Looking for a gift for the mystery writer on your list? How about the perfect villain? Now there’s something that every crime writer needs. A good villain is always in style. Available in all shapes and sizes, villains suit any budget, and best of all, a writer can never have too many. Consider the Ideal Villain, suitable for any occasion. Who could forget Ebenezer Scrooge?

What a guy-a stingy, penny-pinching boss who worked his bookkeeper on Christmas Eve for a pittance. A shrewd tightwad, Scrooge learned dollars and cents from his deceased business partner, Jacob Marley. The Christmas tidings were all humbug to him — until, he received a fateful visit from the Ghost of Christmas Past. The perfect villain meets the perfect ghost. What a plot point!

In our own lives, too, we confront our ghosts. In the words of Leonard Cohen, “Everything that is beautiful is cracked; that’s how the light gets in.” Painful memories may haunt our past, but, viewed in the right light, they brighten the present and future. Among the rummage, the writer must strive to capture the beauty and humanity of ghosts. Scrooge himself struggled with this dichotomy, as he confronts Marley’s spirit:

“But you were always a good man of business, Jacob,” Scrooge said.

“Business! Mankind was my business,” the ghost of Marley responded.

“Mankind was my business.” These are the words that changed Scrooge’s life and everything about it-those words, and a convenient visit from The Ghost of Christmas Future. Therein lies the Christmas Message of Hope. No matter how many times we have failed in the past, there is promise in the present and the future. In the words of Jacob Riis, New York journalist and photographer:

“I look at a stonecutter hammering away at a rock a hundred times without so much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the 101st blow it splits in two. I know it was not the one blow that did it, but all that had gone before.”

May your ghosts confront your villains — and win.

Happy New Year!

See my latest interview with Susan Whitfield on the “About Claire” page

— Claire Applewhite