Guest Post: A Study in Contrasts by Paul A. Barra

Please welcome back author Paul A Barra to the blog today…

 

A Study in Contrasts by Paul A. Barra

 

I admire contrast when authors have two important characters vying for prominence in a mystery novel. Otherwise, why have two? The contrast can vary from the natural complementarity between a man and a woman, working together as protagonists, to a good protagonist opposing an evil antagonist. Whether the contrast is inherently occurring or forced by circumstances, it is important to a story because it adds conflict—and conflict drives the plot, creating tension, the lifeblood of the genre.

 

Many of us write, and read, crime fiction precisely because a certain tension or suspense is a built-in part of the fictive type, pitting criminal activity against investigative efforts designed to end that activity. A person or persons unknown commits a crime, usually murder, early in the book and a good person or persons tries to identify the killer(s) and prevent more of his or her or their evil work. I need hardly mention here that “good” is a relative term when describing our protagonists. Victims are innocents (also speaking relatively), so there is also the satisfying result of justice served. Usually. No matter how intricate a writer’s plot or how well-crafted his characters, introducing a pair of contrasting good guys trying to solve the same mystery adds tension, and so adds interest.

 

When I was working to add such interest to my new thriller, SGT. FORD’S WIDOW, I searched for an opposite to my protagonist. Gil Ford is a rangy native of wild Wyoming who can ride a horse as well as he can drive a pickup. I wanted him to be a veteran of the Vietnam War because I think the Modern-Historical Mystery is the wave of the future in the genre as readers tire of the ubiquitous cell phone playing the role of an electronic version of deus ex machina, or forcing the writer to invent unlikely reasons for a character to be unable to use his or her cell. I say unlikely because we know most people today would rather leave home without their shirts than without their phones. A charged cell is as important to a detective as a loaded sidearm. Cell phone towers have proliferated today to such an extent that Statista, a statistical research company, estimates that there are 16 billion (that’s sixteen thousand million or 16 x 10⁹) mobile phones in the world today—a world of just less than 8 billion human inhabitants. A garbage picker in Bangladesh can now call after work to see if his wife needs anything from Walmart on his way home. Well, maybe not Walmart.

 

What I needed was a person to work with Ford who was small, had never known winter, had never seen a horse or a cow, and who spoke no English. Enter Tran Thi Linh, the wife of a Viet Cong guerilla who died trying to infiltrate Ford’s army base. Ford was an MP then, and he rescued Linh from incensed GIs taking out their anger on her for the damage done by her late husband. As she recovers after in an army field hospital, she realizes Ford saved her very life and she decides she must dedicate the rest of that life to repaying him for his kindness. For his part, Ford realizes Linh will not survive on her own in the war-torn Mekong delta. She is broken, scarred and ostracized by the villagers who hate the grief her husband’s actions brought to them. Ford must get her to his home in Wyoming. It’s 1967. The trouble is, home is 8,000 miles away and American officials, not happy by then with how the war is going, will not transport the family of a VC to the World, as American conscripts referred to the USA. Ford works out an ingenious deal with an officer on a South Vietnamese gunboat, and Linh gets to Guam. And then to California on a plane with other wounded people.

The main part of the book takes place in eastern Wyoming, where Linh is convinced that no living thing can survive outside in January, and where Ford returns to work as a P.I. She accommodates to the weather, and to the large, hairy people, the amounts of protein they consume regularly, and the primitive language they speak. Women in Wyoming shoot guns and smoke cigarettes, she discovers to her horror. But she overcomes all the divergences from her former life and helps Ford solve the theft of six pigeon-blood-red rubies and subsequent murders. Linh eventually becomes locally famous as a crime-buster. She bows to her neighbors, and they bow back. Ford bows to no one. They are the perfect pair—if you like contrast between protagonists—except that Linh can no longer tolerate any sexual contact. That produces yet another contrast to chew over as you read.

 

Paul A. Barra’s new mystery-thriller, SGT. FORD’S WIDOW, will be released by the venerable publishing house The Permanent Press on Oct. 1, 2024. He invites you to kindly check out his website for more information (www.paulbarra.com).

 

Paul A. Barra ©2024