When writing crime, it pays to do your
homework
Lee Weeks
There are some stages in novel writing that
are a teeny bit exasperating, frustrating, laborious even! But research isn’t
one of them. It’s the fun part – maybe because most crime writers are nosy by
default; we love getting deep down and dirty in the sediment of things. I was
lucky enough to have a nose around one of the Murder squads operating today. I
got a foot in the door because my dad was a copper. For most of my childhood he
was a detective. He told me:
‘You have to be a good listener to be a
good detective. You have to listen to the things people don’t say as well as
the things they do.’
Inside MIT11, I was shown around each
department and met the officers and civilian staff who worked in it. I drew diagrams of the layout, jotted down
anything that caught my eye and did a lot of listening.
It’s an extra challenge getting a police
procedural right because Crime readers are experts on every aspect. You just
have to keep up because if you don’t know how to use a smart phone, then you
can’t give your cop one. Police work is always changing, adapting to modern
crime. The intelligence department has now become a massive part of a murder
enquiry team: facebook, mobile phone data, twitter and so on. The Cyber world is
impregnated with a seemingly infinite amount of clues for a detective to sift
through.
I still use reference books of course, I
have several forensic and police procedural books to call on, as well as books
on firearms, on serial killers and how to defend yourself against a man armed
with a machete! I have a folder on my PC of useful articles I have downloaded
from the Internet. I keep a lever arch file for each book I do. When I
download an article I print it straight off and file it there. It’s still
always better to have a hard copy to flick through now and again and make sure
you haven’t missed anything.
Looking through the file now, at the end of
writing Dead of Winter, it has become
fat with articles on subjects as diverse as growing orchids to intensive care nursing
of a coma patient.
Researching locations has become a breeze
with programs like Google Earth. When I’m choosing locations, I do as much
research online as I can before I actually go to an area to have a look for
myself. Just make sure you choose a prime location that you know well. If I
want to have my murderer dump a body in the Thames I’d better make sure I know
tide times and ferry schedules and accessible slipways because one of my
readers will definitely know all that information and more. The internet can
give me those facts, but it can’t tell me if the slipway’s downwind from a fish
market on certain days or who comes every day to feed the pigeons. There’s no
substitute for going there.
I don’t know anyone who can do without the
internet now. It’s an invaluable
time-saving tool and has transformed reader and writer alike into instant
experts. In the end, meticulous research is always worth it because then you don’t
have to waste your imagination on the factual stuff, you can let it loose on
the rest. Apply the Iceberg theory and know that for every piece of information
visible above the surface, seven-eighths of the story is still below the
surface.
Never be afraid to ask an expert but find
out as much as you can by yourself before you do so, so that you don’t waste
their time. Meet them armed with as much basic knowledge of their job as
possible and so free them up to be able to talk past the humdrum and get to the
nitty-gritty. People will nearly always be really happy to help you. They like
to be thanked in the acknowledgements and to know they had a small hand in
making your book great.
See
how Lee’s research is brought to life in the gritty new crime thriller, Dead of Winter
