3.4 Craig Robertson

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A photograph of Craig Robertson.

Craig Robertson is a former journalist and now full-time author writing crime novels based in contemporary Glasgow. His crime series centres around DS Rachel Narey and police photographer Tony Winter. His first novel, Random, was a New York Times bestseller.

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CRAIG ROBERTSON

The question of empathy with villains is a tricky one. And I think it varies author-to-author. And it certainly varies book-to-book. I’ve had villains who are mostly off page whose identity has been the villain or the killer. It’s not revealed till later in the book.

So in those instances, it’s not as important. But I’ve written three, four books where the villain, the killer is upfront and obvious in plain sight. And in at least two of those cases, I have sort empathy, sympathy.

The terms are not necessarily that useful. If I can make my reader understand and I know I’ve sometimes toyed with their emotions of putting them on the side of the villain, and they don’t always like that. I’ve had people say, mainly jokingly, you made me root for someone who’s been killing people.

And I felt uncomfortable with that. And I took that as a bit of a badge of honour. I’m fine with that. Again, people don’t come in black and white. They come in shades of grey. And if we’re going to have any understanding of the human psyche, then at times, we’re going to be in one side or the other.

So I have invested characters with empathy. And that’s again about making them real, about motivations. You might not agree with what someone does. But if you have a sense of why they’ve done it, and think, well, maybe if I was pushed to the edge, and in that circumstance, I might have done the same thing, then I think readers will go along with that. They’ll buy into that if you do it properly.

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Having viewed the videos, you will see that the crime authors are not only interested in making us feel empathy with their protagonists, they are also at times trying to create empathy with their villains. You will also notice, particularly in the last video, that the authors realise that readers might not always like being put on the side of the villain.

Psychologists have tended to suggest that the empathy that can be built through reading is most readily experienced for people who seem like us (Keen, 2006). How might this translate though when the characters involved are people we see as not being similar to us, such as villains? Later on in the course you will return to why readers may feel this way in much more detail, and will examine further whether or not it is possible for us to feel empathy with villains, and still enjoy ourselves, and feel comfortable as readers.