sense of everything that has gone before. Writing a crime novel is hard work – Ian Rankin once said that being a crime writer was absolutely great, apart from the actual writing. There will be times, though, when the characters come alive, the plot explodes with new ideas, when that elusive ending is staring you in the face and you know that writing crime novels is the best thing in the world.
‘Ideas are everywhere’, Janet Laurence points out. Patricia Highsmith, who said in her fascinating book Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction that she was driven to creativity ‘out of boredom with reality’, recommended writers to keep a notebook. You can jot ideas down before they are forgotten. Highsmith also argued that emotions, both positive and negative, could be a fertile source of ideas. In her view, it is almost impossible to be out of ideas, and the usual reason why writers sometimes feel bereft of inspiration is that they are suffering from fatigue or external pressures.
One of the most successful writers during the Golden Age of detective fiction between the wars was Freeman Wills Crofts. His work suffered neglect for half a century following his death, but has recently enjoyed a revival. Reprints of his novels have brought him back into the public eye after a long absence from the shelves, and his work has even been optioned for television. Resolutely traditionalist in approach, he outlines five types of ideas for crime stories.
If we’re lucky we shall begin with a really good idea. This may be one of five kinds. Firstly, it may be an idea for the opening of our book: some dramatic situation or happening to excite and hold the reader’s interest. The standard way of finding a body in the first chapter, if hackneyed, is hard to beat.
Secondly, our idea may be for the closing or climax of our book. This must also be dramatic. As an example I suggest the well-known situation in which Tom, who thinks Jack is dead and has impersonated him, is unexpectedly confronted with Jack in a police office or court of law.
Our idea, thirdly, may be for a good way of committing a crime, probably a murder. It should be novel and ingenious – but not too ingenious – and if possible concerned with things with which the man in the street is familiar. This is probably the most usual way of starting work on a book. Every detective fan will think of dozens of examples.
A fourth kind of idea on which to build a book is that we shall write about some definite crime, such as smuggling, gun-running, coining, arson, or frauds in high finance.
Lastly, our idea may be simply to place the action in a definite setting, such as a mining setting, or a golf or fishing setting, or to lay our scenes in a certain place: a bus or an office, an opium den or Canterbury Cathedral.
We may of course build our book on some idea which does not fall under one of these heads. For instance, Dr Austin Freeman’s book, The Red Thumb Mark, was probably built on the idea that a fingerprint is not necessarily convincing evidence.
This then is the first stage in our work: getting the idea to start on. Our second stage is more difficult: we have to build up the plot on our idea.
We do this in a very simple, but very tedious way: we ask ourselves innumerable questions and think out the answers. One question invariably leads to another, and as we go on our plot gradually takes shape.
Nicholas Blake – the poet Cecil Day-Lewis – began writing ingenious Golden Age puzzles to earn some extra cash in the 1930s, but as time passed became increasingly ambitious as a detective novelist. Introducing an omnibus edition of his finest stories, he explained their diverse origins. Unluckily for him, one clever idea had already occurred to another crime writer, who later became a colleague in the Detection Club.
Imagination at full stretch: emotional involvement … During the Thirties, I saw my little son narrowly missed by a road hog. Suppose he had been killed, and the police were unable to trace the hit-and-run driver? Such was the germ of The Beast Must Die. I tried to imagine myself into the mind of a man – a widower whose only child had been killed like this: how would he find the culprit, and how might he set about destroying him? Revenge, incidentally, seems to be the motive in quite a few of my detection novels, though I am not an overly vindictive person. Perhaps, if I had lived in the early seventeenth century, I would have turned out revenge dramas after the Jacobean pattern. But the point is that, if The Beast Must Die has a sharper edge than most of my thrillers, it is because it sprang from that initial involvement of my emotions, and because I was enabled thus to take the hero’s plight at a more serious imaginative level. This book has the one first-rate plot I have ever invented – a plot, by the way, which was no great shakes till, halfway through the book, I suddenly saw how the hero could use his diary.
The plot of A Tangled Web, on the other hand, was given to me gratis – by ‘The Case of the Hooded Man’, as Sir Patrick Hastings called it in his Memoirs, the first case in which that celebrated KC led for the defence. At Eastbourne early this century a policeman was shot by a burglar – a clergyman’s son who bore the most remarkable resemblance, in temperament and actions, to Hornung’s ‘Raffles’. Sir Patrick was chiefly concerned, in his book, with the legal aspects of the case. So I could exercise all my imagination in reconstructing the character of this young burglar, of his beautiful and innocent mistress, and of the ‘friend’ who proved to be their downfall – a man who, even through Sir Patrick’s factual account, shines out luridly as the nearest thing to Iago I have ever heard about in real life. My emotions, even at the distance of 45 years, became thoroughly involved with the burglar’s girl as I interpreted her. After the book was finished, inquiries among retired policemen who had taken part in the case discovered that several things I had imagined about the Iago character, though not mentioned at the trial, were in fact true.
The germ of A Penknife in my Heart was also given me. A friend suggested a story in which two men, previously unknown to each other and both needing to get rid of certain human encumbrances, meet by chance and decide to swap victims. Neither my friend nor I had read Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train, or seen the film Hitchcock made of it. Later, I found that Miss Highsmith’s treatment was entirely different from mine; but its starting-point was identical – and, horror of horrors, I had given two of my characters the same Christian names as she had used for two of hers. The plot of A Penknife in my Heart is the most ‘fictional’ of the three presented here, and the most diagrammatic. To put flesh on it, I had to work myself into the minds of two very different men – a coarse brute and a weaker, more sensitive character, plunge as deep as I could into their weird relationship, and be each of them as he made his murder-attempt (upon a complete stranger), and live with them through the aftermath. It needed a pretty strenuous stretching of the invention.
