5 Tips for Writing Authentic Crime and Legal Fiction

Writing about a highly technical topic, like crime or law, can be intimidating. In the world of criminal law, there are innumerable rules, practices and procedures. Criminal lawyers speak their own language. To write a good crime or legal story, a writer needs to have credibility.

Credibility comes from working within the rules of criminal law and speaking the criminal law language. But you don't have to be a cop or lawyer to write about crime or criminal law with authenticity. Here are some tips to get started:

1. Brainstorm: As in any genre, a good story with interesting characters and plot twists must be the starting point. Physically write out brainstorming ideas without regard to order, quality or completeness. Just start writing, and let the ideas flow.

2. Get Inspired: Inspiration often comes from outside sources, often unexpectedly. Read great books, and watch great movies, especially crime and legal drama. Read about crime in the news. Follow interesting trials. Watch true crime stories on television and read true crime books. You never know when some small tidbit will spark a story in you.

3. Outline: Everyone has their own methods of and opinions about outlining. Whether organized by chapter, act, scene, character or plot point, outlining is a critical tool to organize a story. The more complex the story, the more important an outline can be. Outlining can be especially important in a crime novel or legal drama because your story needs to fit within the rules of the criminal law world.

For example, if you want to have a piece of exculpatory evidence discovered at the end of act two, you will have to know what stage of the legal proceedings the case is in to help determine how the evidence could realistically come to light.

4. Educate Yourself: Read up about real criminal law on the internet and in books. Look for information specifically targeted to the non-lawyer. Watch real trials when they are televised. Watch true crime shows. Although they often cut out a lot of detail, especially the procedural stuff, they usually get things right. Read news stories and true crime books. The same warning goes for these sources: they are usually accurate but often leave out details you might want to know.

Do not rely on talking head lawyer commentators on television. They usually speak off the tops of their heads and often get things wrong. They also often have an agenda that they are pushing and speak of things from that point-of-view. Finally, do not rely on other criminal law fiction. Crime fiction in television, movies and books are often completely, eye-rollingly off the mark.

5. Consult an Expert: When in doubt, ask a question. As you brainstorm, outline and draft, keep notes of questions that come up. Consulting an expert, usually a criminal lawyer, can be costly, so try to know what you want guidance on before you contact someone. Also, be sure to speak to someone who is able to explain things simply and clearly, and who is willing to admit when they do not know something.

Following these tips will give a writer confidence to create within the world of criminal law and to begin writing crime and legal stories with authenticity.

By: Blythe J. Leszkay CriminalLawConsulting@gmail.com
Blythe is an experienced and successful criminal attorney and expert consultant with Criminal Law Consulting. She consults with and educates writers and filmmakers about criminal law issues in their projects. She provides simple criminal law information at http://www.CriminalLawConsulting.com.

Crime Writing Beckons

If your cash is running out fast and you have an incessant need to write, why not turn to crime?

No! Not committing crime, but to writing about crime. Crime is all around us, and people want to know about it. Don't believe me? Turn on the five o'clock news, Lifetime TV or USA TV Network. You'll see true crime stories run rampant across television schedules. True crime on television is the number two genre (next to romance). And guess what? Someone has to write those movie scripts--might as well be you.

Many movies are adapted from books. Again, someone has to write those books. It's legal, profitable, and downright intriguing.

You ever wonder, when you're watching the news, "How could she be so stupid?" or "Didn't they know they were living with a maniac?" I do, it's only natural. In fact, I think we feel it could never happen to us.

But, crime can happen to any one of us. That's where true crime writing comes in. It answers the questions in story form.

For instance, we have learned that kids believe 'strangers' are ugly and 'scary-looking'--like monsters. But we know that's not accurate, so we teach our kids that a stranger can be good looking, well educated, and considerate. We can tell them about Ted Bundy (without the violence) and show them a picture if we really want to make the point. Many surviving crime victims often say that the person was so nice; they never suspected he could be capable of such destruction. We know this because we were told a story either in verbal, written, or picture form.

If true crime writing interests you, begin by searching local newspapers for stories. Don't search across the country, unless you are independently wealthy! Anytime you see an article that looks interesting, clip it and put it in your 'true crime clippings' file. If there are more articles about the same crime, then you know it is intriguing enough to warrant your attention. Still... it does not mean it is enough for an entire book. To discover the answer to that question will take research.

Do you have a fascinating criminal? Is the crime random, or was the victim chosen for a reason? Is the place of action special (was it at Disneyland, for instance)? Can you write about a totally different lifestyle than what we know? Is the criminal a member of MENSA? Is she dressed up as a clown when she commits her crimes? Is the victim the first woman space rocket engineer? Perhaps the victim is a deaf child. All of these facts increase the story's public interest and can take us into a world we have never been in before.

Are there subplots in the crime (not only did he murder his best friend, he also barged into his friend's family life and became like another son, then he robbed them one night, and then...). These questions will help you decide if you have a story worth considering?

True crime writing is lucrative and actually a challenging kind of fun. It is about combining journalism with novel writing. Nonfiction with fiction. If you have what it takes -- determination, time, and a strong stomach -- you can take up this as a career and soar.

'Popular Crime,' Where Good Writing Transcends Genre

Bill James has written a true-crime book, Popular Crime: Reflections on the Celebration of Violence, and you will probably enjoy it if 1) you've enjoyed James's other work; 2) if you've never heard of James, but like the true-crime genre; or 3) if you've never heard of James and you have historically avoided the true-crime genre because so much of the writing therein is so very terrible.

James (who discussed Popular Crime on Weekend Edition in May) is best known as the father of sabermetrics, a school of statistical analysis (for lack of a better term) that attempts to answer questions about baseball using objective data — questions like "Who was really 'better,' Willie Mays or Mickey Mantle?" and "What is the worst MVP selection of all time?" If you don't care for either arithmetic or baseball, you may not find the idea of a master of both those topics discussing the Lindbergh case very appealing, but James isn't the father of sabermetrics because he came up with innovative ways to gauge and discuss performance on the diamond. He did do that, but to a certain extent, thanks to the advent of personal computing at the time he began publishing his annual Baseball Abstracts, and to the work of others in the same field, sabermetrics' time had come.

James's particular gift, the aspect of his work that's in large part responsible for his "father" status, is his writing — specifically, that it's very good.

 

Very good writing is a rarity, period, but it's a particularly endangered species in baseball books and true crime, genres in which I read voraciously, and the Venn overlap between the two subjects is usually (with the exception of the Black Sox) bad writing. Crappy, strained prose gathers on both baseball bios and serial-killer compendia like cat hair on a black pantleg: overwrought descriptions, flabby entendres, egregious agenda-pushing, abuse of innocent synonyms for "heroic."

James doesn't indulge in the "behold the poetry of our national game" flatulence that many baseball readers have come to accept as an unwelcome given; he's direct, conversational, and able to crack a joke or turn a flavorful phrase without excessive folksiness. He translates the left-brain workings of his formulae for right-brain fans like me who have an easier time following a narrative arc than an algorithm. His essay about the 1985 postseason does contain a fair amount of arithmetic, but it's used in the service of the story, and it's a story itself as well.

James, currently a consultant for the Boston Red Sox, doesn't apply calculus to the famous American crime stories of the last two centuries (although I'd have read an attempt to do so with interest). He just writes about various famous cases in his characteristic frank way, with the occasional elegant turn of phrase that feels almost like an afterthought. Here's James's sketch of 1849 murder victim Dr. George Parkman:

He was a tall, thin man who walked bent forward at the waist with quick, energetic strides, his long nose, long chin and prominent Adam's apply poking forward like a trident, wearing the top hat and tails that were his generation's best effort at dignity.

One sentence gives you a dimensional sketch of a man, and of his time — no bloviating on Victorian values, no self-seriousness. Later, in the context of the Sacco/Venzetti case, James notes of the contemporary divide between haves and have-nots that "Mine owners made huge fortunes enabling them to make showy displays of wealth, while miners lived like rodents," a deceptively simple phrasing that contains all the necessary information. He describes a notorious attorney as "usually divorced," a wonderful term for the Larry Kings of the world, and refers to Lyle and Erik Menendez as "twerps." Such an unserious word for men who murdered their parents for money, and yet, once it's pointed out, you can't help but acknowledge the evident and deep reserves of twerpishness in that family, particularly in Lyle.

James writes an excellent, brisk passage dismissing the idea that the assassination of JFK kicked off the capital-S Sixties as we know them; I don't know that I agree with the alternative he proposes, but that he even raised it got my attention. I definitely don't agree with his conclusions about Lizzie Borden, or his contention that "Michael Jackson was never at any point in his life one of the 100 most famous people in the world."

You may agree with his work in those areas, but then find his take on Lindbergh, or Bambi Bembenek, or Bundy absurd. You may think his proposal for a radical overhaul of the U.S. corrections system is brilliant, or unworkable, or an excuse to do some off-putting complaining about liberals; you may think all three things about it, as I did. What you will not think is that it's boring, or that a proofreader needs to give her paycheck back. Popular Crime does what James has historically done so well in his baseball writing — it asks questions that seem to have no answers, and tries to answer them anyway, as clearly as possible.

I've heard James mention that he began the project — more than 20 years ago — because he too reads true-crime books voraciously, and saw no reason why he couldn't write one himself, an unsucky one. The result is a fascinating read that also recommends (or doesn't) other titles in the genre, and isn't afraid to snark on the writing. James's takedown of Mark Pettit's overview of the John Joubert case, A Time To Kill:

Pettit's book is OK, short and to the point, although it is punctuated with regrettable sentences such as "The teenager gasped at the red-hot streamer of pain that lanced through his body" ... John Joubert was executed in Nebraska in 1996. Pettit's editor is still at large.

Heh.

Best of all, James defends those of us who care deeply about true crime — or baseball, or coin-collecting, or Madonna, or any other subject that's deemed fluffy or "pop," and is therefore not held to the intellectual or craftsmanship standard of something like literary fiction. And he does it with typical concision: "[P]eople have a legitimate need to enjoy their lives. To pursue the things that make life enjoyable is not un-serious."

This is what I like about James's writing and his approach to it. He takes his work and his subjects seriously, but he doesn't take himself seriously. He says what he thinks, and sends you on your way — to a local bookshop to buy Popular Crime, I hope, because it's well-written, thought-provoking, and ungory.

Sarah D. Bunting writes about baseball, Bembenek, and twerps at TomatoNation.com.

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What have we got here then? The mystery of Irish crime writing

The Irish Times - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 JOHN CONNOLLY

DESPITE THE prevalence of a certain type of Golden Age-indebted crime fiction, largely British in origin, that uses rural landscapes as its backdrop, crime fiction functions best in urban settings. It was GK Chesterton who commented that crime fiction was unique in expressing “some sense of the poetry of modern (which is to say urban) life”.

For Chesterton, the city functioned as a text that required interpretation, a mystery in itself: “There is no stone in the street and no brick in the wall that is not actually a deliberate symbol – a message from some man, as much as it were a telegram or postcard. The narrowest street possesses, in every crook and twist of its intention, the soul of the man who built it, perhaps long in the grave.” ( A Defence of Detective Stories , published in The Defendant , 1901).

For Chesterton, crime fiction is inextricable from, and actively concerned with, city life. It requires not only its architectural complexity and historical layering, but the energy that derives from the random collisions of people, the endless social interactions between both strangers and acquaintances.

Even the village settings of Agatha Christie’s novels (the “Mayhem Parva school” of writing, as Colin Watson termed it in Snobbery With Violence (1971), his critical history of the genre) require an enormous degree of interconnectedness between individuals for the plots to function. Christie’s villages are less microcosms and more enclosed spaces into which too many traumatised people have been crammed, like survivors of some dreadful natural disaster.

Irish society, which was primarily rural by nature, was unlikely to accommodate the conventions of contemporary crime fiction without a struggle, despite its fascination with the secrets and foibles of others, itself the subject of the Brinsley MacNamara book, The Valley of the Squinting Windows , the hostile reaction to which led its author to leave his home county of Westmeath and not return.

In a sense, John B Keane’s play The Field (1965) is an example of the form that an Irish rural crime story might take, a study in which the core question is less “who?” than “why?”, where the central mystery is the connection of a people to a landscape, so that land becomes not merely a convenient stage upon which to play out the drama but a thing inseparable from the nature of the protagonists.

Something of our national inferiority complex may well have played a part here too. Perhaps readers simply did not view Ireland as “interesting” or “kinetic” enough to comfortably accommodate the drama of crime fiction, however sedate the form. (A similar outlook bedevilled the development of our native film industry for many years, and it remains a battle to get Irish filmgoers to support home-grown product.)

In this, we have a certain amount in common with Australia, another country that struggled to establish its own cultural identity in the aftermath of direct British rule, and suffered from a similar crisis of confidence as a consequence. It, too, now boasts a burgeoning homegrown crime tradition, and Australian crime authors, including Peter Temple and Michael Robotham, have begun to attract a readership beyond their own shores.

“HEY JOHNNY, WHAT ARE YOU REBELLING AGAINST? WHAT HAVE YOU GOT?” 

The Golden Age of crime fiction, generally taken as the period between the two world wars, produced two very different traditions: the British tradition, often referred to, somewhat unfairly, as “cosy”, and the American, referred to, somewhat less unfairly, as “hard-boiled”. Each springs from a very distinct process of engagement with the concept of law and order and the perceived nature of society. The British tradition is motivated primarily by a trust in the Establishment; a belief that the propensity for criminal behaviour is a part of the human character but also, if acted upon, an aberration; and a desire for order as much as, if not more than, the rule of law, for the two are, of course, not the same. While there is an affection for the amateur eccentric as detective (Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, Dorothy L Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey), such figures are only superficially outsiders while remaining essentially Establishment to their core.

They may occasionally show up the police as well-meaning bumblers, but at heart they maintain a faith in those responsible for protecting society and enforcing the law. In the end, the criminal is handed over the tender care of the police in the certainty that justice, having prevailed, will now be seen to be done in a court of law.

The American tradition has no such faith. It’s no coincidence that the spiritual home of the hard-boiled crime novel is California, a state mired in corruption during the period under discussion. With the police regarded, not without justification, as being bought and paid for by the wealthy and the privileged, the poor and the vulnerable had no recourse to the law in the event that they were victimised further.

In that case they required someone standing outside the established forces of law and order to act on their behalf, and so begins the private eye novel. Actually the figure of the private eye is, in turn, indebted to the lone cowboy of the western tradition, facing down oppressors because to do otherwise would make him complicit in their crimes.

The point at which those two traditions finally begin to blend into each other is probably the publication of Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest (1929), which is essentially a western in nice suits, although Hammett had earlier dabbled in the western with the neo-noir story Corkscrew (1925).

In Red Harvest , two rival gangs are set against each other by a lone, anonymous operative, until eventually they eliminate themselves. Red Harvest subsequently became one of the sources of inspiration for Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (1961), along with Hammett’s later novel The Glass Key (1931), which in turn influenced the Coen Brothers’ 1990 gangster movie Miller’s Crossin g, Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars (1964), and Walter Hill’s Last Man Standing (1996), so Red Harvest has variously taken cinematic form as a samurai movie, a western, and a gangster film. While police procedurals have since found purchase in the American tradition, most memorably in the form of Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct series, albeit with something of the tolerance for the maverick that is a part of the private eye tradition, the private eye novel has struggled to make a successful case for itself in the UK.

While that may be due, to some degree, to the sense that gun-toting PIs don’t travel well across the Atlantic, I would suggest that it is also a consequence of a deeply held belief that the pursuit of justice is one best entrusted to the police, and an absence of the frontier spirit of the United States that places such a premium on independence and individual action.

That belief may be shaken by reports of real life police corruption, brutality, and incompetence, but it seems such revelations may simply cause readers to turn to the more idealised police officers of crime fiction with renewed vigour.

After all, crime fiction is less about the world as it is than the world as it should be. As William Gaddis wrote in his novel JR (1976): “Justice? – you get justice in the next world, in this world, you have the law.”

Crime fiction refuses to accept that this should be the case, and in doing so it reflects the desire of its readers for a more just society. Even at its darkest it is, essentially, hopeful by nature.

All of which brings us back to Ireland, and the question of which of these two opposing outlooks might best have suited an Irish crime novel. The answer, I think, is neither: the Irish police had yet to establish themselves in the mind of the populace, and after centuries of British rule our faith in the Establishment and its values was minimal.

If we accept the view that crime fiction is not merely engaged with the society from which it comes but is representative of it, then the nascent Irish Republic – secretive, defensive, intensely parochial, and unforgiving of its critics – gave Irish crime fiction little with which to work.

John Banville’s 21st-century crime novels, written under the pseudonym Benjamin Black, tackle the bleak Ireland of the 1950s but are informed by revelations that have only recently been formally examined: the cruelty of the Magdalene laundries and the collusion between Church and State that allowed the systematic physical and sexual abuse of children and young women to continue for decades. Such novels would have been difficult to write as contemporary fiction, and impossible to publish.

John Connolly is the author of the Charlie Parker series of mystery novels.

This is an extract from Down These Green Streets: Irish Crime Writing in the 21st Century, edited by Declan Burke, published by Liberties Press

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