Pitchposting: Bad Detectives
content warning: bdsm, sexual violence, suicide, murder, police
Pitchposting is when you write about a thing that you're not going to write to exorcise the demons.
I was a big fan of the Hannibal TV show, partly because it was a bit silly. I'm worried that the thing I'm going to describe here will feel like a riff on that, but hopefully it's just an influence. The actual core of the idea came while watching Presumed Innocent.
The book follows two detectives who hunt serial killers. I'm not sure I care all that much about actual serial killers or the actual people who hunt them, though I have read a few nonfiction books from former FBI people, mostly to make sure I understand the perspective of government employees and how their process of self-mythologizing goes (for a different book). This book takes place in one of those worlds where there are a ton of serial killers, they're clever and artistic and tortured, and they're caught by looking at their signatures and through careful psychoanalysis rather than security cameras, fingerprints, and other features of the national security panopticon.
Our male lead is scruffy and tightly clenched. He's a loner. He doesn't talk much, but when he does, it's insightful and poignant. He's weird, but not in a way that maps well to any actual diagnosis. He's extremely good at getting inside the head of serial killers, understanding their patterns, knowing the things that will give them away, how they'll inevitably slip up or be caught. To the extent we get his inner thoughts, he is absolutely fucked in the head: the only reason you wouldn't call him a serial killer is that he's never actually killed anyone, and the only reason he hasn't done it is because it's wrong. He instead satisfies his urges through his job with the FBI, which allows him access to tons and tons of photographs and the chance to visit crime scenes, to talk to serial killers, to confront his darkness over and over, flirting with it. Maybe there's actually some question whether he has killed someone, and in what circumstances, if he's an Ethical Serial Killer of some kind. You can smell the frustrated impulses on him.
Our female lead is carefully put together and very cold. She's a loner. She doesn't talk much, but when she does, she's sad and distant. She's weird in a way that doesn't map to any diagnosis. She's fastidious. She has eight of the exact same suit and three pairs of the same shoes. She's extremely good at getting in the heads of serial killers, which again, is the main way that serial killers are caught in this world rather than, I don't know, loads of interviews, tip lines, etc. She is absolutely fucked in the head: she's drawn to killers like a moth to flame. She is, essentially, prey incarnate, a lamb who would willingly lie down to be brutalized by the lion. The only reason she hasn't been killed is that she has a sense of self-preservation and thinks that killing and hurting people is wrong. She satisfies her urges through her work, which gets her access to serial killers, lets her interview them, lets her see the crime scenes and imagine herself in them, etc.
I think for the purposes of pitchposting, we could stop there. Obviously we have two completely insane people in a very high-stress high-stakes job who happen to match each other in a way that no human ever actually does. They have these private inner lives that they cannot, under any circumstances, share with other people, but the central tension is that if they did share with each other, they would find that they're a perfect fit.
The scene that's been kicking around in my head is the two of them trying to recreate a crime scene together, with her in the role of victim and him in the role of perpetrator. They're in their work clothes, conservatively dressed, both playing the part of professional, and each actually thinking while they're playing it cool "wow, this is so hot, god I wish this were real".
It's basically this, as a fucked up psycosexual erotic thriller/romance:
I think as far as this core relationship goes, it's pretty solid. Both have a dark secret, their dark secrets complement each other, there's plenty of reason for both of them to misunderstand the other (because both would naturally assume that the other is repulsed rather than attracted).
But at the end of the line, I'm not sure what an ending would look like for the two of them. He's not just a sadist, he has a hunger for murder, and his whole character orientation has been around trying to satisfy those urges in other ways that don't quite work. And she's not just a masochist, she has erotic suicidality, which I might have just coined (but probably did not). The ending that their internal drives are pointing at is with him as a killer and her dead. That would be a very daring ending, and I'm not sure what it would mean ... but I also don't know what ending would work better, or even what the themes of this book would be, other than just "look at these two freaks". (And of course the audience for the book is people who see themselves in one or the other of these two freaks. I'm using "freaks" affectionately here.)
The main problem is that this is all sort of gross. Hannibal steered away from sexual violence, one major notable exception aside, vaguely implying it sometimes but often using murder as a stand-in for sex. I thought the show worked best when it was the most divorced from reality, when it was being serious about its camp. The serial murders are works of art, things of beauty, dark and horrible but also aesthetic and neatly planned.
Maybe you can do that here. Maybe serial killers in this world have absolutely no interest in sexual violence of any kind. Maybe our protagonists are vaguely sexless themselves, and when they're acting out murders together the sex stuff exists only in the mind of the reader. And then when they do have sex, if they do, then that's a stand-in for murder. This is less gross than, e.g. having sexually violent crimes that sexually excite our protagonist, at least in my opinion, maybe because that would be less divorced from reality.
A woman with an interest in getting raped is ... I mean, there are real women like that out there, ones who have that fantasy and ones who actually would want to make that fantasy a reality in some way. But a woman who thinks it's hot to be ritually stabbed fifty-two times in the stomach is less real, and her dark desire is more clearly a stand-in for other dark desires, whatever repressed urge our audience feels, or sees in others, or how we understand ourselves and our thoughts. Easier to do the mapping when it's clear that we're not mapping to anything substantially real. (Knowing humans, I am sure that there probably is someone out there with vivid fantasies about basically anything, but if I wrote the story it would be with "this is not literally about dismemberment, decapitation, vivisection, bondage, stabbing, etc." in mind.)
I think having the serial killers be over the top also helps to take you out some of what tends to be a icky about true crime. It becomes clear that this is a fantasy, that it's exploring something in our brains, rather than doing the typical procedural thing of "ripped from the headlines". These would be killers with their own weird fucked up demons they let free, artists, rather than the serial killers we get in the real world, who are mostly impulse idiots. I think it's easy to not be exploitative if you're completely divorcing yourself from reality.
I think I'm the wrong person to write this, which makes it perfect for a pitchpost. I enjoyed Hannibal, but it seems like an exhausting thing to write, and trying to strike the right balance for both main characters seems tough and like an ongoing battle I'd be fighting with every word. There'd be a risk of teetering over into grimderp shock value at every turn.
I'm trying, right now, to think about a way to have that same dynamic I like without it being some sex-murder thing, and I'm coming up blank. Two people who are serious professionals with a dark secret whose careers are ostensibly about stopping that thing ... you know, maybe just set the story in a repressive society where the things they think are horrible and would offend the other are things we maybe find a little boring or everyday, though this loses you the aspect of "our desires would literally destroy us". So I don't think it would be quite the same, but I'd be more likely to write it, rather than wallowing in the sexy murdersphere.
