The Arvon Book of Crime and Thriller Writing

Michelle Spring, Laurie R. King

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781408131220
• eBook ISBN: 9781408166161
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Writing & Presentation Skills

This is the second book in the Arvon series of books on writing. Written by two distinguished writers in the field, Michelle Spring and Laurie R. King, the book reveals, with riveting honesty, why and how authors are drawn to write about crime. The book also features fascinating insights from twenty-six top crime-writing guests. The Arvon Book of Crime and Thriller Writing is a detailed, practical guide to writing every kind of crime story, from classic whodunits to fast-paced thrillers. The book's objective is to bring together some of the lessons and insights that the authors and contributors have learned over their careers, to help the readers to free their creative minds, while also studying the solid technique behind writing in this genre. The Arvon Book of Crime Writing captures the essence of Arvon teaching into a practical handbook for writers, packed with tips and advice from leading novelists as well reflections on the genre itself and practical instruction on great storytelling. The Arvon Foundation runs professional writing courses by published writers and provides expert tuition and creative support. Contributors from leading crime writers include: Lee Child, P.D James, and Ian Rankin. The Arvon Book of Crime Writing is divided into three sections: Part 1 - Essays on critical issues in the genre, Part 2: Guest Writers - 25 contributors offering advice and tips Part 3: How To Write Crime.

Part 1:
On a life of crime

Reflections I

by Michelle Spring: Thoughts about crime

I became a crime writer in my middle years, from a rather unlikely starting point, and I’m very glad I did. The reflections that follow deal with the life experiences that inform my writing, the challenges that crime writing presents and the wonderful things that it offers for writers and readers alike. The reflections are written from an entirely personal perspective, but I hope that reading them will nudge people to explore further the rich genre of crime fiction for themselves.

1. ‘I always knew I wanted to be a writer’

I never cease to wonder when I hear others say: I always knew I wanted to be a writer. I’m struck by an image of them as newborns, their faces wrinkled with the effort of exposition; scribbling ideas on the trays of their highchairs; parading the premise of their latest story during show-and-tell. Their sense of vocation bowls me over. It wasn’t like that for me. I grew up in a small Canadian town in which, at the time, the principal employer for men was the pulp mill and most married women stayed at home to mend and make do. My grandfather was a logger, my father a commercial fisherman. The idea of writing as a career simply didn’t occur to me.

I adored reading, however, as did my mother. Mom concealed racy romances behind the furnace, and I hid my love of reading, because, among so many of our peers, reading was considered somewhat weird and not a little suspect.

In career terms, luck was on my side. I went to college, developed a passion for social science, and eventually, after moving to England, became a university professor. I wrote academic books and papers on a bulky old electric typewriter. I co-wrote a textbook which ran to four editions and earned a small fortune.

But until the 1990s, I never turned my hand to fiction. It was an encounter with a stalker (of which more later) that compelled me to have a go at writing a novel. To my astonishment, Every Breath You Take was snapped up by publishers in several countries, and I found myself with a new career.

Selling a first novel is a thrilling experience. But by then I was hooked on the writing itself. Writing turned out to be a challenge – and after years and years of teaching, a challenge was a welcome thing.

Writing became an escape. At the end of the day, I’d feel as if I’d been somewhere new, and had an adventure.

Writing freed me to have a new relationship with the world around me. As an academic, I tended to bury myself in my thoughts. Now, I’ve become expert at listening in to other people’s conversations. I plunder the landscape for the materials for word pictures. I stare openly at people on the Underground. (Yes, that was me. Sorry.)

These are some of the pleasures that I’ve found through writing. Of course, there is a commercial interest, too. Books sell, sometimes for relatively little money, sometimes for a lot. That fact allows me to spend most, though not quite all, of my time in writing.

But beyond the prospect of money is the vast delight to be found in the act of writing itself. I’ve never had a talent for music, but I imagine that the rewards of playing an instrument are rather similar to those of writing. Writing involves playing with language. I get a huge buzz out of the rhythm and sound, the crash and hum and tinkle of words. What could be more delicious?

As the writer Anne Lamott says in Bird by Bird:

… publication is not all that it’s cracked up to be. But writing is. Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises. The thing that you had to force yourself to do – the actual act of writing – turns out to be the best part. It’s like discovering that while you thought you needed the tea ceremony for the caffeine, what you really needed was the tea ceremony. The act of writing turns out to be its own reward.

2. Reasons to write a crime novel

Do you remember that British slogan, Go to work on an egg? (Penned, as it happens, by an advertising team led by novelist Fay Weldon.) It’s not a bad idea, but here’s a better one: Go to work on a crime novel.

People are, generally speaking, keen on the idea. At parties, I often meet accountants or toy-model makers with fiendishly clever plot synopses in their waistcoat pockets; the book clubs I visit are bursting with dental nurses who are burrowing away at serial killer stories. When I run crime-writing workshops, lawyers turn out in droves. Even – but perhaps this is less surprising – prisoners are keen.

For those who have the urge to write a crime novel, there are dozens of reasons to do so. I have pared them down to the few that chime most closely with my own experience:

• To lighten up. While it is not infrequently the case that writers of, say, experimental fiction find an emotional release in their work, for crime novelists (who deal with the dark things that we push aside in order to get on with everyday life) the cathartic attraction of writing can be decisive. This was certainly the case for me.
  There was a time in my life when my sleep was punctured by nightmares. When I was constantly scanning for signs of danger. When I couldn’t pass a dark doorway without stiffening in fear.
  Writing crime changed all that. I transferred my dark thoughts on to the page, and the nightmares receded. As long as I’m beavering away at a crime novel, I sleep like a lamb.
• To satisfy the story-telling urge. Items in the news, memories from the past, things that puzzle or fascinate or frighten you: once you begin to exercise your imaginative muscles, you’ll find yourself, as I did, constantly bumping up against stories that demand to be told. They just keep coming, and they won’t be denied.
• For companionship. It’s an open secret that writers can be difficult people to know: gloomy, competitive and bitchy. Romantic novelists are reputed to be backstabbers to a woman – though it goes without saying that the few whom I know well are sweetness and light. But crime writers are a remarkably convivial and good-hearted lot. They work hard – the pressure to produce a book a year is no joke – but they pass up no opportunity for fun. Crime-writing conventions are just one such opportunity, exhausting, exhilarating and irresistible. (We’ll give details at the end of the book.)
• As an outlet for aggression. It is widely mooted within the crime fraternity that crime writers are easy to hang out with precisely because they channel belligerent impulses into their writing, leaving them, in real life, meek and mild. I wouldn’t like to confirm or deny that rumour. But I can tell you that a crime novel is a great place to park your rage. The prospect of giving vent to righteous anger in a safe form can be particularly attractive for women, who are taught, from an early age, that aggression is unfeminine. A sharp-tongued woman is subject to sanctions that rarely apply to a sharp-tongued man, and a woman who meets provocation with an outburst of rage – let alone a well-placed punch – is likely to be deemed a shrew and a slag.
  But draft a crime novel and all that’s set aside. When I first came to write a scene where my private investigator was required to defend herself against a knife-wielding man, I drew on that submerged feeling of rage. Once I’d made the leap into my imagination, punches and kicks came surprisingly easily. More than that, I found that writing a fight scene was good clean fun. I suspect that I’m not the only one who derives from writing crime novels the pleasure of letting rip – entirely on the page.
• For the thrill of research. As someone who’s done both, I can confirm that the research you do as a crime writer is every bit as satisfying as scholarly research – and it’s far more diverse.
  Research has given me an entrée into worlds that I wouldn’t otherwise know. It has taken me to see children, some as young as eleven, who had been locked up for murder, arson and rape. It’s taken me to a refuge in Notting Hill to interview Filipina maids who’ve fled abusive British-based employers – TNTs, as the women are called in their own language. It’s taken me to a formal tea with diplomats at an Arab embassy, while in the background a horse race thundered across the television screen.
  In the interests of research, I’ve breached security in Britain’s tallest skyscraper, provoking an outburst from a security guard who was caught napping on the job. I’ve worked with a forensic artist as she reconstructed human features from a fleshless skull and magicked into being up-to-date ‘photographs’ of a child who’d vanished years before. I’ve posted notices in women’s washrooms inviting prostitutes to interview; one of the conversations that followed was a poignant exchange with a teenager who begged me to find her a job as a call girl. Dilemmas about the ethics of research, you see, are not confined to scholars alone.
  The central character in my series novels, Laura Principal, is a cool and likeable private investigator, so I am spared the need to master the intricacies of police work. But even so, I get a lot of help from the police, particularly from a high-ranking officer who once upon a time was my graduate student. The Inspector keeps me on the straight and narrow. She provides information on serious matters – like airport security and the condition of corpses – and on more frivolous matters, too. After she’d read a draft of one of my novels, I received a fax from police headquarters with a stern reprimand: Female police officers do not, I repeat not, wear regulation underclothes.
• To foster humility – and freedom. If you are determined to produce a really outstanding novel, but you want to avoid becoming swell-headed, then crime writing is for you. No matter how sparkling your prose, how penetrating your insights, how prolific your output, how ambitious your writing, you are unlikely to be ushered into the salons of the Literary Elite.
  Instead, you will be greeted by phrases like – ‘What do you do? What sort of books? Oh, I see, a crime writer.’
  Or – ‘D’you know, you’re good enough to write a real book.’
  Or by the smug declaration,’ I don’t read crime.’
  Incidentally, when someone says to me, ‘I don’t read crime’, I am pierced by a suspicion that the speaker’s knowledge of crime fiction is trapped in the world of Agatha Christie.

FOR SOPHIE HANNAH on …

the psychological depth of Christie’s whodunits, see ‘Tips and tales – guest contributors’.

I’ve got nothing against Christie; in fact, I defended her recently on BBC3’s Battle of the Books. But I do consider her approach to the crime novel – the formulaic puzzler, the tricksy but not entirely credible plot, and the dearth of critical reflection about the world around – distinctly limited and definitely out of date. Crime fiction long ago moved beyond the generic bounds that reigned in Christie’s time. There are still whodunits, but more prominent now are whydunits and whowillbedones and – the staple of the thriller – willhedoits. Some crime novels revel in pure action, and a very few concentrate on puzzle alone, but many more are engaged in an interrogation of psyche and society as acute as that on offer in so-called ‘literary fiction’.

So when someone says to me: ‘I don’t read crime’, I bite back the obvious response: What? Don’t read stories in which transgression or violence (or the consequences thereof) play an important part? Don’t read who, then? J. M. Coetzee? Truman Capote? Peter Carey? Joyce Carol Oates? Ian McEwan? Harper Lee? Margaret Atwood? Dostoevsky? Dickens? Shakespeare?

But don’t be put off by the disdain of Literary Types; even this has its positive side. When you come out, so to speak, as a crime novelist, you no longer have to worry about whether or not your writing is ‘avant-garde’. You are free to create a cracking good story, with vividly drawn characters and sharply etched locations. Free to dive into the darkest corners of the human heart. Free to surface again into a world enriched by the reflection (so central to the genre) on life and loss and death.

What’s not to like?

3. The shadow of violence

I was fourteen years old, at high school in Canada, when I first came face to face with murder. An RCMP squad car pulled up in front of my school and Mounties broke the news to one of the boys in my year that his sister and her boyfriend had been brutally murdered. The killer was a man for whose children she used sometimes to babysit.

Not long after, a girl who’d been a close friend of mine came home from the cinema to find that her father had shot her mother, little brother and baby sister, and then turned the rifle on himself.

I grew up in the 1960s; like many of my contemporaries, I didn’t want to live the corseted lives of earlier generations of women. I wanted, as it seemed at the time, something more: to have a career, to pursue causes I cared about, to travel, to have fun. And one thing was always clear to me: if it’s adventure you’re after, you mustn’t think too long or too hard about violence. Worries about danger – about strangers who can’t be trusted, about the risks you take when you’re far from home – can stop an adventurous girl (or a boy, for that matter) dead in her tracks.

So I put those childhood murders out of my mind.

Except at night, when brutal nightmares were always with me. Afraid to go to sleep, I read novels late, late and later, and slept less and less.

During the day, I persuaded myself that violence was something that happened only to others. That I was safe.

Except that it wasn’t and I wasn’t.

I’d just finished university when, for the first time, I experienced stranger-violence that was aimed directly at me. I lived in Venice Beach, in southern California. At that time, the place was a haunt of Hell’s Angels and drug addicts, with a scattering of elderly couples who played cards on the promenade and closed their eyes to much of what went on. Other people tended to avoid Venice Beach, which left me able to enjoy long stretches of golden sand in solitude. I felt at home there.

Until one day, after a morning by the sea, making my way home across the beach, I found myself surrounded by a group of men.

They were young, tall, strong and well-spoken, like a college basketball team on the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Foreword by P. D. James
• Preface to series by Carole Angier and Sally Cline
• Introduction by Michelle Spring and Laurie R. King
• Notes on format and terminology
• Part 1: On a life of crime
• Part 2: Tips and tales – guest contributors
• Part 3: Write on: Getting your story across
• Acknowledgements
• Resources and reading
• Endorsements
• Novels by Michelle Spring
• Novels by Laurie R. King
• eCopyright