There is an assumption that the older crime novel was built on, often without quite saying so: that danger lives elsewhere. The murder happens in the alley, or …
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The contract that crime fiction makes with its reader is more explicit than almost any other genre's. It is made on the first page, usually in the first paragra…
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There is a test you can apply to almost any crime novel worth remembering. Remove the location. Change Edinburgh to a generic northern city, swap the Cornish co…
Read More »»There is a question that gets asked of women who write crime fiction, sometimes directly and sometimes in the softer form of a compliment that contains a questi…
The woman on page one of the crime novel is almost always dead.Or if she is not dead, she is missing, which is a form of narrative death — her absence is the va…