10 Rules for Writing Crime Fiction

 

The Guardian (UK) has asked some well known writers for their 10 rules. 

Elmore Leonard, Diana Athill, Margaret Atwood, Roddy Doyle, Helen Dunmore, Geoff Dyer, Anne Enright, Richard Ford, Jonathan Franzen, Esther Freud, Neil Gaiman, David Hare, PD James, AL Kennedy,
Hilary Mantel, Michael Moorcock, Michael Morpurgo, Andrew Motion, Joyce Carol Oates, Annie Proulx, Philip Pullman, Ian Rankin, Will Self, Helen Simpson, Zadie Smith, Colm Tóibín, Rose Tremain, Sarah Waters, Jeanette Winterson

Ian Rankin's tips are classic:
1 Read lots.
2 Write lots.
3 Learn to be self-critical.
4 Learn what criticism to accept.
5 Be persistent.
6 Have a story worth telling.
7 Don't give up.
8 Know the market.
9 Get lucky.
10 Stay lucky.

PD James obviously believes in an economy of words (either that or she can't count, but I guess when you are as old as the hills, that's forgiveable)
1 Increase your word power. Words are the raw material of our craft. The greater your vocabulary the more ­effective your writing. We who write in English are fortunate to have the richest and most versatile language in the world. Respect it.
2 Read widely and with discrimination. Bad writing is contagious.
3 Don't just plan to write – write. It is only by writing, not dreaming about it, that we develop our own style.
4 Write what you need to write, not what is currently popular or what you think will sell.
5 Open your mind to new experiences, particularly to the study of other ­people. Nothing that happens to a writer – however happy, however tragic – is ever wasted.

Diana Athill can't count either.
1 Read it aloud to yourself because that's the only way to be sure the rhythms of the sentences are OK (prose rhythms are too complex and subtle to be thought out – they can be got right only by ear).
2 Cut (perhaps that should be CUT): only by having no ­inessential words can every essential word be made to count.
3 You don't always have to go so far as to murder your darlings – those turns of phrase or images of which you felt extra proud when they appeared on the page – but go back and look at them with a very beady eye. Almost always it turns out that they'd be better dead. (Not every little twinge of satisfaction is suspect – it's the ones which amount to a sort of smug glee you must watch out for.)

Oh, why did he (she) do that?

How often have you wondered why the author did what he/she did?
This cartoon appeared recently on Overkill.

Every now and then you read a book where the author appears to have painted himself into a corner as it were, and the only solution has been to introduce another character, kill off someone you really liked, or even produce a rather wet explanation for something that has already happened. Sometimes they just avoid explaining, and leave a thread dangling.

One of the solutions is to decide that the narrator, whom you the reader trusted up until now, is actually the murderer. Some authors will, a bit defensively I think, tell you that they didn't really know who had done what when they began writing.

There's an interesting Wikipedia article about the "twist in the ending" which points out for example that Agatha Christie's decision to employ the unreliable narrator in THE MURDER OF ROGER ACKROYD caused outrage because it was felt that she hadn't been fair to the reader. I seem to remember a Christie plot where a bullet came through the train window and the resultant death was after all an accident. Does anybody remember that? Perhaps it is just my imagination!

The Wikipedia article also mentions a Greek Tragedy ploy: Deus ex machina is a Latin term meaning "god out of a machine." It refers to an unexpected, artificial or improbable character, device or event introduced suddenly in a work of fiction to resolve a situation or untangle a plot. I've certainly noticed a few of those in crime fiction. Once again the reader has little chance of solving the crime for themselves - in P.D. James' terms the writer simply hasn't played fair. Of course what she is actually saying is that information available to the detective is available to the reader. "By the end of the book, the reader should have been able to arrive at the real solution from clues inserted into the novel."
You might find an earlier post SS Van Dine's 20 rules for writing Crime Fiction interesting.

S.S Van Dine's Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories

S. S. Van Dine (1888 - 1939) was the pseudonym of Willard Huntington Wright.
Van Dine was born in Charlottesville, VA. He worked as a literary and art critic for newspapers and magazines. He suffered from poor health, had a severe breakdown in 1923 and was confined to bed for two years. During these years, he read detective stories and amassed a large collection. He then decided that he could write a better story than he was reading. His first Philo Vance book, The Benson Murder Case, was published in 1926. His books were exceptionally popular, and Van Dine became quite wealthy.

In 1936, S.S. Van Dine (author of the Philo Vance mysteries) published an article titled "Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories." Some of his rules are a bit archaic, but it seems to me that they are still worth thinking about.
However even the great have some times flouted these rules (and gotten away with it).

1) The reader should have the same opportunity as the detective to solve the crime.

2) No tricks can be played to mislead the reader unless it is also done to the detective by the criminal.

3) The detective should not have a love interest.

4) Neither the detective nor one of the official investigators can turn out to be the criminal.

5) The villain must be found by logical deduction, not luck, accident, or un-motivated confessions.

6) The story must have a detective who also solves the crime (by detection).

7) It must be a murder mystery ("the deader the corpse the better").

8) The solution must come by "naturalistic means"; e.g., no ouija-boards.

9) There can be only one detective; not a team.

10) The villain has to be someone who plays a prominent part of the story.

11) The culprit can't be a servant (none of this, "The butler did it.").

12) There can only be one murderer. The villain could have a helper or "co-plotter," but only one is going to get the ax in the matter.

13) No secret societies ("mafias, et al"). The murderer, too, needs a sporting chance to outwit the detective.

14) The method of the murder must not be beyond plausibility. No super-natural means, nor the introduction of a fictional device or element ("super-radium, let us say" is not fair).

15) The truth of the solution must be apparent. The reader should be able to pick the book upon completion and see that the answer was in fact starring at him all the time.

16) The detective "novel" must be just that, no side issues of "literary dallying" or "atmospheric preoccupations." These devices interfere with the purpose of detective fiction, "which is to state a problem, analyze it" and solve it.

17) The culprit must be an amateur, not a professional criminal.

18) The solution must never be an accident or suicide.

19) Motives for the crime must be personal, not political or professional.

20) All of the following tricks and devices are verboten. They've been done to death or are otherwise unfair.

a) Comparing a cigarette butt with the suspect's cigarette.
b) Using a séance to frighten the culprit into revealing himself.
c) Using phony fingerprints.
d) Using a dummy figure to establish a false alibi.
e) Learning that the culprit was familiar because the dog didn't bark.
f) Having "the twin" do it.
g) Using knock-out drops.
h) If the murder is in a locked room, it has to be done before the police have actually broken in.
i) Using a word-association test for guilt.
j) Having the solution in a coded message that takes the detective until the end of book to figure out.

References
Mystery Novels of the Golden Age
http://mikegrost.com/vandine.htm
http://www.mysterynet.com/books/testimony/forgottenmaster.shtml
S.S. Van Dine's 20 Rules for Writing Detective Stories

PD James:

What is the difference between the detective story and the crime novel?

I see the detective story as a subspecies of the crime novel. The crime novel can include a remarkable variety of works from the cosy certainties of Agatha Christie, through Anthony Trollope and Graham Greene, to the great Russians. The detective story may be considered more limited in scope and potential. The reader can expect to find a central mysterious death, a closed circle of suspects each with credible motive, means and opportunity for the crime, a detective, either amateur or professional, who comes in like an avenging deity to solve it, and a solution at the end of the book which the reader should be able to arrive at by logical deduction from clues presented by the writer with deceptive cunning but essential fairness. What interests me is the extraordinary variety of talents which this so-called formula is able to accommodate.