I shall readily admit that I do the same thing when I see a good movie. I was telling a friend about the startling ending of Life of Pi, and to my surprise she said, "I don't like to be fooled."
Not me, baby. When it comes to storytelling, fool me once, I like it. Fool me twice and I'm a fan for life. Of course it depends on how you fool me. It has to be like a magic trick – the magician distracts you while the magic goes on right in front of your eyes. It must be that when you look back it was there all the time.
As a mystery writer and reader, I'm pretty hard to fool. This is one thing I discovered early on about writing mysteries – mystery readers know all your tricks. They've seen it all before. So if you can manage to surprise a dedicated mystery reader, you've really done something.
One of my favorite twisty movies was No Way Out, a 1981 thriller starring kevin Costner and Gene Hackman, based on a novel called The Big Clock, by Kenneth Fearing. Costner plays a naval officer named Tom who falls for a women who he later discovers is the mistress of his boss David Bryce (Hackman) – who happens to be the Secretary of Defense. When Bryce finds out she's seeing someone else, he accidentally kills the woman in a fit of jealously. To protect him, the Secretary's aide concocts a cover up. They'll blame the death on her secret lover, not realizing it's Tom. And to keep the whole affair classified and out of the papers, the aide tells the CIA that the murderer they're looking for is a Soviet agent called Yuri. Yuri's name has been bandied about as a deep undercover spy in the Pentagon for years, but most officials long ago came to the conclusion that he doesn't really exist. During a search of the murdered woman's apartment, the CIA finds an overexposed Polaroid on the floor, and a Pentagon systems analyst tells them he can have the computer reconstruct the photo within twelve hours. Tom knows the photo is of him, taken during one of his trysts. Now the clock is set.
Then Bryce puts Tom, Costner's character in charge of the investigation. How Tom manages to get out of this predicament before the photo exposes him as the murdered woman's secret lover is pulse-pounding, to say the least.
But the best part is the twist at the end, and believe me, I never saw it coming. Just when you think it's all over, just as the whole plot comes out int the open and the bad guys are exposed...
But I can't spoil the twist. You'll just have to see for yourself.
And if you can figure it out before the end, kudos. You are a genius. Drop me a note and let me know.
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*I stole this quote. I wish I had said it, but it was T.S. Elliot.
