need tension to persuade the reader to turn the pages, but crime needs a lot of it. The most straightforward way of generating tension in your fiction is by setting up a question and delaying the answer for as long as possible. Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet provides a wonderful masterclass in how to do it. The Chorus tells the audience at the beginning that the play concerns ‘a pair of star-crossed lovers’, who ‘with their death bury their parents’ strife’. We know from the beginning that Romeo and Juliet will die but not how or when. Throughout the play there are scenes in which one or other is likely to be killed, but again and again death is postponed. By the last scene the audience is in the state most of us know when waiting in for the plumber all day, leaping up at the sound of a van in the street or a knock at the door, perpetually thwarted and twitchy beyond belief. You need to generate that kind of edginess in your reader.
7. Emotional intensity
No one can live in a state of unremitting drama, and any novel that makes its characters do that will lose credibility. You need to vary the emotional intensity, interspersing action scenes with reflective ones. Never forget that one emotion intensifies its opposite. If you are about to plunge your readers into tragedy, think about softening them up with humour first.
8. Adverbs
Many writers are tempted to add colour to their narratives with adverbs, but it’s a mistake. Adverbs diminish intensity. Don’t write ‘he ran breathlessly, hurriedly and clumsily to rescue the child from the fire’. Instead describe his headlong rush, perhaps showing how he trips and rips his skin on a piece of broken glass in the grass. Blood will drip unnoticed from the cuts as he forces himself on, panting and trying to control his banging heart. He can feel the heat of the flames on his face now and has to brush sparks off his clothes as he surges forward. The child’s screams drill into his brain as he trips again, spraining his ankle. Limping, he makes it to the burning building just as the child falls from the open window, missing his outstretched hands by inches.
9. Naming characters
When you are considering what to call your characters, do think about the reader. Similar-looking – or similar-sounding – names can make it hard to keep each person distinct. You will know who they are, but for the reader Dave, Dan and Dick will merge into each other, as will Maeve, Steve and Niamh.
10. Moving characters around
Don’t worry about getting your characters from room to room or even city to city. Use what filmmakers call the jump cut. In a novel this can be achieved by ending one scene in the attic bedroom of a flat in Rome and then beginning the next with a short comment about the new venue; for example, ‘The Whispering Gallery of St Paul’s Cathedral in London gave Jim an excellent view of his target.’
Above all, enjoy planning your novel and like your characters. Even the wicked ones.
Opening sentences matter. They don’t come easily, and Frances Fyfield notes: ‘You may have to relinquish the beginning. The best idea might be at the bottom of the page. Bring it up. And, if it is three a.m. in the morning, it’s time for you and your characters to go to bed. To sleep and yet to dream.’
As John Harvey explains, good openings come in many different forms:
The opening sentences of Dashiell Hammett’s first novel, Red Harvest, published in 1929, are these: ‘I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte. He also called his shirt a shoit.’
It’s all there: the directness, the way it buttonholes you instantly, a hand taking hold of the lapel of your jacket while the voice speaks confidently, not overloudly, into your ear. And the poetry: the poetry of the vernacular, the rhythm of real speech.
The first sentence in his first novel. I wonder how many times he rolled the sheet of paper out of the typewriter, read it through, tossed it over his shoulder, lit another cigarette, set a fresh sheet in place and tried again? I wonder if he’d been testing it in his head at a little after four, four-thirty, those mornings it was impossible to get back to sleep? I wonder if he had it all pat from the start?
At the time of writing that first novel, Hammett was thirty-five years old. He’d been an operative for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, a private detective working for an vast organization with government connections. He had twice enlisted in the army, world wars one and two, and it was during the first of these periods that he was diagnosed with the tuberculosis that would seriously affect his well-being for years. When he was no longer with the Pinkertons, realizing, perhaps, that henceforth he would be physically less active, he enrolled at a Business College and set about learning the business of writing.
Going back to the opening of Red Harvest made me think of the distinctive ways in which other crime books begin. Some, like the Hammett, are short and punchy, grabbing the attention at the same time as having a close-to-perfect satisfaction of their own. Others are longer, with a deliberately complex sentence that winds you along its length and so into both the style and the narrative. Others are paragraph-length and draw you in more carefully, and often then stay in the memory – sometimes after the book itself has been read, enjoyed and set aside.
Opening lines matter. Here is a selection of my favourite single sentence beginnings, some of which will be familiar, others perhaps less so.
They threw me off the hay truck about noon.
James M. Cain, The Postman Always Rings Twice
Jackie Brown at twenty-six, with no expression on his face, said that he could get some guns.
George V. Higgins, The Friends of Eddie Coyle
When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.
James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss
Much later, as he sat with his back against an inside wall of a Motel 6 just north of Phoenix, watching the pool of blood lap toward him, Driver would wonder whether he had made a terrible mistake.
James Sallis, Drive
When she was killed by three chest knife blows in a station car park, Megan Harpur had been on her way home to tell her husband that she was leaving him for another man.
Bill James, Roses, Roses
And here are two of my favourites of the longer variety, each humorous in its own way. The first is, of course, a well-known classic, the second by Brian Thompson, a writer whose forays into crime writing deserve to be better known and appreciated than I think they are.
It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid-October, with the sun not
