Why Mothers Make Great Main Characters in Mysteries & Thrillers
Motherhood can flood a woman’s psyche with self-doubt just as easily as it saturates her blood with oxytocin. Add high stakes as standard, and mothers make powerful central characters for crime fiction and thrillers. A closer look at some key tropes tells us more on why.
The Power of Maternal Doubt
“I don’t know if I’m doing anything right.”
When it takes a village to raise a child, what happens when our character is out of hers, or the village she and her offspring find themselves in is hostile? Maternal isolation and insecurity can create the perfect conditions for misdirection and misdemeanor.
In Liane Moriarty’s seminal 2015 thriller Big Little Lies, the presence of Jane ignites school gates chatter, even before her son Ziggy looks to have assaulted a classmate. Jane’s version of motherhood – young and single – challenges community expectations. She’s unusual, suspect; she’s mistaken for a nanny. And when Ziggy faces allegations of harming a female child, Jane herself is unsure if she’s doing motherhood correctly or raising a dangerous bully.
Early motherhood in particular can set the scene for deep-seated doubts. Characters may wrestle with sickly combinations of sky-high expectations paired with shortfalls in their ‘natural’ ability to nurture their newborn.
In my latest thriller The Marriage Rule, new mother Elle has already been backed into the darkest corners of maternal uncertainty by the innate brilliance of husband Dom’s care for their baby daughter and the bleak commentary of her mother-in-law, particularly when Elle struggles to breastfeed.
If your narrator can’t trust their body and soul to do what’s supposed to be instinctive, doubt can seep into extraordinary cracks. In the case of Elle, she’s ultimately left unsure whether the woman responsible for the body in her hotel room bed is her mother-in-law, or her.
Troubled Transformations
“Having a baby changed me completely.”
Motherhood offers characters a shot at metamorphosis, the chance to make self-styled Madonnas from self-imagined sinners. Maternal transformation can therefore offer two dramatic drivers for crime fiction and thrillers: the dark sport of antagonists motivated to pull back the veil on wholesome motherly personas, and what the women ‘birth-washed’ by motherhood may do to pursue and protect their image.
In Katherine Faulkner’s 2022 Greenwich Park, the pregnant and apparently entirely conventional narrator Helen is befriended by Rachel, another mother-to-be. At first, Rachel strikes Helen and loud and brash, before showing herself as erratic and disruptive to Helen’s enviable life. When Rachel goes missing and Helen’s memories of the last argument she had with Rachel are worryingly clouded, Helen yearns for the transformative promise of birth, “Nothing will ever be the same, people say. And that’s what I want, more than anything. To be transformed, to shed the skin of this dead time I am stuck in…”
Problems with Performative Parenthood
“I don’t know how she does it.”
In my second thriller, Such A Good Mother, Rose O’Connell is the last native standing in her once terrifying, now terrifyingly gentrified, neighborhood. When Rose mysteriously manages to pass muster with the queen bee of the finest local school and secure a place for son Charlie, the cost of social elevation is moral evisceration.
As Rose and Charlie are sucked into the so-called Circle of uber-mothers, our narrator loses sight of authentic parental care, instead prioritizing the performance of perfection. Misjudgements, mischief and ultimately, murder, ensue.
The Ultimate Motivation
“I’d do anything for my kids.”
In Lisa Jewell’s The Night She Disappeared, Kim’s daughter, herself a young mother, Tallulah goes missing after a party at a country estate. While the police believe she’s simply run away, Kim refuses to give up on finding Tallulah and the reasons why she vanished. Here, a mother’s compulsion powers both the plot and the novel’s emotional heartbeat.
In The Marriage Rule, what puts Elle in peril – alone in a murder scene she looks to have created – is desperation to stay in her baby daughter’s life. Elle has found ways to get through her marriage and life with over-attentive Dom and her over-bearing mother-in-law: alcohol and the pursuit of a workplace lover, both of which contribute to putting her in grave danger.
However, it’s also Elle’s need to protect her baby from Dom and his mother that motivates her attempt to escape from her crime-scene hotel room as the innocent party, regardless of whether or not she may, in fact, be guilty.
Discover the Book
Elle turns to her charismatic new colleague, Gabriel, to get through the day and red wine to soothe her at night. For a while, the distractions work until one night she wakes up bleary-eyed in a hotel room next to a man who’s not her husband. A dead man who’s not her husband.
Elle realizes Dom is the only person who can help her escape the hotel room with her future intact. She also knows she’d never have found herself next to the dead man if she’d followed The Marriage Rule, the one thing she’s been told a wife needs to do to keep her marriage alive.
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