5 secrets of writing crime fiction
Sam Wilson asks SA’s Queen of Crime, Margie Orford, to spill the bullets.
1. Do your research
There are two main types of crime fiction:
i. ‘Body in the library’ Conan Doyle style, favoured by writers such as Ruth Rendell, Ian Rankin and PD James, and
ii. ‘Hardboiled’ hyper-real, ‘Uneasy Street’ crime fiction, as favoured by Raymond Chandler and Mickey Spillane
If you’re going to fall in between the two (like Orford herself), do it consciously.
2. You need to position the reader OUTSIDE the mind of your protagonist; internal monologues don’t tend to work in crime fiction. You need to position him or her from a certain vantage point and get your plot going through show, not tell.
3. You’ve got to keep up a sense of relentless momentum, to keep your reader paging.
4. It helps if the reader has a connection with both the perpetrators and the victim, recognised within the broader spectrum of life. And obviously... if your reader stops caring about your victim, you’ve lost the plot.
5. Crime is the literature of revenge, so remember the arc of your narrative – where the stasis is interrupted and the plot revolves around the desperate surgery to suture it back together.
What do you think? When you’re reading crime fiction, what makes you feel ‘a rule has been broken’? Who are you favourite crime writers? And your worst ones?
To read Sam Wilson’s interview with Margie Orford, click here. To read her review of Daddy’s Girl, click here.
- Women24