This ABC of Crime Writing was not intended as a ‘how to write crime’ exercise, but perhaps that’s what it is. Things don’t always turn out the way a writer planned. I wanted to provide a kind of tour through the work of crime writers I’m familiar with, drawing attention to some of the key ideas, styles and devices they use to write their stories. I found myself occasionally offering advice, suggestions, a strategy, preferring one way of doing things to another, but that was still a very secondary motive.

Agreeing with Michael Wilding’s injunction that ‘crime fiction is not literature, it is entertainment’, I wanted to be entertaining. So I made fun of certain writers and their characteristics, quoted amusing snatches of dialogue and tried never to be prescriptive or solemn. When I looked through an early draft I realised that I had in fact written my version of a ‘how to write crime’ manual.

I believe that the best and possibly the only way to learn to write crime stories is to read a great many of them. Read for relaxation, enjoyment, perhaps for information, perhaps merely to pass the time. Read, read often and read a lot of different stuff. Read everything you can find of authors you like and sample the work of others you like less. This is certainly what I did. From an early age I read a variety of crime novels, from the pulp of Carter Brown to the polish of Nicholas Blake, from the clue-puzzle cosiness of Agatha Christie to the grime and danger of Dashiell Hammett.

I read vast numbers of the enormous output of John Creasey, who has serial characters the Toff, the Baron and Inspector West. These are essentially polite books. Increasingly, though, I favoured the impolite authors—Peter Cheyney, James Hadley Chase, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald. Over time I acquired all of Hammett and Chandler—novels and story collections—in green Penguin paperbacks, and all of Macdonald in various paperback editions.

As a break from study as an undergraduate and postgraduate research, which included overseas travel and fieldwork in places like New Guinea, the Solomon Islands and Fiji, I read and reread these authors. I remember sharing a cramped space aboard a patrol boat in the Solomons with a touring District Officer and us both pulling out copies of Chandler’s The Big Sleep for our kerosene-lamp-lit, mosquito-net-shrouded night-time reading.

American writer Robert B. Parker, the author of many crime novels, who wrote his doctoral thesis on Hammett, Chandler and Macdonald, said, ‘When the time came to write I found I could write.’ I suspect he experienced the same thing as me: soaked in the plots, the rhythms, the cadences of the hard-boiled writers, he discovered he could, without too much difficulty, produce his own version, giving it his personal stamp.

So this catalogue reflects my own journey through the rich and diverse field of crime fiction and may provide shortcuts for aspiring writers. It is necessarily selective; no one could cover all the crime fiction available, and well-informed readers will see gaps and prejudices. There is, for example, a subset of the genre with priests as investigators to which I am averse. Not to mention investigators in ancient Greece, Rome and Egypt, and cat and dog detectives. Readers will see that I have read and drawn on the work of more male writers than female. I find it easier and more satisfying to immerse myself in the male world with its emphasis on violence, graphic description, action and all the fragilities of men.

My preference for the hard-boiled over the runny-yolked is obvious. But there is interest and pleasure to be found every time the social fabric is torn by a homicide and the effort is made to restore it … temporarily.

—PC

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Jean Bedford, Linda Funnell, Michael Fitzjames (for the illustration that opens this part, ‘M is for mean streets’) and Michael Wilding

A is for action. This is a matter of balance. Some writers, like P.D. James, have very little; some, like Mickey Spillane, have too much. If the low-action model is adopted, the characterisation, dialogue and descriptions had better be good. They were in James’s early novels but when she padded them out with descriptions of furniture and architecture (‘mullioned windows’ adorn many country houses), things slowed to a halt. Spillane’s violence was overkill, literally.

A woman I was talking to at some book gathering asked me what kinds of books I wrote. I was writing crime, spy and historical stuff at the time and said I wrote action novels. ‘Oh, I hate action,’ she said. Her favourite author? Jane Austen.

A is also for adultery. This has lost its potency as a force in crime fiction. In the past, concealment of it could be a prime motive for a murder. Once the chief ground for divorce, ‘irretrievable breakdown’ has sidelined it. It may still play a part if a prenuptial agreement comes into the picture.

A is also for age. The age of the chief character in a long-running series of books can create a problem for the author. Agatha Christie virtually ignored the problem; Hercule Poirot, a middle-aged refugee from Belgium when introduced in The Mysterious Affair at Styles in 1917, would have topped a hundred by the time of his final activities in the 1970s. Christie aged him slowly without comment, though admittedly he was pretty old and infirm by the end.

Robert B. Parker chose not to age his chief character Spenser, a private eye, at all. Had he done so he would have been in trouble. Spenser fought Jersey Joe Walcott, former heavyweight champion, when he was, say, twenty and Walcott was in ‘the twilight of his career.’1 Given that, he would have been in his nineties by the time of his last case in Sixkill (published posthumously in 2011). Spenser is still appearing in a continuation of Parker’s books by Ace Atkins.

John D. MacDonald, creator of Travis McGee, said that an author could credibly age a series character at one-third the natural rate. This is a good working formula.

A is also for alcohol. This is an essential ingredient. I advise giving protagonists a drinking problem, which they struggle, more or less successfully, to control. This provides narrative texture. Reformed alcoholics are also a possibility, especially if they fall off the wagon from time to time, but AA meetings aren’t a lot of fun and the struggle to remain dry can become tedious. The Matthew Scudder novels of Lawrence Block (The Sins of the Fathers, 1976, and following) and the Dave Robicheaux novels of James Lee Burke (The Neon Rain, 1987, and following) provide examples.

An incidental alcoholic character is very useful, especially in private-eye novels. The investigator can exploit this weakness, feel slightly guilty about it but still get the job done.

The classic ambivalent comment about drinking is at the end of Chandler’s The Big Sleep (1939): ‘On the way downtown I stopped at a bar and had a couple of double Scotches. They didn’t do me any good. All they did was make me think of Silver-Wig, and I never saw her again.’ That’s getting a lot of resonance out of a couple of drinks.

B is for backstory. In most crime novels, especially private-eye books, something in the past, preferably murder, surfaces in the present and causes distress. Investigation therefore involves the past and the present, providing a rich texture and helping to fill up the pages to publishable length.

Sometimes the matter in the past is very distant and obscure. The plot of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon (1930) is embellished by a myth about the gifting of a golden bird by the Spanish king to the Knights Hospitaller during the Crusades. The details don’t matter. This was a brilliant exotic touch, providing a backdrop to an intricate, sordid contemporary story.

A misplaced trust, rooted in family history and tradition, with details provided, is a good backstory setting. Then, in the here and now, A assures his lifelong friend B that he had nothing to do with the death of C in the past. B defends A to detective E who doesn’t believe him and comes to suspect B. Then A’s unreliability becomes clear, probably through the intervention of love interest F and things move towards a resolution. Examples abound.

B is also for blackmail. This is not as popular a theme as it once was. Decriminalisation of homosexuality removed one avenue for this form of extortion and our expectation of ethical behaviour from politicians and business leaders is now so low their transgressions don’t need to be hidden. It was a very useful crime for writers, because, unlike others, it forced the perpetrator to maintain some form of connection, however temporary, with the victim. This provided opportunities for the blackmailer to make mistakes and gave the investigator a sporting chance.

When blackmail featured in crime novels it was usually as a precursor to murder, as in The Big Sleep.

B is also for Bradshaw’s. For over a hundred years, Bradshaw’s was the bible of railway travellers in Britain. It was consulted by investigators like Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, Sexton Blake, ‘Bulldog’ Drummond, and others who needed to move around the country.

Bradshaw’s provided writers in the ‘Golden Age’ with plot points (see Agatha Christie’s Death in the Clouds, 1935, using the continental Bradshaw’s). The publication issued frequent amendments and updates. Woe betide the suspect whose alibi relied on the arrival of the 8.15 from Kings Cross to Ely at 9.10 who’d failed to recognise Bradshaw’s notice of the cancellation of the 8.15 service on the day in question.

The chief exponent of the railway mystery, in which timetabling figured along with other aspects of the railway system, was the former railway engineer Freeman Wills Crofts.

A contemporary writer, Edward Marston, has attempted to revive the railway mystery (see H for historical).

B is also for butler. Did the butler ever do it? I can’t recall an example but I haven’t read Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Georgette Heyer or Dorothy L. Sayers exhaustively. Given the convention that it’s where suspicion should fall in the country-house story, if he had it in for the master or mistress of the house, other family members or a guest, it would be unwise for the butler to do it. Better to sublet the act to a footman or gardener.

In 1933 Georgette Heyer worked a twist in Why Shoot a Butler? The butler is the first victim.

C is for car. Given the tedious prevalence of car chases in crime stories on film and television, it is surprising to see that cars play a comparatively insignificant part in books. Police detectives just use the pool cars, except for Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse, who drives a venerable Jaguar. Ian Rankin’s John Rebus drives a battered Saab when not using a pool car. Lee Child’s Jack Reacher has no car at all. How could it be otherwise? He doesn’t have a licence or a fixed abode. When he needs wheels, he borrows, usually from a woman.

C is also for CCTV. Closed circuit television now keeps watch on vast areas of modern cities. London, in particular, is said to be intensely covered but so are capital and provincial cities in many countries. CCTV footage figures prominently in many crime novels, especially the later ones of Barry Maitland (Silvermeadow, 2000, and others). The footage is notoriously grainy and flickering, which allows technicians to play walk-on parts.

In the early days of CCTV, video cassettes were often wiped and reused, to the frustration of investigators. Now, with high-capacity disks and hard drives, the images can be captured and held for all time. Contemporary criminals in fiction can use the footage to their own advantage, a good example being in Lee Child’s One Shot (2005).

C is also for clue puzzle. Coined by the pioneers of mystery fiction, Wilkie Collins, Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle, this was the dominant mode until the advent of the hard-boiled style (see H for hard-boiled). Agatha Christie was the queen of the clue puzzle but there were many contenders—Ngaio Marsh, Georgette Heyer, Margery Allingham, Dorothy L. Sayers (the latter two with upper-class protagonists) and others. Most of the writers in this mode were women, but some men contributed—John Dickson Carr, Freeman Wills Crofts and the Poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis, who wrote under the pseudonym Nicholas Blake.

One of the many variants of the clue-puzzle style was practised by Erle Stanley Gardner in his Perry Mason stories (The Case of the Velvet Claws, 1933, and following), where witnesses could be tripped up by apparently minor discrepancies (see C for courtroom drama).

C is also for coincidence. To be avoided at all times.

C is also for complication. Raymond Chandler’s plots were complicated because he often cobbled together bits from short stories to form the narrative and because he didn’t care. ‘Scene is more important than plot,’ he wrote, and I agree with him. Some critics suggest that a death in The Big Sleep is unattributable. Others disagree. I don’t care.

In the Golden Age of crime writing, the time of Christie, Sayers, Marsh et al., complications were often resolved in the last chapter when characters were called together, often, interestingly, in the library. Unreality was entrenched.

As a yardstick, no plot should be so complicated that an experienced crime reader cannot explain it within twenty-four hours of finishing the book. After that, with the reader almost certainly deep in another book, explanation cannot be expected.

C is also for courtroom drama. Setting aside the formulaic contrivances of Erle Stanley Gardner, the courtroom drama as an acknowledged contemporary subset of the crime genre was kicked off by Scott Turow’s Presumed Innocent (1987). Understandably, the style has flourished most in the United States where the legal system, with its elected judges and district attorneys, plea bargains, bail bondsmen and capital punishment making for corruption and high stakes, has provided a rich field.

John Grisham became a leading practitioner with a series of novels (A Time to Kill, 1989, and following) that became hit films—little Tom Cruise in The Firm, big John Cusack in The Runaway Jury, for example. Other contributors are Steve Martini, Michael Connelly and John Lescroart.

C is also for criminal protagonist. E.W. Hornung, brother-in-law of Arthur Conan Doyle, began publishing stories in the Cornhill Magazine about gentleman thief A.J. Raffles in the 1890s. These were collected and published as The Amateur Cracksman in 1899. This ‘soft’ approach to having a hero working outside the law was continued by Leslie Charteris in his Simon Templar (‘the Saint’) novels (Meet the Tiger, 1928, and following).

In The Killer Inside Me (1952), pulp writer Jim Thompson created one of the most psychotic of criminal protagonists. A sane and in that way tougher criminal protagonist was introduced by Donald E. Westlake, writing as Richard Stark, in his violent novels about Parker, who steals and kills. The first of these, The Hunter (1962), was filmed as Point Blank in 1967, with Lee Marvin perfectly cast as Parker (renamed Walker).

Australian Garry Disher’s character Wyatt, who first appeared in Kickback (1991), is violent in a violent world but has a personal moral code in which his most violent actions are directed towards those who deserve it.

This style, as practised by Stark and Disher, is perhaps the epitome of hard-boiled, in that the protagonists’ emotions, if any, are screwed down tight.

C is also for Crockford’s Clerical Directory. This listing of the Anglican clergy, which began publication in the mid-nineteenth century, was an essential tool for investigators when the bona fides or the career of a clergyman character needed to be checked in the clue-puzzle mysteries of the early twentieth century. Many a vicar was exposed as an imposter, and some were found to have either shady pasts or dubious connections. Vicars figure less frequently in crime fiction now but otherwise nothing has changed.

D is for death. The British Crime Writers Association stipulated on its formation that a book must include a murder to qualify for a Golden Dagger award, and I agree. An induced suicide might just do. Then the question arises of how soon the murder should occur. Some books, of course, have it on the first page. Unless the murder has occurred before the story begins, I would say it should be within the first quarter of the book.

D is also for doctor. Very useful characters, doctors. Absolutely essential in police procedurals where one is needed at a crime scene and a pathologist is needed to perform an autopsy, at which some investigators, like Chief Inspector Morse, feel queasy (see S for squeamishness). Others, as in Stuart McKenzie’s books, for example, indulge in mordant humour. Doctors may be good guys, family friends, the possessors of knowledge like hidden abortions and secret children, or bad guys—Dr Feelgood drug providers, dodgy plastic surgeons and torturers.

D is also for dream. Dreams provide useful punctuation points for writers, allowing the action to slow down or be reprised in the consciousness of a character. It is permissible for an investigator to gain an insight through a dream. A dream is a handy way to invoke a memory, which can deepen characterisation, suggesting perhaps a vulnerability not before glimpsed, but the device should be used sparingly to protect the illusion of reality.

D is also for drugs. Drugs have figured in crime fiction from day one. Not surprisingly, given his own addiction, opium figures in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868), and think of Sherlock Holmes and his ‘seven-per-cent solution’. Opium was inevitably part of the picture when Sax Rohmer’s Dr Fu Manchu was around.

Drugs have figured more prominently in American than in British crime fiction. Raymond Chandler adopted the ‘reefer madness’ stance, in which a marijuana smoker was inherently unreliable.

Once Mafia novels came on stream (see M for mob), drugs moved to centre stage. Drugs figure interestingly in Mario Puzo’s The Godfather (1969), where older mafiosi shy away from drug trafficking while the younger, ‘made’ guys see it as where the money is. The young guys win the battle and, in fiction and in life, the big city mob and drugs have always been closely associated.

In more recent times, writers’ attention has shifted to the importation of drugs across the southern border of the United States. Don Winslow’s The Power of the Dog (2005) is a powerful example with an enormous body count.

E is for email. A contemporary crime novel without email would be like Sherlock Holmes without telegrams.

E is also for empathy. With a couple of notable exceptions, most crime novels have at least one empathetic character—someone to like, if not love. This is built-in with partnership stories. If Holmes is too cold for your taste, Watson’s bluff affability may appeal; if Morse is too acerbic, sensible long-suffering Lewis may excite your sympathy.

But there is no one to like in The Maltese Falcon ( John Huston and Bogart humanised Sam Spade somewhat in the film) or in Hammett’s Continental Op novels. It is a similar situation with James Ellroy. His cop hero Lloyd Hopkins (Blood on the Moon, 1984, and two others) is virtually a psychopath. This was deliberate. After he’d stopped writing about Hopkins, Ellroy was asked what had happened to him. He replied that he’d probably died of AIDS.

Also eschewing empathy as far as his protagonist was concerned was Andrew Vachss in his Burke series of novels beginning with Flood (1985). The theme was child abuse and Vachss said of Burke that he was writing about a vision of hell and didn’t want a knight-errant as the guide.

E is also for exercise. There are no half-measures here. Detectives either do or don’t. Robert B. Parker’s Spenser does. He spars with Hawk in the gym and, as he says tersely, ‘Lifts some’. Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone jogs to work off the effects of her disgusting fast food diet.

Spade and Chandler’s Marlowe, operating well before Jim Fixx’s The Complete Book of Running changed the world, stayed in their suits throughout. Ian Rankin’s Rebus knows he should exercise but has another drink instead; Morse wouldn’t dream of it. At the extreme end is Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe, who is so obese he can hardly move and has to use Archie Goodwin to do the legwork.

It’s a matter of which demographic the writer is appealing to—jock or slob.

E is also for expertise. Early detectives like Holmes and Poe’s Dupin were experts in things like ciphers, poisons and determining the brands of cigars from the ash. Later practitioners were more like Ross Macdonald’s durable Lew Archer—handy with their fists perhaps and bright enough, but with no special skills. A change came with Jonathan Kellerman’s psychologist Alex Delaware and Patricia Cornwell’s pathologist Kay Scarpetta. Their skills were central to cracking their cases. Chief Inspector Morse was an expert at cryptic crosswords and classical music, which helped occasionally, but mainly gave him opportunities to be smart at Detective Sergeant Lewis’s expense.

F is for father. The worst father in crime fiction (filmic) is Noah Cross in Robert Towne’s superb screenplay of Chinatown. Cross fathered a child on his own daughter and has designs on the resultant daughter/granddaughter. Few others come close.

General Sternwood in Chandler’s The Big Sleep combines a louche decadence with a likeable cynicism. He admits to having passed on his own vices to his daughters but believes they may have cultivated a few of their own.

Detectives as fathers can work well, as with Rebus and his accident-prone daughter and with Michael Connelly’s half-brother characters, Harry Bosch and Mickey Haller, whose two daughters get together. The main function of a daughter in a crime novel is to make a father character vulnerable. Sentimentality can cause this to go badly wrong, as in James Lee Burke’s Robicheaux novels, where it oozes over Robicheaux’s daughter Alafair. The only acceptable attitude is tough love.

F is also for the FBI. Ever since Inspector Lestrade in the Sherlock Holmes stories, there have been incompetent policemen acting as foils to the brighter protagonist. In recent times this role has often been assumed by FBI agents. The G-men are seen as unwieldy and bureaucratic and sometimes corrupt. There is a reluctance to call the FBI in and scepticism about its methods.

A notable exception is Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs (1988) who is well and truly up to the job, at least until the foolishness of the novel Hannibal. The heaviest verbal put-down of the Bureau comes in one of the Jack Reacher novels where it is characterised as the Federal Bureau of Incompetence.

F is also for film adaptation. Crime fiction vies with the Western as the genre to be most adapted for films. Some of the best adaptations in my opinion are The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939), The Maltese Falcon (1941), Get Carter (1971), Death on the Nile (1978), True Confessions (1981), The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and LA Confidential (1997). Among the worst, for missing the style and essence of the original story, have been the 1978 remake of The Big Sleep, V.I. Warshawski (1991) and the 2000 remake of Get Carter (one of the worst films of all time).

Far and away the best original screenplay for a crime story is Robert Towne’s Chinatown (1974).

F is also for food. Investigators, criminals and suspects have to eat and many writers make eating part of the texture of their books. As noted, Kinsey Millhone eats fast food but also dines frequently at a local Hungarian restaurant where she has friends and sometimes learns things. Ian Rankin laments the sugar- and salt-laden Scots diet, but eats it. A popular takeaway for his characters is vindaloo and chips but Inspector Rebus himself, a purist, favours rice with his curry. Menus in southern novels, like those of James Lee Burke, Carl Hiaasen and James W. Hall feature shrimp, po’ boy sandwiches and dirty rice.

Harry Bosch eats on the run and buys take-out to indulge his daughter. He microwaves TV dinners and frozen pizzas. Robert B. Parker’s Spenser is a gourmet cook and we get recipes and descriptions of culinary activity. He is also a beer snob but apparently knows or cares little about wine.

Lee Child’s Jack Reacher is a big guy, six-foot-five and a hundred and twenty pounds. He eats a lot, mostly in diners, where he favours cheeseburgers for dinner and pancakes with maple syrup for breakfast. Happily, he walks so far hitch-hiking that he keeps his weight under control.

Meals feature prominently in clue-puzzle country-house mysteries, where an absence at breakfast or the wrong use of an implement at dinner can set hares running.

G is for gambling. In his 1971 survey of British mystery fiction, Snobbery with Violence, Colin Watson has a chapter entitled ‘De rigueur at Monte’. This pointed to the frequency with which British writers in the Golden Age took their characters to Monte Carlo to gamble or to observe gambling. E. Phillips Oppenheimer’s Murder at Monte Carlo (1933) is a prime example. Gambling has not figured much since then in crime fiction, though it crops up in Dick Francis’s racing novels (see H for horses), and Peter Temple’s character Jack Irish (Bad Debts, 1996, and following) is a punter and variously involved in the world of racing.

G is also for ghost. Quite rightly, ghosts are almost entirely absent from crime fiction. The only acceptable ‘ghost’ is one that turns out to have a perfectly rational explanation as in The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902).

In the novels of the mother-and-son team writing under the name Charles Todd (A Test of Wills, 1996, and others), a Scotland Yard detective, Ian Rutledge, a survivor of World War I, has on his conscience and in his consciousness a ‘ghost’ in the form of the voice of his dead Sergeant Hamish McLeod, who taunts and provokes Rutledge as he goes about his work. This is a device admired by some readers and deplored by others.

G is also for guilt. Guilt is no longer as popular as it once was in crime fiction. Once guilt could cause characters to confess to crimes, to name accomplices and to commit suicide. Guilt operated strongly when more people espoused versions of Christianity where guilt is in-built. Catholics could avoid guilt by confession but this could help a story along by inspiring guilt in priests who came into the possession of guilty knowledge.

Characters in contemporary novels in more secular times either don’t feel guilt when psychopaths (see S for serial killer) are able to rationalise it away, being aware in a hard world that, like conscience, it is a luxury and a negative impulse. Approved characters feel guilty about infidelities, neglect of children, deception of colleagues, but few self-respecting murderers would feel guilty about having killed someone.

G is also for gumshoe. This is a colloquial term for a private detective, implying that such operatives require rubber-soled shoes for their clandestine work. Another term is ‘shamus’, whose origin is obscure. It surfaces in the hard-boiled stories of the late 1920s. One suggestion is that it’s an amalgam of the Hebrew word ‘shamesh’, meaning servant, and the Irish name Seamus, a common name for police detectives. This seems unlikely and ‘origin obscure’ remains the best account while the jury is out. ‘Peeper’ is another name hailing from the time when private detectives were commonly engaged in divorce work—peeping through keyholes and under blinds and taking photographs of adulterous activity (see L for Latin tag).

G is also for gun. They’re not essential; knives, clubs, poisons and garrottes will do, but guns are the most efficient killers. Usefully, they leave clues behind—bullets, bullet casings, powder burns—giving investigators something to work with. A ballistics expert in an obligatory white coat, unbuttoned, is a serviceable character. Fingerprints on firearms have become less interesting for investigators. For one thing, everyone now knows to wipe a gun and for another, given the millions of guns in America, most of those used in crimes end up in the drink. The hit man with a favourite gun is a complete anachronism.

A book with guns as the absolute movers and shakers of action is George V. Higgins’s debut novel The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1970).

G could also be for gloves, in this context, as in shooters wearing them, and modifications of guns like the sawing off of stocks and barrels can leave tell-tale signs behind.

Guns can be overdone. There are too many in the novels of Don Winslow and T. Jefferson Parker. Here the classics differ. Raymond Chandler said, ‘When in doubt have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.’ On the other hand, writers might take note of Philip Marlowe’s observation, ‘Such a lot of guns around town and so few brains.’ I think it’s in the book; it’s certainly in the film, with Bogie’s sibilance working full on.

G is also for guts. They may be spilled metaphorically or literally, or, again metaphorically, displayed by the protagonist. At some point in a crime novel a hero should come under threat and display not foolhardiness, but a judicious courage.

H is for habits. Series characters typically have habits—Sherlock Holmes plays the violin, Hercule Poirot drinks tisanes and fusses with his moustache, Philip Marlowe plays auto-chess, Inspector Morse does cryptic crosswords, Nero Wolfe grows orchids. The function of these habits is to humanise the character and to alert readers to the workings of their minds. When Holmes scrapes the strings we know he is thinking deeply; when Morse cracks a difficult cryptic clue we know he is at the top of his game, and so on.

Conversely, for a criminal, a habit is a weakness, allowing an investigator to anticipate an action or set a trap.

H is also for hard-boiled. This is the accepted term for the tough school of crime writing that evolved in the United States in the 1890s and found its expression in magazines like Black Mask and True Detective. The first hard-boiled writer is generally thought to be Carroll John Daly, whose stories were dark, violent and uninterested in redemption. The origin of the term is interestingly discussed on the website The Straight Dope.2 It has a history dating back to the nineteenth century, had a vogue in post-World War I New York and was firmly attached to the seminal writing of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.

The characteristic mode of hard-boiled stories is that they exhibit little of the emotional response of the characters to the events happening around them. Broadly speaking, the investigators are too busy surviving and fending off threats to describe their feelings or to admit to having them about the wider world. This characteristic, though modified, persists in contemporary crime writing (see P for pulp).

H is also for historical. The list of historical crime novels is so extensive you could not live long enough to read them all. The sub-genre has been popular at least since the work of Edith Pargeter, who wrote under a number of pseudonyms, most notably Ellis Peters. Her first novel had the unpromising title of Hortensius, Friend of Nero (1936), but she achieved great popularity with the series of medieval novels featuring Brother Cadfael, set at a time when the English throne was in wild dispute. The books inspired a short-lived television series.

Peter Lovesey has been a prolific writer of historical crime novels. His series character Sergeant Cribb (a descendant of bare-knuckle, prize-fighting champion Tom Cribb—another example of the usefulness of boxing as texture in crime novels) first appeared in Wobble to Death (1970), about the odd Victorian interest in marathon pedestrianism. As so often with successful English novels, a television series resulted.

Anne Perry, who was involved as a teenager in a murder in New Zealand, has produced a great number of historical crime novels. Her first novel had the evocative title The Cater Street Hangman (1979).

Cherry-picking among the many practitioners, Edward Marston’s Domesday novels are worthy of attention. The protagonist is in the service of William the Conqueror and surveys the kingdom’s resources while solving crimes in different counties and cities he visits. The Wolves of Savernake (1993) was the first of these interesting and informative books. Less successful to my mind, after admittedly a small sample, has been his series about the British railway network beginning with The Railway Detective (2004), set in 1851.

Pre-eminent among contemporary English historical crime novelists is C.J. Sansom, whose series about hunchbacked lawyer Matthew Shardlake, set in Tudor times, rises well above the ruck. Beginning with Dissolution in 2003, all subsequent books have been eagerly awaited by devoted readers. Interestingly, Sansom presents a much less sympathetic portrait of Thomas Cromwell than does Hilary Mantel in her Man Booker prize-winners Wolf Hall (2009) and Bring Up the Bodies (2012).

Historical crime writing is much less common in the United States than in Britain. When set in the nineteenth century, American crime stories tend to appear as Westerns, for example Ron Hansen’s excellent Desperadoes (1979) and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (1983).

Books about the Mafia are an exception to this. There was a historical dimension to The Godfather. Dennis Lehane provides another exception with his powerful book The Given Day (2008), set in Boston in the early years of the twentieth century. It focuses on crime and corruption, while his Live by Night (2012) is a convincing and compelling evocation of the Prohibition era.

A trio of crime novels set in Sydney in Victorian times by Martin Long—The Garden House (1989), The Music Room (1990) and The Dark Gateway (1991)—received much less attention than it deserved.

H is also for hit man. Contract killers, also known as button men or torpedos, figure in many crime stories. Their characteristic MO (see L for Latin tag) is a close-range shot to the head with a low-calibre pistol. Hit men tend to be off-stage characters, less the focus of investigators’ interest than the person who put out the contract.

Richard Condon’s 1982 novel Prizzi’s Honor tells the story of a husband and wife, both contract killers, who are hired to murder each other.

H is also for homicide (see D for death), and also for humour. Humour is a matter of judgement. Too much, as in the novels of Kinky Friedman, and the result is ludicrous; none at all and the effect is deadening. The one-liners stand out in Robert B. Parker’s novels. ‘Work for you?’ Spenser says to someone objectionable wishing to hire him. ‘I’d rather spend the rest of my life at a Barry Manilow concert.’

In the 1960s, Joyce Porter’s novels about bumbling, venal Detective Chief Inspector Wilfred Dover (Dover One, 1964, and following) were charming and funny in an old-fashioned English manner. Janet Evanovich has achieved much the same effect with an utterly up-to-date American idiom in the Stephanie Plum series (One for the Money, 1994, and following). ‘I’ll touch it,’ Steph’s feisty grandmother exclaims when a flasher invites the women to feel his member. Great scene.

H is also for Hong Kong. Australian William Marshall wrote a series of crime novels, beginning with Yellowthread Street (1975), featuring detectives Harry Feiffer and Christopher O’Yee, set in Hong Kong. The books provided the basis for a British television series and sold well in the 1970s and 80s.

With its interesting geographical location, political history, affluence and gambling culture, Hong Kong has provided a vibrant setting for crime writers. Michael Connelly’s twelfth Harry Bosch novel, Nine Dragons (2009), is one example.

H is also for horses, which didn’t figure much in crime fiction after Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘Silver Blaze’ story until Dick Francis mounted up. In a succession of best-selling books, ex-jump-jockey Francis had various damaged (one-armed, deaf, traumatised) protagonists, always middle class or above, dealing with villains lurking around the stables and the racetracks. The early books had, if the expression can be excused, pace, good inside information and sufficient characterisation to make them enjoyable. But they became increasingly formulaic to the point of being repetitive and displayed ever more conservative attitudes—understandable perhaps in one who rode for the late Queen Mother.

It has emerged that the books were practically written by Francis’s wife, Mary, who researched and developed them. When she died the job was taken over by his son Felix, who continued to write them after his father’s race was run.

I is for incest. This taboo subject does not figure much in crime fiction. However, two American taboo-defiers, James M. Cain and Jim Thompson, were preoccupied with the subject. Cain is said to have begun, and abandoned, a literary novel dealing with incest. His book The Butterfly (1946) is about it. Thompson, probably a victim of child abuse and certainly a witness to it, writes about incest in Heed the Thunder (1946) and The Alcoholics (1953) and touches on it in other works.

I is also for India. A number of writers, Indian and non-Indian, have set stories on the subcontinent but India has not achieved the popularity of the Scandinavian setting (see N for Nordic). Perhaps the most successful series of novels set in India are those of H.R.F. ‘Harry’ Keating about Inspector G.V. Ghote of the Bombay police (The Perfect Murder, 1964, and following). Keating avoided two pitfalls of writing about Indian characters—parody and condescension.

I is also for indigenous. The first notable indigenous detective was Australian—Arthur Upfield’s Napoleon Bonaparte. In a series of novels in the 1930s and 40s, Upfield had great success with part-Aboriginal (white father, black mother—the reverse would have been unthinkable at the time) Bonaparte. The books were distinguished by their accurate descriptions of the Australian bush. They were well-intentioned but racist, in that Upfield seemed unaware of the patronising condescension in the character’s name (harking back to the deplorable days of the ‘King Billy’ brass nameplates given to Aboriginal elders) and making Bonaparte’s intellectual abilities (he held an MA) attributable to his white ancestry while his instinctive talents came from the black side. The books are almost unreadable now on this account and for their sexism, stereotypical characters and stilted dialogue. However, Upfield’s books sold well in England and America.

Thirty years ago, at a writing conference in Stockholm, American author Tony Hillerman told me he’d been influenced by Upfield’s books, serialised in the Saturday Evening Post. If so, and he wasn’t just being nice to an Australian a long way from home who only had two books to his credit, this was the best thing Upfield did. Hillerman’s best-selling and award-winning novels about Navajo tribal policemen Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee really put the indigenous detective on the map. Books like The Blessing Way (1970) and others combine a profound understanding of Native American culture with sound crime-writing technique.

Hillerman’s books have been much imitated and there are now other indigenous investigators on the scene such as Inuits and, for all I know, Ainu and Veddas.

I is also for insanity. Insanity often plays a part in crime novels: sometimes as a motivation, sometimes as an excuse. Carmen Sternwood in The Big Sleep is insane, but compassionate Philip Marlowe believes she can be cured. Howard Hughes is insane in James Ellroy’s White Jazz (1992) and American Tabloid (1995) and cannot be redeemed—but that’s Ellroy. And Hughes.

Insane characters provided backdrop until Thomas Harris placed Hannibal Lecter centre-stage in Red Dragon (1981) and The Silence of the Lambs (1988). Mad, cannibalistic Lecter is like a force of nature—preternaturally intelligent and vicious, the energetic focus of the books’ plots, although in captivity for much of the time. It’s hard to imagine how he could be surpassed as a sociopath and psychopath. Unfortunately, in Hannibal and Hannibal Rising, Harris overplayed his hand.

I is also for internet. Like other technological advances (see E for email, M for mobile phone, P for photograph and T for texting), the internet has had a profound effect on the plotting and texture of crime fiction. Investigators and criminals now have vast amounts of data literally at their fingertips and much plodding work can be avoided. It cuts both ways, with brilliant law-enforcement computer technicians vying with crazed criminal geeks.

Typically, characters like Harry Bosch and Jack Reacher have only a nodding acquaintance with the technology. Their talents lie elsewhere.

I is also for ‘in the wind’. This is a term in American crime fiction for a character who has gone into hiding or whose whereabouts are unknown.

J is for Jack the Ripper. Probably no series of crimes has inspired so many books, fiction and non-fiction, as the Whitechapel murders of 1888 in which five prostitutes were killed and mutilated. The perpetrator was never found. The name ‘Jack the Ripper’ was signed to a note sent to the London police, purporting to be from the killer. It was almost certainly a hoax but the name stuck.

Serious study of the crimes is known as Ripperology and two notable examples of works that attempt to identify the Ripper are Stephen Knight’s Jack the Ripper: The final solution (1976) and Patricia Cornwell’s Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper, case closed (2002). Candidates for the perpetrator have included Prince Albert (the grandson of Queen Victoria), artist Walter Sickert, royal physician Sir William Gull and professional cricketer Montague Druitt. Frederick Deeming, who killed women and children in England and Australia and was hanged in Victoria, has also been proposed as a possible culprit.

The list of novels dealing with the crimes is very long and has drawn in historical figures such as Oscar Wilde and fictional characters like Sherlock Holmes.

J could also be for jail but no one much spells it that way these days.

J could be for jogging (see E for exercise) or joke (see H for homicide) but it’s also for journalist. Journalists stand very low in social esteem, down with used-car salesmen apparently, but they rate much more highly with crime writers. They are very useful characters as the holders and purveyors of information. Investigators can use their knowledge as a shortcut to gaining an understanding of people and circumstances and use their publishing power to further a cause, as in Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2005, and following).

Journalists make very good partners for male detectives because of their contacts, but also conflicts of interest can arise between the journalist’s need to publish and the investigator’s need for security. This can make for dramatic clashes and resolutions as well as providing a desirable balance.

But times have changed and the internet has reduced the usefulness of journalists to investigators. Female journalists are also now more likely to be in the visual, rather than the print media, which has had the effect of making them better looking but dumber. A book making critical use of a TV journalist is Lee Child’s One Shot (2005). Unhappily, this didn’t make it a good book.

J is also for juries. These are crucially important in American crime novels, as the death penalty is still a possibility, less so in civilised countries where it has long been scrapped. John Grisham’s The Runaway Jury (1996) focuses on the bizarre US system of jury selection and manipulation. Juries are also central to Michael Connelly’s Mickey Haller series of novels, starting with The Lincoln Lawyer (2005, and following) (see C for courtroom drama).

J is also for justice. Justice is assumed to be blind or capricious in crime novels, otherwise there would be no need for ethical lawyers, honest cops and private investigators.

K is for knife. The knife is a ‘wet work’ murder weapon with a lot to recommend it—a silent operation if properly delivered, the possibility of fingerprints and DNA, blood typing (rendered less useful by the discovery of DNA), and distinctive shapes and cutting edges allowing different white-coated experts to parade their knowledge. As the title suggests, Jonathan Kellerman’s The Butcher’s Theatre (1988) makes good use of knives, and of course they come into play in any book based on the Whitechapel murders.

It’s worth noting that knives are the only weapons that give Jack Reacher qualms, before he starts breaking wrists and arms and dislocating shoulders.

In cases of domestic fatalities, knives are usually found in kitchens.

K is also for knight and squire. This is a term coined by Barry Maitland for pairings such as Colin Dexter’s Morse and Lewis, Reginald Hill’s Dalziel and Pascoe, and Ruth Rendell’s Wexford and Burden. It was to get away from this formula that Maitland chose to use the male and female team of Brock and Kolla in his police procedural series (The Marx Sisters, 1994, and following), although it should be noted that in romantic historical fiction squires sometimes turn out to be women, with obvious consequences.

L is for laboratory (see D for doctor and S for squeamishness). Since the advent of Patricia Cornwell’s medical examiner Kay Scarpetta (Postmortem, 1990, and following), crime writers have increasingly felt obliged to introduce laboratory scenes into their stories—white coats, petri dishes, latex gloves. There is a variety of ways to handle these scenes—humorously, clinically, sceptically. Perhaps the best approach, a challenge yet to be met, would be to combine all three.

L is also for Latin tag. Some of the most common are habeas corpus, in situ, modus operandi, sub judice, in flagrante delicto. Most crime writers have little Latin and less Greek but they must know these terms.

L is also for loan sharking. This peculiarly American practice occurs in many crime novels where the debt incurred has to be paid one way or another. The Vig (1990) by John Lescroart has loan sharking as its central theme.

L is also for locality. Some writers are intensely identified with their chosen localities—Dashiell Hammett with San Francisco, Raymond Chandler with LA, Georges Simenon with Paris, Ian Rankin with Edinburgh. Some writers (see R for research) invent their localities—Ed McBain, Ross Macdonald and Sue Grafton for example. The only rule is that the localities be interesting in their own right and believable.

L is also for locked room. Introduced into what was then called ‘sensational fiction’ by Edgar Allan Poe in ‘Murder in the Rue Morgue’ (1841), the locked-room mystery was popular in the Golden Age—the 1920s to 1940s. The exemplar of the device was American-born John Dickson Carr, who mostly lived in and wrote about England. His 1935 novel The Hollow Man was voted the best locked-room mystery of all time in 1935 by a panel of seventeen crime writers. It is likely to retain the title because the style is out of fashion, although some contemporary writers employ it; examples are Peter Lovesey’s Bloodhounds (1996) and Kerry Greenwood’s Murder in Montparnasse (2002). Carr’s protagonist, Dr Gideon Fell, lectures on the subject in the book and this is sometimes published as a stand-alone essay.

The device in the hands of Carr and others always strains credulity.

L is also for love. Love suffuses crime novels—except those of James Ellroy, where nobody loves anybody or anything. Characters kill for love and die for love. They love their jobs, their houses, their money. Investigators love their wives (often estranged) and their children—more often one child and usually a daughter. Some investigators love the natural world, as James W. Hall’s Thorn loves the Florida Keys.

Morse loves classical music, Bosch loves jazz, R.D. Wingfield’s Jack Frost loves sausage sandwiches. Dr Watson, of course, loves Sherlock Holmes but doesn’t know it, while Robert B. Parker’s Spenser loves Hawk but can’t admit it, even though Susan Silverman might be tolerant.

M is for mean streets. ‘Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.’ Raymond Chandler’s stylish famous formulation is odd, given his work. Philip Marlowe is initially seen in Chandler’s first novel, The Big Sleep, not in a mean street but outside General Sternwood’s mansion. Marlowe, in fact, spends more time in high-class gambling joints onshore and afloat, respectable apartment buildings, doctors’ rooms and out-of-town resorts than on mean streets. But the formulation could hardly go, ‘Down these mean streets a man must sometimes go …’

Streets are meaner in Hammett and much meaner in later writers like James Ellroy.

M is also for Miranda. The Miranda warning has been a part of police procedure in the United States since 1966. There is no precise text for arresting police to follow but they must advise suspects of the following: they have the right to remain silent; anything they say may be used in evidence against them; they have the right for an attorney to be present at any interrogation and, if they cannot afford a lawyer, a court-appointed attorney will be provided.

In crime fiction police observe or violate these rules as circumstances dictate.

M is also for mob or mafia. The quintessential mob book is Mario Puzo’s The Godfather (1969), which laid down the ground rules, introducing us to consiglieri, ‘made’ guys and the code of silence. The mob is a very useful device, allowing organised crime to be a threatening and controlling presence without ever having to specify details. The mob can be thought to be behind a series of murders for two-thirds of a book before it becomes clear that the perp was a rogue cop or a CIA guy or a lawyer.

The mob can be located anywhere up and down the east coast of the United States, in California and Nevada but never in the mid-west except in Chicago or possibly Kansas. The best mob book in recent years is Don Winslow’s The Winter of Frankie Machine (2006) in which a mafia hit man tries to retire. There was talk of a film with Robert de Niro, who has played mafiosi so often he must sometimes think he is one.

The Russian mafia has begun to figure in American and British crime novels. In its home-grown manifestation it is best seen in Martin Cruz Smith’s books (Gorky Park, 1981, and following).

M is also for mobile phone (cell phone in the United States), which has changed the plotting and pace of crime novels. Where detectives used to have to locate pay phones or stay by a home, office or hotel-room phone, they can now move around freely. Mobiles are good for tracking people, which can work both ways—for good or evil. They are bad for the environment because characters throw them from high buildings or into the nearest lake or river to avoid being tracked.

There are dangers for writers here. Ian Rankin’s Standing in Another Man’s Grave (2012) makes a greater use of the mobile phone—calling, texting, messaging, photographing and sending photographs, voice recording—than I’ve seen before. It threatens to dehumanise, over-digitalise, the story.

The change wrought by the mobile was underlined in the British TV series Life on Mars where a character, thrown back to the 1970s, howls, ‘I need my mobile.’

‘Your mobile what?’ is the only response he gets. The short-lived American adaptation was deprived of this joke. ‘I need my cell’ just wouldn’t work.

M is also for morality. Investigators have an ill-defined, self-devised moral code, rarely spelled out. It can be very flexible, as in the case of Sam Spade, who is sexually amoral—he has seduced his partner’s wife and rejects her when attracted to someone else. But when the partner he has cuckolded is killed he says, ‘When a man’s partner is killed he’s supposed to do something about it.’ Who supposes this? He does.

M is also for morgue (see D for doctor and S for squeamishness).

M is also for motivation, of which there must be one, or several. Along with means, motivation is one of the big three (see O for opportunity) and the chief one is money.

M is also for multiple killings. These are usually the work of individuals (see S for serial killer) but occasionally take the form of massacres. Massacres are on the cards whenever Mexican and South American drug cartels are on the scene. The best exchange at a massacre scene is in Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men (2005) where the deputy says, ‘It’s a mess, ain’t it, Sheriff?’

‘If it ain’t,’ the sheriff replies, ‘it’ll do till a mess gets here.’

The lines were reproduced word for word in the Coen brothers’ 2007 award-winning film of the book, something rarely achieved by novelists.

N is for name. For series characters, names are very important. Arthur Conan Doyle considered ‘Sherrington’ before settling on Sherlock, a wise choice. The names often encode the qualities of the characters. Raymond Chandler gave his detectives various names, including Malory, before settling on Marlowe. A theory that this was the name of one of the houses at the private school Chandler attended was exploded when it was discovered that the house name wasn’t used in his time. (Such is the interest of writers in this matter.) It seems most likely that Marlowe is resonant of Malory and his Morte d’Arthur. The name of Robert B. Parker’s Spenser is a deliberate and poetic evocation of the past. The same goes for Timothy Harris’s character Thomas Kyd in Kyd for Hire (1977) and Goodnight and Good-bye (1979). Kyd was an Elizabethan playwright.

The name Morse suggests codes and clues appropriate to the character; Mike Hammer and Tiger Mann, Mickey Spillane’s characters’ names, need no explanation.

Garry Disher says that he wanted a name with a ‘short whiplash quality’ for his series character Wyatt and that he probably had Wyatt Earp in the back of his mind when he decided on the name.

Michael Connelly and John Lescroart chose unusual first names for their series characters—Hieronymus and Dismas; the first is a fourteenth-century Dutch painter, the second the name given by tradition to the repentant thief on the cross in the biblical legend of the crucifixion. The names permit some amusing exchanges in the books and privilege educated readers—nothing wrong with that.

N is also for noir. A French film critic of the 1940s defined certain Hollywood films as film noir, pointing to the use of dimly lit scenes, shadows, and dark actions and motives. Since then film historians have argued that the style was accidental—an attempt by studios to save money on lighting rather than to add atmosphere. Whatever the truth of this, the term was taken up by later critics and reviewers of both films and books to describe a certain kind of morally ambiguous and dramatically tense story (see H for hard-boiled). This led to ridiculous descriptions, from a literal perspective, of films like the brightly lit Chinatown and books set in the high bright sun such as the Elvis Cole novels of Robert Crais (The Monkey’s Raincoat, 1987, and following) as noir. It remained a useful and more or less accurate term for books such as those by Philip Kerr in the gloomy Bernie Gunther series (March Violets, 1989, and following), which are aptly described as ‘Berlin noir’.

‘Tartan noir’ is a term loosely applied but best used to describe crime writing set in Scotland where the characters and the setting share characteristics—bleakness, toughness and harshness. The protagonists are of the anti-hero type—cynical and without illusions—and the social scene is unforgiving.

An early example was the work of William McIlvanney (Remedy is None, 1966, and following). The novels of Ian Rankin, Stuart MacBride and Denise Mina (The Field of Blood, 2005, and following) fit the category better than some other Scots writers like Val McDermid.

N is also for Nordic. After the success of the de facto husband-and-wife writing team Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö with their Swedish police procedurals featuring Martin Beck (Roseanna, 1965, and following), there was a falling away in translation of Scandinavian crime novels, although they continued to be written and to be popular locally.

That changed with the translations into English and popularity of writers like Peter Høeg, Henning Mankell, Anne Holt and others in the 1990s. Since that time there has been an avalanche of ‘Nordics’—from Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland and Iceland. The extraordinary sales of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl trilogy in the 2000s built on the success of earlier writers.

The best survey and appraisal of the Nordic crime-writing scene is Jean Bedford’s ‘The Nordic Phenomenon’ in the Newtown Review of Books, 28 February 2012. There is, she argues, a hunger among progressively inclined readers for stories from a part of the world that, in theory and to a degree in practice, has fairness-to-all social settings.

The exotic climate and geography, too, seem to exercise a fascination for readers, which has provided encouragement and a degree of success to writers basing their stories in Canada and Alaska. It hasn’t worked at the other end of the globe. As far as I’m aware there are no crime novels written and set in Tierra del Fuego.

N is also for nostalgia. Once a crime series is underway the protagonist inevitably expresses nostalgia for a time when he or she was younger and life was simpler. This can provide engaging punctuation points in the narrative and readers enjoy references to places they once enjoyed, music they once listened to, sports stars they once admired. It’s a device that bonds writer and reader.

It isn’t always appreciated that those writers who become tired of their characters, as Arthur Conan Doyle did of Holmes, Chandler did of Marlowe and Fleming did of Bond, generally yearned for the time when the enterprise was fresher. It shows.

O is for OMCG. This acronym for outlaw motorcycle gang is gaining currency in Australia, with governments becoming ever more enthusiastic about limiting the freedoms of the citizenry.

‘Bikers’ (the US term works much better than the Australian ‘bikies’) are usually associated with the manufacture and distribution of mind-altering drugs rather than crimes against persons or property. Increasingly, as with many criminal organisations, their violence tends to be directed principally towards themselves.

Hunter S. Thompson apart, not many writers have chosen to get close enough to motorcycle gangs to write about them. A common attitude is summed up by comedian Roseanne Barr: ‘I hate bikers. They’re dirty, they smell, they have tobacco juice in their beards, they shit by the side of the road—and that’s just the women.’

O is also for omniscience. In effect third-person narrators are omniscient in that they are in possession of all the information and control everything. This contrasts with the first-person style (standard although not universal with private-eye stories) where the action is seen from the point of view of the character/narrator—who only knows so much and must find out more. Certain detectives in what might be called the old school—Holmes, Poirot and Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe, for example—are omniscient in their inherent superiority over the forces they have to contend with. It is significant that they are sexless—attachment to a woman or women would constitute an impermissible weakness.

O is also for opportunity. This is very much needed by a would-be murderer, but in most cases it needs to be contrived or set up. The danger here is in leaving behind evidence of the arrangement. With the opportunity taken and the murder committed, it becomes necessary to cover the tracks. One method is the alibi, but it can be tricky. Alibis can be broken down. Another method is to deflect suspicion onto someone else. This only works if the murderer is considerably smarter than the investigator, which may appear to be the case, but only temporarily.

In the clue-puzzle mystery the opportunity is crucial and must be uncovered. In the weakest examples it can be done by a coincidental meeting or a chance remark. This is shaky ground. In the hard-boiled school, the opportunity may be given, even admitted, by the perpetrator, and the challenge becomes, ‘Prove it.’ Then it turns into a battle of wills and other forces intrude (see V for violence).

O is also for output. Like many authors of Westerns, some crime writers have been notable for the extraordinary number of books they’ve published. Belgian Georges Simenon published over four hundred novels; Agatha Christie about sixty-six, and others, like Erle Stanley Gardner and Leslie Charteris, also have long bibliographies to their credit.

Edgar Wallace produced so many books, dictating them and once publishing eighteen in a single year, that an English newspaper printed a cartoon in which a bookseller offered a volume to a customer saying, ‘Have you read the midday Wallace?’

The biggest producer was British writer John Creasey, who started late, did not live to a great age, and published more than six hundred books. Creasey, who also had an active political life, wrote under a variety of pseudonyms and had a number of serial characters. His books written under the name J.J. Marric are competent police procedurals, while others, like many of the Inspector Roger West books, are superficial and unconvincing. There is no detailed biography of Creasey, and how he was able to write so much remains a mystery.

By contrast, Arthur Conan Doyle, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler produced comparatively few books, but their place in the crime-writing pantheon is secure.

P is for passion (see L for love and S for sex).

P is also for pastiche. Pastiches of popular crime stories have often been written, with the most notable source being the work of Arthur Conan Doyle. A recent count listed close to a hundred Sherlock Holmes pastiches, parodies and imitations, of which one of the earliest and possibly the best was Nicholas Meyer’s The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1974).

Pastiches have been written of the work of Rex Stout, Agatha Christie and other leading lights. To mark the centenary of his birth, the estate of Raymond Chandler commissioned Robert B. Parker to write a continuation of ‘The Poodle Springs Story’, which Chandler had left unfinished at his death. This was published in 1989 as Poodle Springs. In 1991, also with the estate’s approval, Parker published Perchance to Dream, a sequel to The Big Sleep.

P is also for perpetrator. Arch-villains like Arthur Conan Doyle’s Professor Moriarty, Sax Rohmer’s Dr Fu Manchu and Ed McBain’s Deaf Man (see P for police procedural), are long out of fashion. The lone serial killer is probably the most favoured subject of all in contemporary crime fiction (see S for serial killer).

Perpetrators can be male or female, black, white or Asian or a mix of any of these. A skilful writer can enlist the reader’s sympathy for a perpetrator, as when young Vito Corleone kills the Mafia street boss in The Godfather, but only up to a point. Perps can be rich or poor but, as Sophie Tucker famously observed of personal circumstances, ‘rich is better’, which holds true for crime writing.

P is also for photograph. Scene of crime officers (see S for SOCO) take photographs of crime scenes, some of which can be blown up to reveal detail, but that is about the extent of the usefulness of photography in modern crime fiction. The ‘Brownie and bedsheets’ era, where private detectives took photos of actually or spuriously cooperative adulterous couples (see G for gumshoe) is long past. Ever since suspicion was aroused about the photograph of alleged John F. Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald posed with a rifle (was the shadow in the right place?) the potential for doctoring photographs has limited their usefulness as either evidence or accusatory material. With digital photography, any misrepresentation of arms, legs, faces or sexual organs is possible.

P is also for plot. One of the greats of crime fiction, Raymond Chandler, made a pronouncement on this subject that aspiring crime writers should take into account: ‘Scene is more important than plot.’ This is sage advice; many tyros become frustrated and bogged down trying to devise and control complicated plots. Many, perhaps most, crime readers are interested in the elan of the story rather than the twists and turns.

P is also for poison. Once popular as a murder method—the more exotic the better—poison is now little used.

P is also for police procedural, a subset of the genre more or less invented by Ed McBain in his 87th Precinct series (Cop Hater, 1956, and following). These books reproduced facsimiles of documents—reports, mug shots, fingerprints, letters etc.—to represent the nitty-gritty of the materials the cops had to work with. McBain had an engaging set of characters, particularly Steve Carella with his deaf-mute wife, Teddy, and Cotton Hawes, prey to certain weaknesses (though the writing could get sentimental). There was also a potent recurring villain, the Deaf Man.

The term now applies to any book featuring teamed, organised police work as exemplified by Stuart MacBride, Ruth Rendell, Reginald Hill and Barry Maitland. R.D. Wingfield’s novels about Detective Inspector Jack Frost (Frost at Christmas, 1984, and following) and Ian Rankin’s Rebus novels are not strictly police procedurals because the protagonists typically do not follow procedure.

P is also for politics. Politics and crime intersect in life as well as in fiction, as any newspaper will affirm. Politicians rarely make heroes or favoured characters but they make excellent perpetrators and victims because so many people dislike them and there are so many possible motives for their crimes or victimhood.

Generally speaking, conservative politicians make the best villains because, as the saying goes, ‘reality has a left-wing bias’.

P is also for primal scene. Psychiatrist Geraldine Pederson-Krag theorised that the addictive appeal of mystery fiction relates to the primal scene—the child’s witnessing of or curiosity about sex between the parents. She argued that the child’s observation of the clues—closed doors, nocturnal sounds, clothing disturbances etc., excite the child’s curiosity, which contains strong oedipal elements.

Mystery fiction reactivates this interest, leading to the compulsive reading of crime stories. Whether sound or not, this is an extremely useful theory for crime writers, who are frequently asked to account for the popularity of the genre. The usual answers go to a vicarious thrill from reading about crime and violence and its all-pervading presence in the world. Ho hum. A writer could advance the psychiatric theory and either stop the questioner in his or her tracks or open up an interesting discussion, according to whether the questioner is worth talking to.

P is also for probable cause. A version of this rule exists in many jurisdictions, with varying effects. In general it provides that a law officer must have reasonable grounds to arrest a person, search a person or a person’s property, or have a search or arrest warrant issued in respect of a crime committed or in prospect.

Non-observance of the rule and the difficulty of applying it figure prominently in American crime fiction (see C for courtroom drama).

P is also for profiler. Profilers are often to be found in police procedurals. As with identikit drawings, it is fairly unusual for the profiler’s work to crack the case. Profilers are very passive, mostly to be found at their desks clicking keys. They have, it seems to me, a fairly interesting but very cushy job. Like weather forecasters they are never called to account when they get it wildly wrong.

The compelling exception to this is brilliant, sexually dysfunctional psychologist Dr Tony Hill in the novels of Val McDermid (The Mermaids Singing, 1995, and following).

P is also for pseudonym. Some crime writers adopt pseudonyms to cope with and conceal their enormous outputs, as in the cases of John Creasey, Edgar Wallace and others (see O for output). But sometimes it is done for a variety of other reasons. Alan Yates, for example, wrote as Carter Brown simply because he thought the name sounded better. Gore Vidal produced several crime novels under the name Edgar Box to mark a separation between his popular and literary work. Kenneth Millar wrote under a couple of closely related names before settling on Ross Macdonald. The reason was to avoid confusion with the work of his wife, who was published as Margaret Millar.

The multiplicity of the pseudonyms of Creasey and Wallace are long forgotten, and who now knows that Georgette Heyer also wrote as Stella Martin, or that Martin Cruz Smith also wrote under the name Simon Quinn? Pseudonyms are hard to maintain—crime readers now are well aware that Jack Harvey is Ian Rankin, Barbara Vine is Ruth Rendell and Robert Galbraith is J.K. Rowling.

The writer to most successfully achieve long-term anonymity through the use of a pseudonym was Rodney William Whitaker, an American academic who published best-selling novels like The Eiger Sanction (1972) and The Loo Sanction (1973) as Trevanion. Whitaker also published academic works under his own name and books in other genres under different pseudonyms.

P is also for pulp. The name derives from the poor quality of the paper on which mass-market magazines were printed. Those on better paper, like the Saturday Evening Post or the New Yorker, were known as ‘slicks’ and cost a lot more. The leading American crime writers James Ellroy (until he ran off the rails), Michael Connelly, Harlan Coben, Jeffery Deaver, Dennis Lehane and Elmore Leonard (before he became a parody of himself ) owe much to the pulp writers of the 1930s and 40s.

I take Chandler’s remark that ‘Hammett gave murder back to the people who commit it’ to mean that the pulp writers democratised crime writing. Henceforth murders would be committed and investigated by ordinary people using ordinary language, or people only marginally out of the ordinary experiencing the pressures of everyday life.

The same is true of the Britishers like Rankin, MacBride and others. Crime investigation as the province of the aristocracy and gentry lingers on, though, in the Adam Dalgleish books of P.D. James (Cover Her Face, 1992, and following), and the Inspector Thomas Lynley (who is the Earl of Asherton) books of Elizabeth George (A Great Deliverance, 1988, and following).

Q is for question. Questions are the warp and woof of crime novels. ‘Where were you on the night of …?’ The subject had better have an answer. Private-eye novels, in particular, amount to the detective making house calls and asking questions. The questioner may get truthful answers, untruthful ones or a beating but the questioning will persist. The list of questions is almost infinite—who, why, when, where, how, how much, how often …?

R is for rape. Rape is sometimes, but not always, an accompaniment to serial killings. Semen analysis is high on the list of pathologists’ skills. The rape of a prostitute can sometimes be the subject of jokes by hard-bitten cops, but the rape of a child never. Homosexual rape occurs in prisons and the threat of it—‘You know what happens to smooth-looking guys like you in the joint?’—is often used as a threat to suspects, who mostly cooperate. Who wouldn’t?

R is also for research. Some crime writers carry out extensive research, some do very little. Elmore Leonard took to using professional researchers to take photographs of places and provide descriptions and impressions of them, their transport systems, weather, and so on.

Most writers, I suspect, as I do, research in the way a bird builds its nest—selecting precisely and only what is wanted. Best-selling authors need to produce quickly and regularly, and the last thing writers need is to get bogged down in research. Chandler kept a book about guns on a shelf above the typewriter and found what he wanted without needing to join a pistol-shooting club. Because crime is in the air, on the street and in the media, simply being alive and able to see and hear provides material.

Fiction writers have a great advantage over journalists and non-fiction writers. When an actual place that is otherwise just right for atmosphere and sociology is wrong in some crucial aspect, the solution is simple—use the real stuff, make up the rest and invent a name. This saves a lot of work looking for somewhere else. Ed McBain went further. His city was totally fictional though very detailed. It had the illusion of reality and left him free to model locations on real places and tweak them as he pleased.

R is also for robbery. This is a minor crime in the writer’s lexicon but it often acts as a precursor to the central business, which is murder.

R is also for rule. Many crime writers have suggested rules for the craft, such as Chandler’s celebrated ‘When in doubt have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand’ (see G for gun), which was surely tongue in cheek. Agatha Christie’s tip for the clue-puzzle writer, though never explicitly stated, was her practice of writing the last chapter first.

Elmore Leonard’s ten rules3 are justly celebrated (see W for weather) but writers should also take note of one golfing guru’s overriding tip—‘Ignore all tips.’

S is for security. In the best crime fiction no important characters are secure.

S is also for sentimentality. Literary critics define sentimental writing as that in which the emotion generated is excessive for what is being described or dramatised. It is the besetting sin of American crime writers since the 1950s such as Ed McBain, Robert B. Parker, James Lee Burke and others. The problem seems to be that, having been let off the leash to use violence and obscenity as much as they please, some writers feel a sense of guilt about this freedom and balance it with sentimentality about parents, children, lovers and country. The British and Australian counterbalance of cynicism and disillusion is more appropriate.

S is also for serial killer. Writers outdo each other in devising motivations and methods for serial killers. Probably the most bizarre example occurs in Lee Child’s novel Running Blind, in which several young women are found dead in their own bathtubs, which are filled with green paint. There is no apparent cause of death.

Jack Reacher is dragged in by the FBI to help the investigation. Only a spoilsport would give away the reasons for, and causes of, the deaths. It’s sufficient to say that Child has to be credited with inventing a completely original and very unpleasant mode of exit.

Following the example of the Whitechapel Killer, a twisted hatred of women is a powerful trigger. Such killings give the writer scope to explore subjects like DNA, semen traces, mutilation patterns and to speculate about the enormous spectrum of human sexuality.

A spate of serial killings gives an opportunity for a differently motivated single-focus killer to insert a joker into the pack to deflect attention and investigation from the serial killer.

S is also for series. Whether or not to write a series is not always the writer’s decision. After the success of a first book, publishers often desire a sequel and the writer refuses at his or her peril. Once launched, a series is hard to stop for a variety of reasons. When a potent character has been created, it’s tempting to simply put him or her through the paces again and again. In a sense the books write themselves.

Publisher pressure can be relentless because it’s easier to market a book in a series than a one-off—it takes less thought, which appeals mightily to publicists. The dangers to the writer come if he or she wishes to branch out, to write one-offs, start a new series or, even worse, write in another genre. Type-casting, stamping the writer as ‘the creator of ’, may cripple the ambition.

John D. MacDonald, creator of the colour-coded Travis McGee series (The Deep Blue Good-by, 1964, to The Lonely Silver Rain, 1985, and many others in between) found a way around this. When his publishers gave him grief over a non-McGee novel, he said he’d written one called A Black Border for McGee and would kill the best-selling character off unless the publisher gave the non-McGee effort the full treatment. It was in his safe at home, he said.

MacDonald died and no such manuscript was found. He was bluffing. Travis would have approved.

S is also for sex. A distinction has to be made between sexual language and sexual action. James Ellroy’s books, for example, are awash with four-letter words but even the usually mild sex scenes are few.

Spenser and Susan Silverman fuck a lot but the bedroom door is firmly closed. In fact very few crime writers do R-rated scenes. Most attempt a minimalist approach:

‘Want to?’ she said.

‘Yes,’ I said.

So we did.

That kind of thing.

S is also for SOCO. Scene of crime officers (SOCOs), or crime scene investigators (CSIs), are important minor, atmosphere-providing characters in crime novels. They wear white protective suits and booties, latex gloves and shower caps. They work within an area taped off by the first cops to arrive at the scene and spend a lot of time bent double looking for footprints and cigarette butts. They drop what they find into evidence bags, which, contrary to many writers’ beliefs, are made of paper. Plastic has the capacity to pollute the evidence but it may be used when it is raining, which it usually is in crime scenes in Ireland, Scotland and the north of England.

S is also for Southern Africa. There are a large number of South African crime writers. The only one I’m familiar with is James McClure, whose series about detectives Kramer and Zondi (The Steam Pig, 1971, and following) enjoyed international success in the 1970s.

Rhodesian-born Scots writer Alexander McCall Smith has enjoyed enormous success with a series of novels set in Botswana beginning with The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency (1998, and following). My attempt to read the first book failed; I found it impossibly twee and paternalistic.

S is also for sport. Dick Francis’s racing novels (see H for horses) are the most prominent example of the sports mystery—if horse racing can be considered a sport. Other sports are less suitable; there have been good and less good crime novels centred on golf and tennis, with perhaps the most notable being Martina Navratilova’s Total Zone (1994) and others. The books received a lukewarm reception.

By far the most appropriate sport to provide a context for a crime novel is boxing. Budd Schulberg’s The Harder They Fall (1947) qualifies as a crime novel, with its plot involving deception, exploitation and death. Boxing features in several of Robert B. Parker’s Spenser novels and is a dominant force in the dark and violent world of one of James Ellroy’s best books, The Black Dahlia (1987).

Without actually featuring in the story, boxing is often used as a point of reference in crime fiction to suggest manly character, from Sherlock Holmes in ‘The Sign of the Four’, to Ross Macdonald, where Lew Archer claims to be the nephew of a man who went fifteen rounds to no decision with ‘Gunboat’ Smith, the ‘Great White Hope’ when African-American Jack Johnson held the world heavyweight title (Find a Victim, 1954).

S is also for squeamishness. As noted (see D for death) some investigators exhibit squeamishness at crime scenes and autopsies. Most writers do not, the exception being P.D. James who takes care not to have a witness to a murder be depicted as someone who cannot cope with the event—a child or a parent, for example. James is thus sparing herself, the characters and the reader. She is in this regard more the nurse than the queen of crime.

S is also for story. Crime fiction is mercifully free of the kind of writing that does without story in favour of … who knows what?

The very best of the pulp writers, Jim Thompson, provided a definition that embraces everything from his noir classic, The Killer Inside Me (1952), to Romeo and Juliet. ‘There is only one story,’ Thompson wrote: ‘Things are not what they seem.’

S is also for suicide, which is still a common fate for suspects who turn out to be perpetrators.

S is also for survival. Of stylistic necessity, first-person series characters must survive. The way to handle this is to make the threats to them credible enough for the reader to, in a sense, suspend this knowledge and feel the weight of the threat. Third-person stories about series characters are not hampered in this way and a writer may kill the character off, as Nicolas Freeling did Piet Van der Valk in A Long Silence (1972) and Colin Dexter did Endeavour Morse in The Remorseful Day (1999).

A writer who has killed off or retired a series character might revive him in a retrospective story and get away with it once or twice. Nicholas Freeling, unsuccessfully, tried a version of this with two books about Van der Valk’s wife (see N for nostalgia). Colin Dexter said he wouldn’t do it.

Another method of sustaining a series after a character’s retirement is to bring him back to work on cold cases, as Michael Connelly did with Harry Bosch in The Narrows (2004) and as Ian Rankin did with Rebus in Standing in Another Man’s Grave (2012).

S is also for suspect. Some suspects are merely red herrings but they swim for quite some time before being caught and discarded. Too few suspects and the story can be too thin; too many and it gets cluttered. The red herring suspect is the chief legacy of the old clue-puzzle mystery and the trick is to develop the character or situation just sufficiently, and no more, so that the matter can remain open for a good part of the book.

Variations on the theme include the protagonist (even the first-person narrator) being an apparently credible suspect for a considerable time. Suspects may complicate matters by making confessions—sometimes to deflect attention from someone to be protected or through mental aberration. The disturbed false confessor is common in sexual cases, with offenders eager to proclaim their guilt. They are pretty easily spotted and become part of the sad backdrop in the tableau of modern urban life, as a serious critic might say.

T is for terrorist. Terrorists crop up in crime fiction from time to time—increasingly, these days—but never very usefully. Their inevitable failure and destruction limit their serviceability.

Black Sunday (1975), Thomas Harris’s pre-Hannibal Lecter novel, presented a fresh approach to the terrorist story. A deranged Vietnam vet who flies a television blimp over US sporting events plans to explode a bomb containing a vast number of steel darts over a Super Bowl game. He doesn’t.

After I read it I waited impatiently for his next, Red Dragon, and the rest is history. The film had Bruce Dern, as one critic said, ‘at his unhinged best’ as the nutter. Dern was every bit as good as Anthony Hopkins but, in the nature of things, there was no sequel.

T is also for texting. A modern crime novel without texting would be like Sherlock Holmes without twice-daily mail delivery.

T is also for threat. Without threats there is no story. In a serial killer book (see S for serial killer) the threat is that he or she will kill again. In a kidnap story the threat is that the victim will die. In the police procedural the threat may come from within the police department; superior officers may be stupid, corrupt or both. In the best PI stories the protagonist should be placed under threat of some kind but another threat lies within his or her own character—in the balance between weaknesses (drink, sex, misplaced loyalty) and strengths (courage, persistence, honour). Threats are everywhere in crime fiction, as in life.

T is also for title. Titles are crucially important. The Maltese Pigeon doesn’t work nor does The Long Sleep, not because of the familiarity of the real titles but because the wrong words don’t carry the right resonance. Crime writers choosing titles have a multitude of choices.

Some, like Garry Disher, go for the impact of a single word—most of Disher’s novels in the Wyatt series have one-word titles.

The most common crime fiction title is one starting with the definite article. There are thousands of examples. A very long list of famous titles of this kind begins with Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860). Michael Connelly uses the style throughout his Mickey Haller series from The Lincoln Lawyer (2005) to The Gods of Guilt (2013).

Five words seems the ideal length for a longer title—James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) or James Hadley Chase’s No Orchids for Miss Blandish (1939), for example. Six words, as with The Far Side of the Dollar (1965) seems a touch too long. Ross Macdonald should have dropped the first definite article.

The violent vigilantism of Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer is unambiguously announced in titles like I, the Jury (1947) and My Gun is Quick (1950), while the even more violent intent of Hannibal Lecter is totally masked, indeed deflected, by Thomas Harris’s title The Silence of the Lambs.

As mentioned, John D. MacDonald colour-coded his Travis McGee novels. He said he did this to make it easier for buyers to remember what they’d read and recognise a title as new. Why Sue Grafton chose to alphabetise her titles—A is for Alibi (1982) through to Y is for Yesterday (2017)—and Janet Evanovich to adopt a number code—One for the Money (1994) to Hardcore 24 (2017)—is not clear. If Grafton had wanted to continue the series beyond another book (she died before she could get to Z) she’d have had to think again about titles, but Evanovich won’t.

T is also for tobacco. Holmes, famously, smoked a meerschaum pipe; Sam Spade rolled his own (presumably Bull Durham or something similar) and other Hammett characters smoked Fatimas like their author; Marlowe (like Chandler) smoked a pipe and cigarettes. Poirot did not smoke but his offsider, Captain Arthur Hastings, was a pipe smoker, as was Simenon’s Maigret. Simon Templar smoked because it was the sophisticated thing to do. Mike Hammer smoked Luckies, what else?

Smoking gave writers useful punctuation points in the scene—pauses, distractions, opportunities for reflection. It’s been sorely missed as an aspect of sympathetic characters since the US Surgeon General’s report of 1984. Smoking is now reserved for dubious characters more flawed than the protagonists—women in particular.

Some reformed smokers, like Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch or Lee Child’s Jack Reacher, have stressful moments when they wish they still smoked but they don’t. This is in contrast to recovering alcoholics like James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux, who have similar moments of temptation and succumb.

T is also for torture. Torture is more common in spy and historical novels than in crime fiction but in books involving ruthless organisations such as the Mafia and drug cartels, torture is used to gain information or expose traitors. Seldom, though, is torture there as a sadistic indulgence or a fit punishment.

For most serial killers, dismemberment and display are postmortem. ‘Buffalo Bill’, the serial killer in The Silence of the Lambs, subjects his incarcerated victims to severe mental torture but this is not his object. He wishes to fatten them so that their flayed skins will help him in his transgendered delusion to create a ‘girl suit’. Their physical pain simply does not figure in his calculation and is all the more horrifying for that.

Mutilation occurs, as when fingers or parts thereof are sent to solicit ransoms, but this is not torture per se. Torture takes time and crime fiction is, or should be, fast-paced.

The threat of torture is another matter. A powerful example occurs in Don Winslow’s The Winter of Frankie Machine (2006) when Frankie takes a man out into the desert, strips him naked, and sits in front of him sharpening a knife to a flaying keenness. The guy talks.

T is also for trench coat. The trench coat, usually with the collar turned up and the belt loosely tied, has been de rigueur for private eyes in films, on television, in comics and in illustrations ever since Humphrey Bogart shrugged into one in the film of The Big Sleep. But I cannot think of a book in which a PI wears one.

T is also for trial (see C for courtroom drama).

T is also for true crime. The shelves in bookshops groan under the weight of books about crimes that have actually happened. I cite a selection with which I am familiar. Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966) and Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song (1979) are sometimes designated ‘non-fiction novels’ or ‘creative non-fiction’ but I regard them as true crime books. Also in this category is Robert Lindsey’s The Falcon and the Snowman (1979). True crime shading into memoir is Mikal Gilmore’s account of the crimes and death of his brother Gary, Shot in the Heart (1994). More strictly true crime are Dominick Dunne’s The Two Mrs Grenvilles (1985) and Gerold Frank’s The Boston Strangler (1966).

Ten Rillington Place by Ludovic Kennedy (1961) details the murders committed by John Reginald Christie in the 1940s and 50s in London. Fred and Rose (1995) by Howard Sounes, deals with the multiple killings by Fred and Rose West, one of the victims being a cousin of English writer Martin Amis.

In Australia, Lindsay Simpson and Sandra Harvey wrote a number of widely read true crime books including Brothers in Arms (1989) and The Killer Next Door (1994). John Dale’s Huckstepp: A dangerous life (2000) about Sallie-Anne Huckstepp, prostitute, drug addict, associate of criminal Warren Lanfranchi and murder victim, is a compelling work.

True crime books often provide the basis for film and television treatments.

U is for undercover. Undercover cops occur frequently in crime fiction. They are usefully ambiguous characters treading a fine line between criminality and law enforcement. Quite often they fall over the line to the wrong side, at least for a time. Undercover cops are under intense pressure from both sides of the line and many do not make it to the denouement. If an undercover cop dies early, interesting questions arise—was the death caused by the good guys or the bad guys and does it matter which?

U is also for underworld. This term is now little used. It comes from a time when the criminal classes were thought to be located in ill-favoured parts of big cities such as the East End of London or the Bowery in New York. Now the crooks are to be credibly found everywhere, in Mayfair and on Park Avenue as like as not. Generalised terms like organised crime or the mob (see M for mob) now serve the purpose.

U is also for university. The university or campus mystery has had capable exponents from Dorothy L. Sayers’ Gaudy Night (1935), set in a fictitious Oxford college and featuring her characters Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane, onward. Robert B. Parker’s first Spenser novel, The Godwulf Manuscript (1973), was set in a university and reflected Parker’s years as an academic.

Robert Barnard, another academic who became a successful crime writer, wrote Death of an Old Goat (1974), set in a thinly disguised University of New England, where he had held a teaching position. Don Aitkin, a distinguished academic political scientist, wrote a light mystery novel set in a university, The Second Chair (1977).

The campus mystery provides a ready-made set of characters—academics, administrators, students, and such elements as ambition, career and examination pressures, plagiarism, cheating and sexual misalliances that make a heady brew. Several of Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse novels involved doings in Oxford colleges where these forces come into play.

V is for vicar (see C for Crockford’s Clerical Directory).

V is also for victim. Victims can be drawn from either sex or anything in between and from all walks of life. They are preferably young for sympathy’s sake and, if old, are best depicted as either helpless or rich. Dead criminals are not necessarily victims. Their criminality may have deprived them of that status unless they have some redeeming features, such as a firm, long-standing friendship with an unblemished (or slightly blemished) protagonist.

Victims have to be identified, which allows pathologists, computer freaks and old-time cops (particularly in the case of dead prostitutes) into the act. Victims can be either hidden or ostentatiously displayed, according to the perpetrators’ particular needs. Occasionally a victim may leave a clue to the killer—a bloodied word on a wall, a scrap of clothing clutched in a dead hand—but an efficient killer will clean up properly afterwards.

V is also for violence. In crime fiction, violence has escalated since the time of Sherlock Holmes and the sedate Golden Age. It took on a mindless, fascist character in the work of Mickey Spillane and a psychologically disturbing tone in the pulp novels of Jim Thompson, Cornell Woolrich (The Bride Wore Black, 1940, and others) and other pulp writers like Steve Fisher (I Wake up Screaming, 1941).

Violence is more nuanced in the hard-boiled school of Hammett and Chandler. In the work of the post-Chandlerians and the legions of crime writers now operating, it becomes a metaphor for the state of society, a pointer to personal and institutional corruption.

W is for Washington, DC. Washington is often described as the crime capital of the United States and not only because the government is based there. It is the setting for most of the novels of George Pelecanos (A Firing Offense, 1992, and following).

W is also for water. It’s amazing how many fictional killers persist in drowning people in baths and dumping their bodies in the sea. Child’s play to the pathologist. Such murderers also fail to realise that bodies thrown into the sea, rivers and lakes will rise to the surface unless properly trussed and weighted. They deserve to be caught.

Water is good for showering after a hard day’s investigation and for having sex while doing so. It’s also good for crossing in ferries, and allowing investigators, informants and even perpetrators to have safe conversations.

Some writers specialise in water-borne stories. Anne Perry has the Thames River Police while Travis McGee often takes to the water in his houseboat, The Busted Flush.

There is a good deal of water about in the novels of James Lee Burke, James W. Hall and Carl Hiaasen, in the forms of the Gulf, the bayous and the Florida Everglades. There is also shrimp at cook-outs and po’ boy sandwiches.

W is also for weariness. Investigators are often described as ‘world weary’ and why not, given the number of jobs they’ve undertaken. Maigret is the world-record holder at 76 novels and 28 short stories; Spenser 40 novels; Lew Archer 18 novels and about the same number of short stories; Harry Bosch, 18 novels and counting.

The weariness, of course, is metaphorical for pragmatism and lack of illusion. Investigators are not physically weary when long stake-out hours are required or a man comes through a door with a gun.

W is also for weather. It would be interesting to do a survey, but I doubt if there has ever been a crime novel that does not mention the weather. Like the state of traffic on the roads, fluctuations in the stock market and current news events, the weather provides a useful punctuation point, slowing down the narrative and providing texture while plots thicken and develop.

Weather is even more useful as a signifier of the mood of characters, the physical surrounds to the action, the atmospherics of the story. However, Elmore Leonard’s first rule of writing in his list of ten is: ‘Never open a book with weather’.

W is also for witness (see C for courtroom drama).

X is for xenophobia. Xenophobia was a mainstay of early crime writers like Sax Rohmer (towards the Chinese). Interestingly, xenophobia is two-edged in Sax Rohmer—Fu Manchu plots the elimination of the ‘white race’ while a white character screams at him, ‘You yellow devil.’ We have Sapper’s Bulldog Drummond castigating the Germans, while in the Sherlock Holmes stories lascars are never to be trusted. It’s less common now and writers take care to vary their villains—in the United States if the villains are Vietnamese in one book, they’d better be Cubans in the next; in Britain West Indians/Russians; in Australia Italians/Lebanese, and so on.

Unapproved characters give xenophobia full rein but their aversions are more likely to be directed at other races than nationalities, although everyone despises the Swiss.

Y is for Yeti. So far, to my knowledge, no Yetis have appeared in crime fiction but the range of the genre suggests that it might happen. I seem to remember some books that featured a sasquatch or the fear of the creature, but I retain no other details.

Z is for zeitgeist. The zeitgeist of crime fiction is that a world of violence, hatred and greed can be countered by intelligence, humour and courage, but only partly and temporarily because there are more books to write.

Z is also for Zen. Buddhism figures very little in crime fiction because the word itself suggests peace and harmony, whereas the atmospherics of crime fiction stress violence, hatred and greed.

Australian Colin Talbot’s 1995 mystery novel is entitled The Zen Detective, and of course there is Michael Dibdin’s Italian detective Aurelio Zen (Ratking, 1988, and following).

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1 This is a rare example of sports fan Parker getting things wrong. Strictly speaking, Walcott did not have a twilight. He retired after his second loss to Rocky Marciano in 1951. The television series based on Parker’s book took years and weight off Spenser by having him fight José Torres, a light heavyweight world champion in the 1960s.

2 www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1475/

3 ‘Tips from the Masters’, Gotham Writers, www.writingclasses.com/toolbox/tipsmasters/elmore-leonard-10-rules-for-good-writing.