How do you add tension to a quiet plot?

This post discusses the entire plot of The Secret Hours, including the ending.

The Secret Hours may be the most narratively and structurally complex novel I’ve examined in this series, so it’s fitting that we’re ending with it. Consider the two other novels similar in genre we’ve looked at: The Searcher by Tana French and The Last Thing He Told Me by Laura Dave. The Searcher has a single point-of-view character and a straight (and quite limited) timeline; readers learn things only as the protagonist-narrator Cal learns things. The Last Thing He Told Me has flashback chapters, but they are short and limited in scope, and Dave gives us access only to protagonist-narrator Hannah’s point of view. The Secret Hours, by contrast, has ten different narrators (in addition to an omniscient narrator) and a timespan of over thirty years.

If we compare the premise of each of these novels, we also find a stark contrast. While it has a slow start, the premise of The Searcher is clear and compelling. Teenager Brendan Reddy has disappeared, and the residents of his tiny Irish village of Ardnakelty seem uninterested in finding out what happened to him. The Last Thing He Told Me has a similar premise. Tech entrepreneur Owen Michaels has disappeared; his wife, left with a bag of cash and a note telling her to protect Owen’s daughter, must find out why. These are easy-to-understand hooks with life-and-death stakes—typical for mysteries and thrillers. While The Secret Hours starts out with an exciting chase scene, the question of who is pursuing Max Janáček and why isn’t actually the central premise of the plot, just one offshoot of it. The true premise connects the past plot strands of the novel to the present and isn’t fully visible until the last third of the novel. A former member of the East German Stasi secret police has changed his identity and is now trying to win the contract to manage background checks for UK government jobs with security clearances (details so boring I literally just had to look them up again even though I’ve now read the novel twice).

I doubt that Herron intentionally set out to solve the problem of how to make a seemingly boring plot exciting. It’s clear from interviews that what really interested him is the question of how the past reaches into the present in unexpected ways; as we’ve seen, this becomes one of the central themes of The Secret Hour. Specifically, he was drawn to Berlin of the early 1990s, just after the end of the Cold War, and long chunks of the narrative take us to those years, following a subplot premise: A naive young security service agent is sent to gather intel on the activities of a fellow agent in the Berlin office who seems to be running an off-the-books operation to get revenge for the killing of a spy embedded in the Stasi. This is a more compelling premise, in many ways, but setting the novel entirely in the 1990s wouldn’t allow Herron to explore the interplay between past and present that really interests him. Herron has to find a way to make this decades-old history matter in the present; to do so, he embeds it in a power struggle between the Security Service and the prime minister. That boring bureaucratic matter of the vetting contract is actually part of a broader attempt to rein in the power of the Security Service, under the guise of privatization and cost-cutting.

Cleverly, Herron increases the drama and intensity of the novel by splitting these two poles of the book into four separate plot strands, each with their own constellation of characters for readers to follow. In each case, one plot strand is suspenseful, with life-or-death stakes, while the other is slower moving but more central.

Past reaching into the present

Power struggle between First Desk and prime minister

The Max thread and the contract thread represent active battlegrounds with live and important stakes, whereas the Berlin thread and the Monochrome thread are primarily backward-looking and have lower stakes. What Herron shows us here is a very clever solution to the problem of how to enliven a dull or lifeless plot. If this is a problem you are facing, ask yourself if there are characters or plot pieces that could be spun off into their own strands to represent different aspects of your overall premise or plot set-up. My guess is that, in the case of The Secret Hours, Herron first sketched out the basics of Alison’s story in Berlin. He was able to give it present-day stakes by making it the focus on the Monochrome inquiry and bringing her in to testify in front of the panel—in essence, providing an excuse for her to tell this story of the past in the present. However, an appearance before a government panel doesn’t exactly come with high stakes—and that’s where the Max plot comes in. Max is an important but, ultimately, secondary figure in Alison’s story, but by making him the protagonist and narrator of his own plot thread, Herron finds a way to make that past-focused strand generate present-day life-or-death stakes.

The lesson here for writers is to spend time asking what kinds of stories and situations your plot components can generate, especially if you are starting from a premise that you fear may be too quiet for reader expectations for your genre or for the kind of story you want to tell. What threads can you tease out and light on fire, allowing readers to enjoy the dramatic blaze until the thread finally sets your primary plot ablaze? Which characters could be spun off into their own plot thread with higher stakes? Teasing out different threads and thinking about how to maximize the drama within them might lead you to a subplot or surprise twist that could enliven your book.

Now that we have a handle on the overall structure of the novel, let’s look more closely at how Herron weaves these four plot threads together. We looked at the opening of each of the four plot strands in my post on the novel’s opening, so here I’ll focus on the climax and ending of each strand. All of them are complex, with multiple point-of-view and secondary characters, and it takes Herron two-thirds of the novel (parts one through four) to set up all of the plot strands and get each poised to hit their interwoven climaxes in the third act of the novel (parts five through seven). Every step of the way, Herron uses his storytelling tools to control the pacing and intensity of the novel, as well as when and how readers get information. The novel does not have a predictable structure or pattern of chapter breaks or point-of-view shifts; instead, Herron has his hand on the instrument panel at all times, ready to use omniscient narration, point-of-view handoffs, time jumps, and scene, chapter, or part breaks whenever they are needed.

The figure below charts the external and internal intensity of the four plot strands within each part of the novel. The size of the circles corresponds to page count; for example, in the external plot, you can see that the Berlin thread dominates parts four and six, while the Monochrome thread dominates part two. Herron uses part breaks to keep the reader oriented in time, but when grouped together they also fit nicely into the standard three-act structure: parts one and two make up act one, parts three and four make up act two, and parts five through seven make up our climactic act three—just where we’d expect to find the most intense external action.

The first thing to note is how important the Max thread is for the stakes, pacing, and intensity of the external plot. Without Max, we lose the punch of action that pulls us into the book, as well as the scene I analyzed in my post on its action scene in which he confronts John Bachelor and has to elude his pursuers once again. The high stakes of that scene are especially welcome after a comparatively quiet series of chapters focused on laying the groundwork for the Monochrome plot thread.

You can also see from the figure that Max plays an important role in the climax of both the external and internal plots. By part six, readers have enough information to guess that the man known to us as Max is the man Alison North has been referring to as “Otis,” whose name is on the classified folder smuggled to the Monochrome panel by way of Malcolm’s grocery cart. A very alert reader might have made the connection in part four, when Alison recalls a night at a club that matches the details of the snippet of memory Herron embeds in the fight scene I analyzed in that post.

In the climax of the novel, Max is waiting outside a restaurant for a man named Carl Singer, who owns the agency employing the group pursuing him. Max intends to find out who hired Singer’s group; what he finds instead when Singer leaves the restaurant is that he’d been dining with Karl Schenker, the ex-Stasi agent who killed Max’s sister back in the 1990s. (He’s also the man who, under a new identity, is trying to get the Security Service vetting contract.) Max is crossing the road to confront him when agents acting on the orders of First Desk scoop him up before he reaches Schenker, bringing him back to the Regent’s Park headquarters. There we see an emotional reunion between Max and Alison, who haven’t seen one another since Alison lost her legs in the bomb planted in Max’s car—probably by Schenker and intended for Max.

By contrast, the contract thread starts out low in intensity, in both the external and internal plots, only exploding into energy and action during the climax of the novel. We know that First Desk is opposed to the entire idea of the vetting contract—for her it represents an important loss of power and resources and a diminishment of the Security Service overall. Even before knowing his real identity, she blocks Fabian de Vries (aka Karl Schenker) from winning it because she was suspicious of his murky past and his financial hold on the former prime minister, among other powerful figures. By the climax of the novel, she has put together all the pieces of the puzzle: Schenker/DeVries executed one MI5 agent and gravely wounded another, has paid a mole on the Monochrome inquiry (leading to his pursuit of Max, who could expose his past), and, after being told he wouldn’t get the vetting contract, has already established Carl Singer as a virtual proxy. In the last burst of action in the novel, First Desk eliminates him with a maneuver that even DeVries, a very experienced and ruthless operator himself, does not see coming. The contract thread turns out to be unexpectedly riveting—it allows the past to reach out and make trouble in the present—but it’s also complex and relies on surprise twists Herron wants to keep hidden until the end.

As we’ve seen, Herron uses the excitement of the Max thread to compensate for the delayed gratification of the contract thread. However, he also has two more threads to work with—those focused on the Monochrome inquiry and the testimony they elicit from Alison, which becomes the Berlin thread. The Monochrome thread is used primarily as a plot delivery vehicle. It provides an audience for the Berlin thread, so readers can experience those events through Alison’s point of view, but also try to put the puzzle pieces together, alongside Malcolm and Griselda, the POV characters for the Monochrome thread. And the appearance of the Otis file before the panel is ultimately what prompts Schenker to go after Max, as we’ve seen. But Herron also uses the Monochrome thread as comedic relief, like his hilarious skewering of the pompous Sir Winston, the titular head of the panel. And, although the stakes are not life or death, the thread does provide a punch of external intensity when Malcolm and Griselda decide to proceed with Alison’s testimony even after the inquiry is officially halted, as well as a punch of internal intensity when that testimony reveals one of the most closely guarded secrets of the Security Service—that a former First Desk was a Russian spy.

Finally, the Berlin thread operates structurally much like the contract thread, starting slowly and reaching a high level of intensity only in the last third of the novel. In this thread, the highest intensity comes in the internal plot; the external events are still echoing in the present action of the novel, but their active impact is muted, except in the internal emotional engagement of Alison and her listeners as she recounts the events—the betrayals and double betrayals and unexpected shows of loyalty—that led to the life-altering injury she suffered.

The internal plot of the Berlin thread is also a place where Herron can most clearly articulate the theme of the novel. One of those spots comes near the end. Alison has finished her testimony and left the Monochrome offices, but instead of going home she heads to Regent’s Park, where, we learn for the first time, she is the longtime archivist for the Security Service. As she journeys through the wet London streets, she recalls the day her assistant, Erin, started the research that ultimately led her to uncover Karl Schenker’s identity and pass the Otis file to the Monochrome inquiry so the secret could be revealed. Erin’s purpose in doing so is the same as First Desk’s—to prevent the Security Service from losing power—and Alison asks her why she’s so devoted to the present. Erin’s answer, recalled at this point in the novel, rings out with bell-like clarity: “Because it’s only the present for a moment. In the long run, it’s all history.” And past history, as we’ve seen, retains the power to reach into the present. All stories, Herron is saying, are ultimately circular rather than linear, leading us back to ourselves rather than to some newer, more enlightened plane of existence.

The Secret Hours is an excellent novel to learn from because Herron knows exactly how and when he wants readers to get specific pieces of information, and he manipulates the chronology of the story and uses various narrative tools to accomplish it. When I work with writers who are struggling with plot structure, I often find that they are either surveying the story up on high, from the creator’s perspective, or in the trenches, aligned with one or more of the point-of-view characters. Rather than see their story holistically or partially, writers at the revision stage need to see it sequentially—from the reader’s point of view. You’ve imagined this story and now you have to, in a sense, forget everything you know about it in order to view it like a reader.

Get new craft breakdowns like these right in your inbox, plus sentence studies, craft tips, and book reviews.