Assassins are some of my favorite creatures to create. They are the Byronic hero of the literary world, moving through the shadows, doing the wrong thing for the right reasons. We root for these characters because they are vital in the international landscape, stopping wars, ending dictatorships, and otherwise ridding the world of vermin. They also protect, keep safe, and otherwise selflessly save the lives of many characters. They walk such a fine line, and the ones we (I) love the most are forever struggling with that tightrope, relying heavily on their strict but twisted moral code and sense of honor while still…well…murdering people for a living.
The dichotomy of these characters is one of my favorites to write. I thought I’d spend today deconstructing how I create a solid, believable assassin, using one of my favorites, Angelie Delacroix, as an example. Angelie appears first in the Taylor Jackson novella Whiteout and reappears in The Wolves Come at Night.
Angelie was born in blood. The sole survivor of an assassination attempt on her family, she is brought up by her morally corrupt uncle and trained away from her grief and into the vicious traditions that make him money. She eventually becomes one of the most sought-after assassins in the world for her success, discretion, and creative disposal methods. She works for an international consortium, The Macallan Group, under the ever-watchful eye of Thierry Florian.
Angelie fascinates me for several reasons.
Her character juxtaposes the facets necessary for the kind of person she’s become. She is topically emotionless yet feels deeply and seeks beauty wherever she can. She is vicious, feral, unforgiving, yet desperate for peace and answers. She is brilliant but not beautiful; she is a chameleon. A wolf in sheep’s clothing. She is Taylor Jackson, but unfettered, ungoverned, unmade.
Whiteout begins with the attack on Angelie and her family. She is a child, a baby, just old enough to be cognizant of the situation but much too young to understand the forever implications of what’s really happened. When I say “born in blood,” this is what I mean.
October 9, 1987
Annecy, France
1900 HoursMy father’s screams echo in the small car.
“Monte, vite, vite. Angelie, baisse-toi! Baisse-toi!”
My head hits the floor just as the window shatters. Blood, thick and hot, sprays my bare legs. I wedge myself under my mother’s skirts, her thighs heavy against my shoulders. Somehow I know she is already dead. We are all dead.
Flashes of black.
Their voices, two distinctly male, one female. Another, a stranger’s call, silenced abruptly with a short fusillade of bullets. The would-be savior’s bicycle smashes into the side of our aging Peugeot. His body catapults across the hood onto the pavement beyond and his head hits the ground; the crack sounds like the opening of a cantaloupe, ripe and hard.
My father, his life leaving him, slides down in the seat like a puppet cut from its strings. He’s whispering words over and over, faintly, and with the cacophony in the background I can barely hear him. I risk a glance, wishing I’d not. The image shall never leave me. Red, pulpy and viscous. He is missing half his face, but his full lips are moving.
“Si toi survivre, cherchér ton Oncle Pierre. Je t’aime de tout mon cœur.”
I hear nothing but the first words. Panic fills me. Though I recognize what is happening, the reality has just crept in.
Si toi survivre. If you survive.
I want to take his hand, to comfort him, to tell him I am there, that I, too, love him with all my heart. I reach for him as he dies. He shakes his head, trying to implore me to stay hidden, not to move. He isn’t even speaking now, but I can hear his words in my head, like he has transferred his soul to my body for these last fluttering moments, has given himself up early to crowd into my body and try to save me.
Undeterred, my hand steals across the gearshift. I touch the cold skin of his thumb.
A roaring in my ears. There is pain beyond anything I’ve ever felt, and I go blank.
Effective, intimate, and painful. She is made before our very eyes into a creature of darkness. She is murdered yet survives, rising like a phoenix from the ashes. Rebirth is an excellent metaphor for the Byronic hero; thematically, it almost always works.
(As it happens, her death and rebirth mimic an actual assassination of a young family at a small country crossroads in France. All the best mythologies are born in truth, yes?)
The adult Angelie is formidable, and in the following scene, we see how she transforms herself to move in the world as she’s about to start a job. She shifts seamlessly from one persona to another, and we learn about her barbaric but effective methods.
October 7
London, England
0000 HoursThe phone in my flat bleats to life as I am leaving for the airport.
My phone never rings, and this is purposeful. It is there for emergencies: fires, break-ins, unanticipated scenarios that could lead to my death. It is not for casual conversations, and it never rings, because only one person has my number.
My heart speeds up, just a little. Why is he calling? Why now?
I pick up the receiver. “Oui?”
“Angelie. What have you done?”
“Je ne sais pas de quoi tu parles.”
“In English, Angelie. How many times have I told you?”
“Alors, Pierre. Fine. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Angelie, you know exactly what I’m talking about. A couple of gendârmes just pulled Gregoire Campion’s body out of a duffel bag that was stashed in his bathtub. He was in pieces.”
This news is both good and bad. Good, because the smug bastard is dead, at last. Bad, because if my Uncle Pierre is telling the truth and the body has been found so soon, the borders will be under extra scrutiny. Pierre has given me a gift without even knowing.
“That means nothing to me. I must go, Oncle. À bientôt.”
I hear his cry of protest as I drop the receiver. I must hurry.
From my closet I pull the necessary gear. A quick change of undergarments gives my thin body curves; tinted contacts turn my eyes blue; a beautifully made wig transforms me into an elegant blonde. I trade my jeans and trainers for a cashmere dress that clings perfectly to every inch of my altered body. A pair of knee-high leather Frye boots with specially made lifts adds a good three inches to my five-foot-four frame.
My name is now Alana Terbraak. I have been this woman before. Alana is fearless, a predator disguised as a Dutch-Canadian travel agent. She is the perfect cover for crossing borders; it is her job to scope out areas she sends her clients to. No one questions Alana’s travel. She is one of my better identities.
I place several remaining identities in the bag, under a secure flap that is impossible to see with the naked eye, and pull the worn Canadian dollars from my safe. I mix them in with my Euros and pound notes, wipe down the small flat, lock everything up, and leave.
My plane departs in two hours, and I will not miss it.
Enigmatic characters are best drawn with one or two very fine strokes. We know so much about Angelie now, with very few words to get us there. I could write that she is thin, sarcastic, wears disguises, and is driven by hate, and that would work perfectly well. But for my style, my voice, showing her transformations drive the narrative.
When we again meet Angelie in Whiteout, we find she has discovered, at long last, the truth behind the plot to murder her family and is out for sweet revenge. The person who ordered the hit is at the conference in Maryland, and she’s posing as an attendee to get close to him. She comes up against Taylor Jackson, and the ensuing battle royale leaves deep scars on them both.
October 9
Chesapeake Bay, Maryland
0000 HoursThe cameras are on for my safety. I made sure before we began. They will catch everything. Just in case.
The kisses are going a mile a minute. Our clothes are gone, my slip is rucked up over my hips. I skipped panties, hopeful for this moment. It makes things so much easier. His hands rush over my body, grasping my skin, kneading my buttocks, hands hurrying to my thighs and then my back, up and down and around, and I whisper, “Too fast, too fast.”
He slows, smiling, his right palm lingering along the curve of my hip, then sliding to my breast, his mouth featherweight, following his touch.
Better.
It has been too long. I should stop him before it goes much further, but it feels so good to be touched, to be loved.
[paragraphs redacted to protect the innocent 😇]
When our breathing slows, he rolls off me, to the side, and I rise from the bed.
“Don’t get up,” he says, leaning on an elbow, beckoning me back.
Too late. I am already at my purse, the bag open, the cold steel in my hand. My favorite companion, the only one I truly trust. I turn to him, a brief smile playing on my lips.
“Thank you,” I say, and fire. The suppressed round sounds like a sigh in the darkened room. It takes him between the eyes, and he collapses back onto the bed.
Another means to an end.
I replace the weapon, dress, brush my hair, enjoy the flush of color on my cheeks. I wipe down the room, grab my cell phone, turn off the video camera. Face the connecting door to the room next to my newly dead lover.
A moment twenty-five years in the making. Finally here.
I jimmy the lock, silent as possible. The door opens, and there he is. Asleep, quiet. Far from innocent. He looks older in his sleep.
Older, and soon to be very, very dead.
One of my favorite ways to deeply explore a character is to put them in a sex scene. Angelie is the honeypot here, but in a moment of weakness, allows herself to indulge in the pleasure of physical contact, something she rarely does. It makes me sad for her, humanizes her, and shows how incredibly vicious she truly is. The black widow strikes. She can make love, take her own pleasure, then murder her lover without hesitation… yeah. I don’t want to get on her bad side, do you?
I won’t ruin the rest of Whiteout for you. It is a lot of fun, and incredibly important to the plot of Wolves. I see Taylor and Angelie as Janus twins. They are both seeking justice, though one has a badge and is sanctioned by the world to do so, whereas Angelie is a solo operator who would go to jail for the same actions. This dichotomy is so much fun to explore!
A little taste of her new world in Wolves for you…Angelie has retired to the French countryside, where she is renovating a château. How long with her newfound peace last? You can imagine the answer…
Château Rodaune, Burgundy, France
Angelie Delacroix stared in abject horror at the man in front of her, standing with his hand outstretched, the small package dangling precariously from his thick fingers. He was tall, heavy through the shoulders and brow, covered in dirt, and to this point, had done everything she asked perfectly. But now, he had deviated from the plan, and she had to get him back in line. Her heart raged in her chest, and her first instinct was to simply kill him immediately and dump the remains in the river, despite the fact she had no gun to hand. No matter. Angelie had myriad ways to kill.
Breathe. Focus. Fury gets you in trouble. You need him.
In a clipped, tight voice, she said, “Please put that down. Carefully. It’s worth more than your home. Perhaps more than your life.”
The workman dubiously eyed the small sculpture that could fit into the palms of his calloused hands, but complied, setting the box holding its precious cargo gingerly on the table, as if it carried a grenade instead of an original Rodin she had unearthed from a niche in a forgotten bedroom. He backed out of the room before she could lose it, closing the battered French doors behind him.
Smart move.
Angelie collapsed onto a Louis XIV chair that she suspected might be original but hadn’t yet had time to track its provenance and sighed in relief.
Another disaster averted.
She’d had no idea when she tackled the restoration that she’d be just as tense as if she were on a job.
She’d been restoring the château for almost fourteen months now, and each room, each hallway, each cracked wall and fallen chimney and tarnished iron gate, brought new and interesting problems to her door. Rotting tapestries, gaping holes in the roof, flooring eaten alive by termites, cracked Napoleonic-era marble mantels tumbling into the fireplaces. The château had once been a grand and seductive summer palace for the kings of France, but now was a shadow of itself, not so gently collapsing into the forest that guarded its rear.
She’d visited this place once when she was a child. It was in ruins then as well, and her father had stood in the gravel drive with tears in his eyes. “It is a beautiful place, ma chérie, one worthy of its history. Look at the carved wolf head above the door! If I had the money, I would snap it up and restore it, top to bottom.”
Her mother, Genevieve, laughed. “You know nothing of restoration. How would you do this?”
A grin, white teeth flashing. “I would quit my job and hire you and Angelie as decorators. I would buy a donkey to carry timber from the town, and a hundred men to swarm over the ruins like bees. We would buy art books and interview craftsmen to determine what it was supposed to be like originally. And we would dance in the ballroom at midnight and give offerings at the folly under the full moon. It would be glorious, my darlings. We could live here, be happy here.”
Angelie had no idea at the moment that this would be the last time she heard her father laugh. The last time she’d spy the small kiss on the forehead her mother gave him when she was amused, as if a promise for later. An hour hence, they were dead, butchered, ambushed at a crossroads, and for all their assassins knew, so was Angelie.
You can take the wolf from the field, but you can’t take the field from the wolf. Angelie is older, here, wiser; changed but the same. It’s important to remember that the reader might not have read Whiteout. I have to assume no one knows who this woman is and give ample explanation about her background and character without bogging down the readers who know all about her. It’s a delicate dance, but when you’re building characters who will move freely from story to story, you have to find ways to reintroduce them.
Daniel Silva does this masterfully in his Gabriel Allon series. In every book, he introduces Gabriel as the hero who took out the assassins who murdered and held hostage members of the Israeli Olympic team in what’s known as the “Munich Massacre.” He doesn’t waste time getting into all the details. He offers very salient character tags, from his green eyes to his small stature to his name—Gabriel, the avenging angel—that tell you exactly who you’re dealing with in very few words. It’s masterful, and an example I try to emulate in my series characters. We have a very different narrative style, though both are solid examples of how ongoing characters become beloved favorites. I find character tags work incredibly well in omniscient narration. Taylor herself is often described briefly by eye color, stature, and hair tics. Angelie gets a bit more nuance because her very being defies the character tag.
I hope this helps explain my thought process on character development!
Who are some of your favorite assassins in literature?
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[Excerpts from Whiteout, A Taylor Jackson Novella, © 2015 J.T. Ellison and The Wolves Come at Night, A Taylor Jackson Novel © 2023 by J.T. Ellison]