I was watching a rerun of CSI with the hubs the other night. Well, I started watching it, but I got too annoyed to go on with the episode about halfway through. It was the climax of last season’s serial killer plot, with Bill Irwin being a maniacal genius. In the end, the whole thing just made me tired.

Here’s the deal folks—I am so sick of genius serial killers that sometimes I want to do a little serial killing myself, aimed at writers and directors who think this is a good plot.

We all know where this started, right? Silence Of the Lambs. Now I’m the first to admit that SOTL is a great movie. In fact, it’s one of the few movies that’s actually better than the book it was based on IMHO. Hannibal Lector is a marvelous character and Anthony Hopkins did a marvelous job with him (and then proceeded to play him again and again in at least half of the movies he made after that). But here’s the thing—he’s a character. He’s not reality. If you look at most real serial killers, they’re not geniuses. They’re nut cases who mostly managed to evade capture by moving around a lot and killing perfect strangers.

That’s part of the problem with the whole “genius serial killer” thing. The other part of it is the way the police are inevitably portrayed in the serial killer plot—basically, they’re morons. The killer lays elaborate traps for them that they always trip into. The killer sends them taunting notes that contain clues they’re too clueless to unravel. The killer, in other words, is the puppeteer, while the police dangle on his strings.

Now you could talk about how unrealistic this plot is, but I’d prefer to talk about how clichéd it is. I’m so tired of killers who are wacky enough to go around killing strangers for kicks, but brilliant enough to make the whole thing into some kind of grotesque grand guignol. The only surprises in this plot involve the gruesome things the killer does to his victims.

Of course, some books do buck this trend. Jane Haddam’s Glass Houses, for example, features a serial killer who really isn’t one and who gets away with it for a while because of a bureaucratic screw-up. Haddam’s detective, Gregor Demarkian, is a former serial-killer-hunting FBI agent, and Haddam is even more scathing in her dismissal of the whole “genius serial killer” cliché than I am.

And that’s the point here: the serial killer plot has become so clichéd that it’s almost impossible to do it with any kind of originality any more. Every serial killer becomes another Hannibal Lector clone, and who wants to see that?

So here’s a suggestion. If you’re writing a thriller, how about not making the villain a serial killer? How about giving him a motive for a change—money, sex, revenge, and self-protection all work nicely. Yeah, it’s harder to create a plot that involves motive than somebody with a degree in particle physics and a guillotine in his basement, but trust me, a lot of us will thank you.