The Crime Writers’ Association

Ten Ways to Make Your Criminal Protagonist Fascinating by Dagger Longlister Judy Hock

By Judy Hock

There’s always a crook in crime fiction, but what if that character is your protagonist? Readers need to care about the main character. Here are some tips for adding complexity and keeping your reader intrigued.

1. Make Them ‌a Victim

A tried-and-true approach to building sympathy for a criminal protagonist is to make them an abused spouse (The Wife Between Us) or someone falsely accused (The Fugitive), or recruited into crime at an early age (Lucky).

2. Make Them Fail Early and Often

The odds are against them, but they never quit. The reader can’t help but give them credit as they become increasingly clever.

3. Give them a Thread of Goodness

Give your protagonist a strong value and show it early. Remember Lisbeth Salander in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and her compulsion to save women from harm?

4. Put Them at a Disadvantage

Your character wrestles with a sympathetic disadvantage. Nobody believes them. They have a disability. Whatever you choose, add a noble touch to your character by having them never complain.

5. Let Them Explain Themselves

Give the character a solid justification for what they’re doing, even if it’s wrong. In Janelle Brown’s Pretty Things, the grifter scams the rich to pay for her mom’s medical treatment. Cliche maybe, but the character wasn’t.

6. Give Them a Talent

It’s hard not to admire an extraordinary skill, whether it’s being able to hack technology or anticipate the quarry’s every move. We all want to imagine ourselves being that smart or talented.

7. Pit Them Against Someone Worse

Make your protagonist more sympathetic by introducing a reprehensible character. The cop investigating them is corrupt. Or the psychopath framing them is so twisted, we root for your main character.

8. Make Them Funny

Readers will enjoy your criminal protagonist if they’re humorous. Think of the dark humor in How to Kill Your Family, or the sarcastic thoughts in Dexter.

9. Add a Hint of Justice

Nothing gets under a reader’s skin like injustice. Your criminal protagonist can get away with theft, blackmail, even murder if it means bringing someone despicable to justice.

10. Make Them Question Themselves

Don’t overdo it, but at least once give your crooked protagonist a dose of self-doubt. Have them ask themselves if what they’re doing is morally dubious and whether they should really be doing it. Of course, both answers will be yes, but at least they have some compunctions.

Bonus Tip: Keep the Reader in the Dark

This one is tricky to pull off, but it can work. Make your character relatable and good until the end when they reveal their true intentions. If the reader liked the story, they’ll never forget the ending.

Judy Hock is a writer in San Diego. The CWA longlisted her novel Good Criminals in the 2024 Debut Dagger. Her novel About the Dress won third place in the 2023 Daphne du Maurier Kiss of Death contest, unpublished division. She is currently working on a new crime suspense novel.

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