Crime writing: Writing the Murder

When we first started collecting the essays that make up Writing the Murder, we wanted to avoid a simplistic ‘How to’ formula. There’s a time and place for that approach, but our intention was to offer something different. Not just a guide for the aspiring writer, but also inspiration for those with more experience – as well as jumping-off points for writers who have hit a stumbling block, or who are looking for ways to reinvigorate their writing. Not so much a ‘How to’ as a How, Why, Where, When and Who.

That doesn’t mean the essays contained within are without advice, however. Whether you’re a fresh-faced rookie or a hardened veteran, there are countless nuggets of wisdom to give your writing a boost. Here are six of the best:

1. We’re all familiar with the formula – so give it a unique twist

With so many crime shows appearing on our TVs, and crime fiction becoming the dominant genre in our bookshops, its tropes have never been so well known. If you want to stand out from the crowd, then make sure you’re reimagining or pushing back against what has gone before. It may have well-established conventions, but crime fiction is still at its best when it surprises us.

2. Keep your detectives grounded in reality

There’s plenty of scope for imagination and raw creativity in writing crime fiction, but police procedures should stay as grounded as possible if your story is to be believable. Paul Finch gives a thorough run-down of some of the pitfalls to avoid in his essay ‘Cop Stuff: Fact or Fantasy’, but you can research most of it yourself. Don’t simply assume that a law exists or a crime scene procedure is standard because you saw it on TV (especially if that was set in the US and you’re writing in the UK, or vice versa).

3. Make sure every part of your story is working towards the same end

In Writing the Murder, Vaseem Khan suggests an acid test when writing historical crime, to ensure that you’re not resting too heavily on the story’s background. It’s a technique that can be applied to almost any work of fiction: 'examine each chapter, each scene, each paragraph and make an honest judgement as to whether or not it is adding something tangible to the book: advancing the plot, developing a character, or setting the scene.' Sometimes the red pen is a writer’s best friend.

4. Write about the conflicts you see around you

There’s no need to fabricate Bond-esque villains or intricate international conspiracies – although if that’s where your heart lies, then there’s room for that too. But crime fiction can be the perfect medium for discussing real-life tensions. In writing her bestselling novel The Khan, Saima Mir asked herself two questions: 'it began with "What if Michael Corleone from The Godfather was a British Pakistani woman living in the north of England?" and went on to examine things like "Why do British Muslims live the way they do? And are Muslim women really all oppressed?"' What questions might you tackle from the social dilemmas that surround you?

5. Look after your mental health

Writing crime fiction can take you to some dark places, and the locked room inside your head can be the hardest to escape. As Charlie Higson points out in his essay on classic pulp fiction, it doesn’t always end well for the author:

Jim Thompson was an alcoholic. The booze killed him when he was seventy, when none of his books were still in print.

Patricia Highsmith was described by J.G. Ballard as ‘every bit as deviant and quirky as her mischievous heroes, and didn’t seem to mind if everyone knew it’. Booze and fags did for her.

Ted Lewis (the creator of Jack Carter) died in 1982, aged forty-two, of alcohol-related causes.

Learning to put aside dark things at the end of the day can be the most important lesson of all.

6. When all else fails, there’s always Agatha Christie

If there’s one shadow that looms large over British crime fiction, then it’s Dame Agatha’s. Here’s what Jessie Greengrass learned from reading Christie’s body of work in the early nineties:

I learned to distrust policemen and also men who wear the wrong shirts, especially if those men have spent time in South Africa. I learned that diamonds, unpolished, look exactly like pebbles, and any alibi revolving around a watch is automatically suspect. That at any given country house party at least fifty per cent of the guests will be other than they seem. That hats make improbably good disguises, but dying your hair with peroxide and wearing nylons will almost certainly get you killed, probably by strangulation. I learned that the perfect length for a novel is 180 pages… What Christie taught me, when I first read her, was the enormous power of books as a means of comfort and escape – and while I also believe in literature as a form of engagement with the world (to read and to write our fears seems, often, to be the only available act both of protest and of hope), I still believe that  escapism is profoundly important.

Writing crime fiction can explore the darkness in our psyches, or the injustices of history; it can shine a light on social inequality, or detail the difficulties involved in policing our streets. More than that, though, writing crime fiction can be hugely rewarding, challenging us with plot twists and red herrings – and it can be criminally good fun.

Writing the Murder: Essays in Crafting Crime Fiction edited by Dan Coxon and Richard V. Hirst is published by Dead Ink (£10.99)

Interested in Golden Age crime writing? Read author Louise Hare on the appeal of a genre that will neve die

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