Fiction Award, PEN/Bingham Prize, and Dayton Literary Peace Prize. A former columnist for the New York Times and McSweeney’s and a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, he has taught at Columbia University and Washington University in St. Louis. He has developed films and series from his novels with Columbia Pictures, HBO, MGM Television, and others. He lives in Brooklyn with his family.
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