The Art of Writing Crime Stories

„Planning Murders with Students“

A seminar on crime fiction? An offer I couldn’t refuse.

Professor Dr. Matthias Kunert invited me to teach students at the Hamm-Lippstadt University of Applied Sciences how to murder, an invitation I was only too happy to accept. But how do you teach students to kill?

It is all too understandable that some of them were clueless at first. After all, the crime genre is tricky. What makes a good crime story anyway? How is a crime story structured? How to begin a crime novel?

As old as the genre has become – Edgar Allan Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue from 1841 is generally considered to be the beginning – it is difficult, especially for novices, to link the elements of the genre in such a way that they result in an exciting story.

At the beginning, I too found it difficult to succeed in a genre in which highly intelligent criminals often meet ingenious detectives, a genre that thrives on coming up with twists and turns that are as surprising as they are plausible for a clever audience.

Over the years, however, I have developed a surefire, playful modus operandi, a system by which crime plots emerge almost effortlessly. And I wanted to introduce this system to students.

Why are crime stories so popular?

They can’t be killed, crime stories. The Agatha Christie remakes Murder on the Orient Express (2017) and Death on the Nile (2022) are testament to the enduring fascination with even the best-known classics of the genre.

I have studied literature on screenwriting in depth over the years and was surprised to find that it barely addresses the basic pattern of the crime genre – even though it appears in places where one would not (at first) suspect it, such as in the mystery-comedy series Wednesday (2022).

So screenwriting literature is missing out something. Because crime fiction is immensely popular due to playing on social taboos and prohibitions, because the world of crime fascinates us as much as it outrages us, also because it negotiates the boundaries of right and wrong, transports us to illustrious settings and draws fascinating milieus.

It was important to me not to present my „schonological“ system for developing crime plots in an overly abstract and theoretical way, but to try it out on a piece of work in the course of the seminar. That gave Matthias Kunert a murderous idea …

Perpetrator: Artificial Intelligence – ChatGPT as crime novelist

He suggested feeding OpenAI’s chatbot with the prompt to develop a crime plot. No sooner said than done. The plot that ChatGPT then wrote had some useful ingredients, but was disappointing in its overall recipe. It simply failed to develop the mystery structure so typical of crime fiction, a structure known as „whodunit“.

Crime fiction as genre literature – important elements of the crime genre

The fact that crime fiction is genre literature is especially helpful for beginners – there are a number of supposed rules and standards that are well known. In this way, the genre functions as a co-author, secretly helping to shape the plot.

So what are the basics of the crime genre?

Classic crime plots are about the mystery question „who has done it?“, hence the term „whodunit“: possible suspects are introduced and possible courses of events until the true crime is revealed in a final twist and the true perpetrator is convicted.

Crime plots are therefore always about the question: What only seems to have happened, what really happened?

The innocent suspects of the crime and the only alleged courses of events are false leads, the famous „red herrings“.

Also important for crime plots: Who knows what when – and how much? Because there are always facts that only the perpetrator can know, this knowledge of the crime is sometimes useful for the conviction – how did you know that, Mrs. Guilty?

Step by step to successful crime writing

The clou of my method is, in short, to mentally separate the chronological chain of events leading up to the crime (the „story“) from the sequence of investigative work (the actual „plot“) – and thus to proceed in reverse order.

First, the questions are answered as to who the victim is, who the perpetrator is and why. Then the chain of events leading up to the crime is worked out – how was the crime planned? Who was where, when, and knew what and how much? How was the crime committed? Did anything go wrong? What traces were left behind? Were there witnesses? What did they witness?

Only in the next step, when the crime has already been committed, is the actual plot developed, as a kind of inversion of the chain of events. The consequences of the last thing that happened, the crime, are usually discovered first, until the detective finds his way back to its (initial) causes.

The plot, in turn, is presented as a chain of standard situations (crime – discovery of the crime – finding or crime scene work – first questioning, etc.). In this way, clue follows clue, suspect follows suspect.

Developing fascinating characters

Since the basic pattern of the genre, the whodunit, develops as a logical puzzle, there is generally less room for character development than in other genres.

What all the characters have in common is that they are assumed to have a possible motive for the crime.

Like the perpetrator (the antagonist), the other suspects should also have something to hide – complicity, another crime, an affair, something shameful, for instance – so that exciting conflicts and surprising resolutions can develop.

But even the victim can still surprise the audience posthumously: By revealing through the investigative work that the well-behaved and respected mayor was pursuing sinister pleasures, for example, or that the alleged felon was hiding a very different, delicate string or even wanted to get out of his criminal business.

For the detective (the protagonist), it is above all her method that characterises her: Is she a professional or an amateur? Is she scientific or street smart? Does she have special skills? Or limitations?

Often someone is placed at the detective’s side, such as Sherlock Holmes‘ faithful companion Dr. Watson. Establishing such a character serves to direct sympathy and identification – by remaining at Watson’s level of knowledge, Holmes‘ powers of deduction seem ingenious, he is always ahead of Watson – and us.

Once a coherent chain of events (story) has been woven and, as it were, turned upside down, arranged as an investigation sequence (plot), this does not mean that the high tension expected by a demanding audience is guaranteed.

Merely committing a gruesome, mysterious crime and then unravelling bit by bit how it happened is simply not gripping enough these days. Contemporary audiences are spoilt, sly and media-savvy; to bore them would be the most reprehensible of sins.

Four means of suspense

Accordingly, I encouraged the students to skilfully use the four means of suspense: mystery, tense, suspense (in a narrower sense) and surprise.

• mysteries pose (logical) riddles to the audience, like the basic structure of the genre itself; it is no coincidence that the genre is teeming with secret messages, codes and symbols, hidden clues and secret passages. 
• tense puts the audience in anticipatory suspense about what will happen – through dangerous situations, fears, hopes, plans, oaths, atmosphere, oracles and omens.
• suspense (in the narrower sense) gives the audience more knowledge than the Dramatis Personae, for example, they learn that characters are unknowingly in danger, so that they would prefer to warn them.
• surprises baffle the audience by revealing that everything is different from what they initially thought.

To increase the suspense immeasurably, I introduced other elements that aspiring crime novelists should use: Deadlines and last-second-rescues, backstory wounds and simply the fact that the perpetrator does not remain inactive in the course of the plot, but rather commits further crimes or even attacks the investigator.

Secrets of a grand finale

If the detective a last-second rescue rushes to the (possible) scene of another gruesome crime to thwart it and if the perpetrator is an entirely different one than expected, the crime plot already leads to a fascinating finale.

It becomes even more fulminant when, in the process, the assumed courses of events are all discarded and abruptly revealed: The clues and indications suggested a completely different course of events than now turns out to be the true one. Everything was different than it seemed at first!

The (serial) criminal always returns to the scene of the crime

Instructing students in the art of murder was an extraordinary pleasure for me. Their feedback and that of Matthias Kunert inspired me to such an extent that I will probably give another lecture on storytelling and dramaturgy in a coming semester. Moreover, I am toying with the idea of writing a kind of practical book „Murder Made Easy“, should I find the time. 

I hope that this brief sketch of the „schonological“ method for developing crime stories has provided you, dear reader, with some useful informaton and inspiration for your own crimes.

Yours sincerely,

Postscript: This blogue article provides an introduction to writing crime stories, and I have since written other useful articles on the subject – namely on innovation in the crime genre and a review of a handbook on writing ‘damn good’ crime stories.