The Stinker Challenge

I have a stinker streak in me, without a doubt. Babies can be real stinkers, and I’m not even talking about the obvious. Take a look at this photo of Grandson Rory, who is putting stinker eyes on his dad for reasons only a wee babe can imagine.

As a retired high school principal, over the years I learned a lot about stinkers. But that's for another blog. As a reader and a writer, I've learned something about literary stinkers. Here's Literary Stinker Law #1:

Stinkers make crappy main characters. Novels about stinkers don’t get passed along to a friend. Instead, readers get fed up with stinkers and toss those novels in the trash—unfinished. You and I and every other reader simply must like the main character in a novel, or else.

I know, I know there was Dexter on TV and some other murderous main characters on the screen, Still, Dexter was likable, and his propensities to mayhem was always towards very bad people. 

I’m hard pressed to think of an unlikable stinker who is the main character in a popular novel, especially a novel by a southern author and set in the south. I personally found Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind, to be a stinker, and quit reading it towards the end, but the record-breaking sales of GWTW say otherwise. I’m thinking more of Atticus Finch and Huck Finn. Guys like that.

So here I sit in Recliner #7, the morning after Easter, midway through writing A Different Country Entirely, my new novel, which centers on a real adventure led by a true-blue stinker. I’m wondering if the stinker in my new book will cause it to get tossed unfinished into lots of trashcans. Of course, I hope not.

The stinker is Captain James Callahan, who led the 115 Texans who historically undertook the adventure that I’m writing about. The primary sources of the time reflect that Callahan really was a stinker, and I’m determined not to whitewash the history in this historical novel. An accurate portrayal of how things historically were is important to me, and I think important to readers. Otherwise I’d just write and they’d just read fantasy fiction.  

My Stinker-Challenge is not easily resolved. I can’t simply edit my historical stinker out of the story. He’s the catalyst, the core of the historical side of the plot. Nonetheless, I’m striving to keep him out of the main spotlight as much as I can. To that end, I’ve upgraded a fellow who would typically be a supporting character into the main character role.

First Sergeant Milo Macleod, like all first sergeants, is the man who makes sure that what Captain Callahan wants, gets done, He and Stinker Callahan have a backstory together that involves both mutual respect and a growing concern by Macleod that his boss has serious “flaws.” That’s not a new issue in military fiction, for sure. Mutiny On The Bounty and The Caine Mutiny, and so forth.

Be assured that First Sergeant Macleod won’t foment a mutiny, but he will find himself, more than once, between a rock and a hard place, left to feel his way through, where there are no good paths. He'll have to find a way to work around the unacceptable facets of Callahan's orders and still get the job done. A Stinker-Challenge.

I expect we all find ourselves in the dark, feeling our way along, probably more often than we let on. Situations that looked oh, so rosy, one day, look oh, so stinky later on.  You've been there, you get it. 

Back to Sergeant Macleod and Captain Callahan, when A Different Country Entirely rattles the windows all across America as the newest book everyone’s gotta read, you’ll know I won the Stinker Challenge.  J