I Think Hitchcock Would Call It Cheating

It happens ever more frequently:

The opening chapters of the book – a page-turner, something grabbed off the rack at the supermarket – are written in first person.

This is a plot-driven story, a paperback with crosshairs on the cover, not a character study, so the first-person voice at best lends some character to the proceedings, or at least inserts the reader more readily into the role of the protagonist, as the shadowy forces that plan to disrupt his existence begin to gather.

By now, several score of pages have (hopefully) flown by, and if the author’s done his or her work, you’re at one with the narrator, because a) the narrator is a genuinely-engaging character, b) their predicament is so ingenious that you deem it worth your time to find out how any old straw man would fare, c) some combination of a and b; or even, if you have a stronger stomach than I do, the dread d) the author has all but sent a masseuse to your home in their effort to impress upon you their narrator’s essential goodness and likeability.

So the cat-and-mouse game is on. We have our mouse, we are rooting for the mouse, and the cat is still invisible.

Until the next chapter begins…in third person.

Here comes the cat. And he’s thrown the whole book out of joint.

Because why, then, do the “mouse” chapters need to be in first person?

The only reason, at this point, as far as I can tell, is d).

I think most authors accused of this would say something about using a larger palette.

I can agree that there’s something claustrophobic about first-person, but I would counter that claustrophobia is not a bad thing in a thriller; and that a third-person narrative throughout would be an omniscient narrator, and there’s no larger palette than omniscience.

Which leads back to d).

I think the Web is partly to blame for d). Go to Amazon and look up a thriller of the past ten years, then look at the lowest-starred customer reviews, and it's almost certain the customer "didn't like" or "didn't care" about the characters.

Properly chastened, the author who couldn't resist instant feedback returned to the keyboard and gifted their protagonist with heaps of caring: a dying mother or a selfless profession or - yes yes, a first-person narrative...for two-thirds of the book. Whenever the cat is not center stage.

Here's the thing: I think Hitchcock would call any of these gambits cheating.

That orderly contract between the writer and the reader that the postmodernists wanted thrown away for all time, the thriller still cries out for.