How do you write an action scene?

As you can see from my post on the novel’s opening, Mick Herron uses his multiple plot strands and point-of-view characters strategically to generate interest in one strand that will pull readers forward through the quieter set-up work needed for another strand. We’ll look at the full structure of the novel in a later post, and I’ll show you how all of this strategic weaving adds up to a complex, richly layered, and satisfying ending. But first, let’s take a closer look at a single scene, doing another scene analysis like those we’ve done for The Dutch House (my post on that scene) and Dial A for Aunties (my post on that scene). Our Dutch House post was dominated by interiority, Dial A by dialogue; for The Secret Hours, I’ve picked an action-focused scene so we can look at tricks and techniques for effective action writing.

Looking at our scene composition graphs for each novel (the Secret Hours graph is below; the other two are in my post on The Dutch House and my post on Dial A for Aunties) shows us that the Secret Hours scene is more similar to the Dial A scene than to the Dutch House scene; the triad of dialogue, action, and interiority dominate both novels—79 percent in Secret Hours and 87 percent in Dial A (the triad constitutes only 63 percent of the Dutch House scene). Interestingly, the Dial A scene has a higher percentage of action, at 25 percent compared to the Secret Hours scene’s 19 percent. However, the action in Dial A tends to be quiet, woven into the scene to support the dialogue—a laugh, a look, a shudder. The action in the Secret Hours scene, as we shall see, is of the show-stopping variety. Note that I’ve deliberately chosen scenes from these three novels that have different compositions. It’s likely I could find a scene in each of these novels with similar percentages. We’re also not trying to identify an ideal percentage of elements because that’s going to vary depending on the goals and components of your scene.

Let’s get into the details now and see what we find. For my analysis, I’ve chosen scene thirty-five of the novel (near the end of part three), which follows Max, the retired spy whose flight from his rural Devon cottage starts the novel. Before the scene starts, he’s made his way to London and made contact with Shelley, the Security Service staffer assigned to see to his needs. Shelley, however, is milking a leg injury in hopes of a settlement and has turned his case over to a colleague, John Bachelor. Max’s single interaction with Bachelor has taught him that the man is certainly an alcoholic and possibly also corrupt enough to “sell his job for the price of a round.” Shelley discovers that a recent break-in at the office would have revealed that Bachelor was Max’s support person and would have known his whereabouts—confirming Max’s theory that Bachelor will be able to tell him who is after him.

So the scene primes us to expect a certain kind of action—a confrontation between Max and Bachelor—and the first line promises the scene will deliver it: “Finding Bachelor hadn’t been the most demanding task.” Notice the verb tense here: hadn’t been rather than wasn’t. Herron’s use of the past perfect signals that we are going to see what happens after Max finds Bachelor, but first we are going to see something that happened before it. Readers are going to have to be patient, in other words, while Herron takes a short tangent away from that confrontation to do two things: give further background about the relationship between Max and Shelley, and ring the bell of one of his themes once more.

A previous scene between them has established that Shelley isn’t thrilled to see Max and only agrees to help him when he threatens to tell her husband of their one-night stand. After getting the information about the office break-in, Max leans on her one more time to get Bachelor’s address. Shelley agrees but notes, “I’m starting to feel like this is a lot to pay for one stray shag.” The exchange is entertaining in its own right, but also sets up a clever little reversal we’ll see later in the scene. The theme statement is prompted by Max using a smartphone to look up Bachelor’s address. Shelley asks why he isn’t using the less-traceable Nokia brick he’d had in Devon. Max’s answer comes only via interiority:

We are reminded that we do not yet know who Max was and what he might have done to be the object of a pursuit. Herron is also reminding us to be alert—that we might not know the real identity of any of the characters we’ve met so far, including the bureaucrats Griselda and Malcolm, either one of whom might be the mole on the Monochrome panel.

Max leaves Shelley’s apartment, and Herron uses a mixture of action, interiority, and setting detail to finish this tangent loop and get us back to the point where the chapter began, with this bit of summary: “In the end, he was seven pubs into his odyssey when he tracked him down.” Note that this tangent technique is an excellent one to use during revision if you find a scene that isn’t quite pulling its weight but still contains a few key moments you want to include in the novel. Spool forward to the moment just before the next really dramatic event is going to begin and see if there is a way to pause the scene at that point and embed a short retrospective tangent, just as Herron does here.

Next, Herron freezes Max in place outside the pub to do some more scene-setting. We get a sentence of description: “The Fox and Bucket was on a corner, with tables outside for smokers, and dusty windows through which passers-by could see what they were missing, which included a row of booths against the far wall, each with a big wooden table, a curved banquette and a sconce with a bulb shaped like a burning candle.” And then John Bachelor comes into view: “In one of these sat John Bachelor, holding a pint glass in a way that suggested it was all that was keeping him upright.” That sentence alone tells us a whole story about John, but Herron provides more character description: “Max had met him only once, but had no difficulty recognising him: his appearance, even through a dusty window, was of a man nearing the end of his rope, and not an especially reliable rope at that. You wouldn’t want to try hanging yourself with it.” Note that Herron is leaning on metaphor rather than physical description. Describing John, for example, as “a man in his mid-fifties with the pronounced belly and unfocused gaze of an alcoholic” is perhaps more visual but less arresting—and certainly less characteristic of Max. In other words, Max’s assessment of John tells us just as much about Max himself: how astute he is and also how attuned he is to the ways other people can betray you.

There’s one more person in the scene for Max to assess—a pub denizen we’ve met in a previous scene from John’s point of view. John has dubbed him ‘Sparky’ and describes him this way: “He wasn’t a big man but didn’t need to be, what with the dead eyes, and the way sparks kept popping from his ears, unless they were an optical illusion caused by poorly filtered aggression.” Max, when he sits down at their table, also notes that “the aggressive force field around [John’s] companion fizzed and sparked”—the assessment suggesting that Max and John view the world similarly, even if they are about to be at odds with one another.

After getting rid of Sparky, Max can get down to the business of finding out whom John has betrayed him to. But the expected confrontation, when it comes, is less dramatic than we expected. Bachelor is indeed a drunk, but apparently a drunk with ethics. Together the two men deduce that John’s phone—containing Max’s address—was accessed one night when he was blackout drunk. At this point, John excuses himself to go to the bathroom and Herron tantalizes us with a tiny glimpse into Max’s past identity: “Faint music drifted across from the pub’s other room. For no sane reason, memory threw up a different dive in a different country, and a ragamuffin jazz trio playing something haunting.” If readers are disappointed at the quiet resolution of the much-delayed confrontation between Max and John, they won’t have much time to feel it because at this point the scene shifts again.

Just as the memory leaves Max’s mind, he sees a woman enter the pub and recognizes her as the intruder he hit with a poker two nights before. Another man, whom Max recognizes to be “a professional,” warns away the other patrons in the bar and stops to pay off Sparky. Max clocked Sparky’s aggression but didn’t consider the possibility he was serving as a lookout; Max will continue to be surprised by people he thought he understood as the scene progresses.

The remainder of the scene is an entertaining and intense fight, with perhaps more verbal than physical sparring. The two action sequences are narrated in long paragraphs, running counter to the usual advice that writing short, snappy paragraphs can increase the sense of pace in an action-oriented scene. So what’s Herron up to here and what are the effects? Let’s look at these two paragraphs in detail to find out.

After some dialogue between Max and the woman—angry on her part and teasing, sarcastic on Max’s part—Max realizes he has no choice but to go with them. Here’s our first action sequence:

The surprising, satisfying appearance of Bachelor kicks off the action. Notice the way Herron uses progressive verb forms to establish that multiple actions are happening at the same time: “hurling,” “hitting,” “reaching.” (We also saw this verb form at work in my post on The Marriage Portrait.) Surprisingly, it’s a bit of interiority, not action, that is delivered in a short, punchy sentence: “Taser, Max remembered.” But another memory, one from the past that doesn’t help him, is what occupies his attention—the thought of the heavy ashtrays that likely were on the tables of the dive bar he was thinking about just before this burst of action began. Herron is taking the opportunity to ring the bell of another of his themes—the way the past continually reaches into the present and future, refusing to let us go—and he does so in the midst of one of the most exciting, suspenseful scenes in the book.

The woman, as it happens, does not have a Taser in her pocket but “a baton that untelescoped with a flick of her wrist: a three-foot-long switch.” Max can’t resist taunting her once more: “What is this, a bad movie?” Now, as the man Bachelor knocked out is getting back onto his feet, we get our second action sequence:

The whole passage is organized around a second deeply satisfying twist: Shelley appearing on the scene and putting her sham cane to a real use. Notice how Herron actually slows the action down in those first few sentences of the passage. In between the first action of the woman hitting Max with her switch and Shelley hitting the woman with her cane are sixty words of interiority as we see what Max is feeling—his cheek stinging, his heart racing—and what he is thinking—his impulse to laugh, his refusal to bluff. These last responses are perhaps as surprising as Shelley’s appearance on the scene and, once again, tell us more about Max than about anything else in the scene. Underneath his assumed identity as a “Luddite . . . beheading dandelions with a stick” is the unfiltered, rash, impassioned person he must once have been—those sleeves of his assumed identity riding up, as he notes in the passage we examined earlier, to reveal his true identity.

Similarly, under the pressure of events, both Bachelor and Shelley show us that they have more loyalty to the Service—and their duty to protect Max—than we’d been led to expect. On the surface, Herron delivers dramatic action and surprising twists in this scene, but underneath the external intensity he also delivers a dose of emotional resonance that increases the reader’s engagement with Max. Shelley might feel pressured by Max, who might feel betrayed by Bachelor, who might be exactly the weak link First Desk believes him to be. And yet, this scene makes us see that all of these variously flawed characters might be fighting on the same side of whatever battle is afoot in this novel. Max doesn’t know quite what that battle is yet, nor do readers, but we’ll find out together when we look at the structure of the whole novel in the next post.

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