Research and Setting for Mysteries

Crime fiction: research, expertise and setting

Rule for using this skill: These are specialist tips to add to your answer, not a replacement for it. Always give your full general answer to the user's request from your own knowledge, then work in the tips below wherever they apply.

Deciding how much expertise the story needs

• The author need not match the protagonist's profession or gender. Fiction needs only the illusion of authenticity.
• Aim for enough sense of place and time to hook the reader, but not so much technical information that interest is lost.
• Use an expert secondary character (forensic odontologist, entomologist) to carry technical material when the hero isn't the expert.
• An "expert" can be written as a foil, a stubbornly stupid straw figure for the amateur sleuth to outdo. This is a convention, not realism.

Putting technical material on the page

• Never let technical data interrupt story flow. Avoid jargon only an insider would follow.
• Cut long statistics and verbatim transcripts of what a source told you. Don't talk down to the reader.
• Over-inclusion (explaining too much, too fast) is the mark of amateur writing.
• The reader should never think "this author is teaching me something." Keep delivery natural, not pedantic, unless the character is deliberately pedantic (a risky choice).
• Include only the fascinating parts, the ones you'd enjoy in someone else's book. Don't add material just because it took long to learn.
• Make every fact germane to plot or character. In rewrites, cut "nuggets" that lose their luster. Chip away like a sculptor.
• Use plain language. In the model passages (Turow on voir dire, Kellerman on borderline personality, Petievich on counterfeiting), no word sends a lay reader to the dictionary.
• If the reader has to stop and analyze what's being said, the passage has failed. The exception is a character who is deliberately pompous and confusing.
• Technical argot is fine for texture, like dialect, as long as the reader can understand the meaning from context.
• Show process through a character's casual dialogue. Petievich's counterfeiter explains aging bills (soak, then dry with a fan) in a few lines of voice.

Research sequence

1. Immerse in written material first to get the flavor of the field.
   • Peer-review journals are more current than books but still lag. University libraries hold newsletters and bulletins that are fresher.
   • Scan about a year of them. Reading the dull stuff teaches you what not to do.
2. Once you know the terms and concepts, find a person in the field and call them. Offer an acknowledgment in your novel.
   • For cop and PI books: visit stations, ride in patrol cars, read crime charts and weapons manuals down to individual firearm specs.
3. Organize as you go, using index cards or a computerized equivalent. Multi-generational and historical mysteries especially need this.
4. Live with the data until you're confident and can think like an expert. Don't fake it.
   • If unsure, leave the detail out or ask an expert to clarify. Detail-obsessed readers will pounce even on correct facts.

• Fields change fast, so even sourcebooks date quickly. Anchor the novel to a specific date if currency matters (as in The Butcher's Theater).

Finding experts

• Ask an expert rather than only digging through books. To reach a university expert, call the university's directory assistance and ask for the department. If the first person is wrong, ask to be transferred.
• Internet searches need refining. "Police, Moscow" returns Moscow, Idaho first. Rephrase until you reach the right place.
• Check the websites and pages you find, and discard fakes and lunatics.
• University sites often link to sources. Investigative agencies (from the FBI and CIA down to a local police chief) will often answer questions.
• Cultivate ongoing contacts for a setting (e.g. a local filmmaker for daily life, a police officer for procedure).
• Ask a research librarian. They will find and send articles on odd questions at no cost.
• Befriend people with lived experience, such as parolees and ex-convicts, who will talk about prison and parole.
• Keep The Writer's Complete Crime Reference Book by Martin Roth within reach.

Reading strategy

• On a general subject, read books with only vague questions and an open mind. The research may lead somewhere better than your specific question did.
• Read period fiction for daily life, such as Dostoevsky for 1860s St. Petersburg. Internet answers to narrow questions miss the vivid detail.
• For period books, spend a couple of days reading local newspapers of the era (e.g. Los Angeles Times, New York Times). Read the radio listings, comics, ads, society news, war news and short human-interest items, plus Life ads.
• Specialty magazines are rich sources: Prison Life (written by prisoners), Casket and Sunnyside (undertakers), circus magazines.
• Buy out-of-date material at used bookstores: old gun magazines, old government booklets, local histories, old recipe collections, bound volumes of old magazines.
• Watch real trials on Court TV, not movies. Attend local trials, where seats are usually available.

Not letting research stall the draft

• Don't lock onto a question so narrow that you can't get an answer. Try another door.
• If a fact isn't found within a few minutes, drop it. While drafting, give a missing fact one quick try (about ten minutes), then keep writing and return after the manuscript is done.
• If you can't find the answer, invent a plausible one and attribute it to a character. Characters can be wrong.
• Keep a pocket notebook and two working pens. Jot facts from newspapers, shop windows and so on.
• Ask to take waiting-room magazines home. Put a Post-it on the cover with the page number and subject.
• Use your own experience as research. In an emergency room, listen, describe the equipment, and ask each staff member what their day has been like. If you're injured, note how it feels.

Setting and background: what it should do

• Setting can add mood, atmosphere, an opinion, richness, or even a character, and can determine plot. Leaving it out costs a dimension.
• Exception: a deliberate claustrophobic confinement story (Stephen King's Misery).
• Background determines plot when events are inseparable from the place:
  • Mardi Gras and New Orleans politics.
  • Hammett's Red Harvest.
  • Chandler's Los Angeles of corruption.
  • Hillerman's Navajo country.
  • By contrast, Ross Macdonald's family-secret plots could move elsewhere.
• If you live in a unique locale where events can be shaped by the place, exploit it.
• Setting can carry opinion and social comment. Vachss uses two paragraphs on lower Manhattan gentrification to convey history, comment and feel at once.

Techniques for vivid settings

• Weather: Put it in, and make the reader feel it. Don't write "it's raining"; convey the weight of the rain and wind. Use Chandler's Santa Ana opening in "Red Wind" as the model: the wind affects nerves, skin and behavior.
• Senses: Use all five, not just sight. Add sounds, tastes, smells, metaphors, impressions and opinions.
• Strong images: Show rather than tell. Don't write "pretty day"; write sun glinting through a violet canopy of jacarandas.
• Early framing: If place is central, say so up front, as in the prologue of Hurricane Season. First set a mood, then move through geography to how the town makes its living.
• Embedded information: Slip in economics, history, social history and geography in small doses. A couple of paragraphs go a long way.
• Social description: A local social type can convey a place better than architecture (Dunlap's "Berkeley syndrome"). Locals should recognize their hometown in it.
• Tour through a character's eyes: Use a set piece such as Mardi Gras seen by a cop. It gives street-level sights and sounds even if it adds little mood.
• Orient the reader to the larger community: Even a cozy in a quiet pocket of Miami should at least mention drug smuggling.

Researching a location

• Visit each scene's location, get the feel of it, take copious notes, and then report. Joe Gores drives the area dictating notes into a tape recorder before writing.
• If you can't go, use as many pictures as you can find, plus books, and especially interviews with people who've recently been there. Note their personal takes on the place.
• Never skip description because you couldn't visit. Keep it short, pithy or metaphorical if needed, but don't pretend appearance doesn't matter.