Communicating psychology

'A Few Short Notes On Tropical Butterflies' by John Murray

Not a crime in sight, but useful character studies.

‘My profession is a shelter and retreat,’ says an aging optomologist in Acts of Memory/Wisdom of Man’.

John Murray’s collection of 8 stories are peopled with characters who hide from the difficulties of life by immersing themselves in their obsessions. Rather than deal with the emotional disorder surrounding them, they bury their uncertainties in the clinical worlds of science, disease and categorical ordering. There is the surgeon who collects and classifies butterflies, the doctor who tries to put a dent in the chaos of cholera, and the son who tracks his runaway father down in an effort to glue his fragmented family back together.

As writers, we have much to learn about building character and a character’s world from Murray’s stories. His characters deliberately lose themselves in order, pour their energies into creating emotional buffers and cocoons into which they can retreat. These manifestations signal to the reader that the characters are inwardly out of control or unable to deal with the world around them. These glaring contradictions between the characters’ outer and inner worlds let the reader see the characters’ conflicts and issues for themselves.

As devices for communicating the inner crisis of character, Murray’s constructions are highly metaphoric. Yet they are also immediate, colourful, and quirky whilst still being universal. We all know of people who use hobbies as a retreat or meditative space. We may even have done this ourselves. Set against a crumbling outside world or failing family lives, this behavior can indicate a person’s desperate desire to run and hide.

Making deviant characters likeable

'The Burglar Who Liked To Quote Kipling' by Lawrence Block

Lawrence Block’s ‘The burglar who liked to quote Kipling’ is the third read in the Bernie Rhodenbarr series. Block’s Rhodenbarr adventures are unique as they are one of the few literary franchises that sit squarely in the genre of ‘criminal fiction’. Sure, there are other authors who use criminals as their main characters. Elmore Leonard is one of the most notable, except that he rarely revisits the same protagonist. So Block faces a rare writerly challenge – how do you make the reader repeatedly sympathise with a character who functions on the wrong side of the law?

The solution? Make his inability to resist crime an addiction, just as smoking or sex is for some people. Rhodenbarr’s fingers start out with a mission, in this case to steal a rare Kipling for a buyer, but they can’t help straying along the way to pocket a few goodies lying around. Of course, he does make an attempt at restraint when he resists the urge to back a truck up to a house and clean the lot out. But overall, we’re given the message that Bernie’s a victim of a badly wired brain.

Block also swings us over to Bernie’s side by only letting him burgle people who are also crooked. There are no innocent victims of Bernie’s crimes, only those who obtained wealth by deception, who are duplicitous to their partners, who are murderers. Even those who seem innocent, such as the elderly owners of the apartment Bernie tumbles into after he’s been drugged and set up for murder, prove they are not what they seem when they exaggerate the number of goods Bernie steals.

Block extends this finger of blame to the poor bystanders whose cars Bernie steals. They are double parked and hydrant hogging lawbreakers themselves. Despite this, Bernie always make a special effort to return their cars in pristine condition – and with a little extra gas in the tank as a thank you.

So what can we learn as writers from Block’s criminal character? That a reader will cheer on anyone as long as they establish their own set of well justified morals and stick by them in a universe where no one else will. No matter how bad he is, make the world worse.


Block, L. (1979) The burglar who liked to quote Kipling. New York. Dutton.