Help! I’m Wrestling with a Conundrum!

I’m grappling with a conundrum about point of view.

Part of me loves writing in first person. Writing from the “I/we” perspective allows the main character’s personality to beam through. First person makes for an intimate bond between the reader and the protagonist, whose quirks feel more real, her fears more intense.

But as every one of my colleagues here on MCW knows, there’s a trade-off for that immediacy—every fact and perception is funneled to the reader through the mind of the protagonist.

Writing in third person allows writers the flexibility to present the story from multiple perspectives, and this can be a boon. There’s inherent conflict when some characters know things other characters don’t (and maybe need) to know, and in crime fiction, conflict is more than desirable, it’s essential.

The general rule is that authors must choose.

I am not always good at obeying rules.

In my Joe Gale series, I played around with point of view. Quick Pivot, the first book in the series, alternated chapters between the point of view of  newspaper reporter Joe, written in first person, and his mentor, Paulie Finnegan, written in third person. To amp the degree of difficulty, I used dual timelines. The Joe chapters were contemporary, the Paulie chapters were set in 1968. That book was a blast to write. Tricky, yes, but lots of fun.

Cover Story, was written entirely from Joe’s point of view, and with that particular tale, it worked. No scenes demanded to be written from another character’s point of view. Though it is the second book in the series, Cover Story was the first book I actually wrote, and its wholly-first-person point of view almost certainly stemmed from the fact it was my first effort to get 90,000 words on paper. Learning to write a novel was hard enough without doing anything fancy.

In Truth Beat, the third book in the Joe Gale series, I also used a first person/third person combination. Joe narrated most chapters, but some were from the perspective of his buddy Rufe, who knew some key secrets the reader needed to know along the way.

My current novel in progress features Neva Pierce, a Portland criminal defense lawyer who takes on the kind of cases that prove Maine’s not always Vacationland.  It has five point of view characters, all of whom are essential to the story. Each chapter is confined to a particular character’s point of view—I don’t hop heads in the middle of chapters. The conundrum I mentioned at the outset is whether Neva can be written in first person, and the other four characters in third person, or whether all five should be in third person.

While I’m not a fan of hard-and-fast writing rules, I don’t want to frustrate, irritate or exasperate my readers, so I need your help. I will greatly appreciate hearing from those of you who read this blog, writers and readers alike. Here are my questions:

First, does a novel work for you if different chapters are written from the point of view of different characters?

Second, is it a problem if one of those characters is a first-person narrator, and the others are written in third person?

I very much will appreciate your thoughts and opinions.

P.S. Neva is the first-person narrator of my short story Means, Motive, and Opportunity, which was included in last year’s anthology, Bloodroot: Best New England Crime Stories 2021. Joe Gale fans should note he plays a central role in that story as well.