Crime Fiction Writing Guides
Craft guides on plotting, suspense, dialogue, and character — from Phillip Strang, author of 150+ crime novels. Practical techniques from the writing desk.
The Urban Settings Evolution in Crime Fiction is not simply a matter of geography shifting from country houses to tower blocks — it is a fundamental change in what the city is asked to do on the page. The urban environment has moved from backdrop to protagonist, from atmosphere to mechanism, from postcard...
Remote Settings in Modern Crime Fiction present a particular kind of structural problem that most writers underestimate: isolation is not inherently dramatic. A Scottish moor, an Australian outback station, a Hebridean ferry terminal in January — none of these settings generates tension on their own....
The question of Thriller Settings: International vs Domestic is not a marketing decision dressed up as a creative one — it is a foundational craft choice that determines what kind of pressure your story can generate, what your protagonist knows and does not know, and how much the reader is willing to...
Police Procedural Settings are not backdrop. They are not the decorative layer you apply after the plot is assembled. The setting of a procedural — the precinct, the city, the landscape, the social geography — is doing investigative work of its own, shaping what crimes are plausible, what detectives...
Cosy mystery settings get dismissed by writers who work in darker subgenres, treated as decorative wallpaper rather than structural architecture. That is a mistake, and it costs writers who attempt the form more than they realise. The setting in a cosy mystery is not backdrop — it is the engine of the...
The question of Noir Settings: Urban vs Natural is not simply one of backdrop — it is a question of moral architecture. Where your crime happens shapes what kind of crime it can be, what kind of guilt lingers, and what kind of investigator can survive it. Get the landscape wrong and you do not just have...
The choice between coastal vs inland crime settings is not a matter of scenery preference — it is a structural decision that shapes the psychology of your story from the first page. Where you place a crime determines how your characters move, how isolated they feel, and how much the landscape itself...
The question of Urban vs Rural Crime Fiction Settings is not simply one of backdrop or atmosphere — it is a structural decision that determines how your story moves, how your characters behave under pressure, and what kinds of secrets are even possible. Choose the wrong setting for your story and the...
The question of Australian vs Scottish Crime Settings is not simply about geography — it is about the fundamentally different emotional grammars that each landscape imposes on a crime narrative. One setting gives you vast, indifferent space where isolation is total and rescue is never coming; the other...
The debate around Outback Noir vs Highland Noir is not really about geography. It is about what landscape does to a crime story at the structural level — how the physical world shapes character psychology, investigative logic, and the particular flavour of dread that makes noir distinct from ordinary...
Symbolic Settings in Crime Fiction is not a technique writers apply after the fact, like a coat of paint over finished timber. It is structural. The setting either carries moral and psychological weight from the first scene, or it never earns that weight at all, no matter how many brooding descriptions...
Contrast Settings in Crime Fiction is not a decorative technique. It is structural. When two locations sit in deliberate tension with each other, the friction between them does work that no amount of expository prose can replicate. The question every crime writer should be asking is not where does my...