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 epistolary element in crime fiction serves as both evidence and narrative device, demanding precise execution to maintain credibility while advancing plot. Too many authors treat letters, emails, and documents as convenient exposition dumps rather than authentic pieces of their fictional world that...
The framing device in crime fiction serves as the outer shell that contains and contextualizes your central investigation, yet many authors stumble into using one without understanding its purpose or executing it properly. When a detective recounts a case from twenty years past, when a journalist discovers...
The Orkney Islands demand a specific approach that most crime writers get wrong. They treat these northern Scottish isles as generic isolated settings, missing the deeper current of Norse heritage that should inform every aspect of your story craft.
Across eighteen series and more than 150 novels, I...
Scottish island crime fiction presents a unique challenge: how do you sustain reader interest when your suspect pool is limited to a handful of residents who’ve known each other for decades? The isolation that makes these communities perfect for murder also threatens to make your plot predictable....
Orkney’s wind-battered islands offer crime writers a setting unlike anywhere else—ancient stone circles standing sentinel over modern murder, Viking burial grounds concealing contemporary secrets, and communities so isolated that everyone knows everyone else’s business. The challenge lies...
Highland settings offer crime writers something urban environments cannot: absolute isolation where help is hours away and secrets can remain buried for generations. The question isn’t whether the Scottish Highlands make for compelling crime fiction backdrops, but how to harness their inherent...
The Scottish Highlands present crime writers with a geography that functions as both blessing and curse—endless opportunities for isolation and atmospheric tension, but treacherous territory for authors who mistake scenic description for genuine craft. The landscape demands respect, not tourist brochure...
Highland noir mysteries demand a particular alchemy of atmosphere, character, and place that separates them from standard police procedurals or cozy mysteries. The genre requires writers to harness the isolation, history, and psychological complexity of the Scottish Highlands while maintaining the noir...
Sydney noir demands more than transplanting American hardboiled tropes onto Australian soil. The city’s unique geography, social tensions, and cultural undercurrents require a novelist to dig deeper than surface-level local colour to create authentic urban crime fiction.
Across eighteen series...
New South Wales offers crime writers an unmatched palette of settings, from Sydney’s urban sprawl to the red dirt isolation of the far west. Yet most authors barely scratch the surface of this geographic goldmine, defaulting to familiar city streets when the state’s regional diversity could...
Sydney presents unique challenges for procedural writers that go far beyond dropping in a few harbour views and calling it authentic. The city’s sprawling geography, from the glittering CBD towers to the western suburbs’ industrial heartland, demands careful navigation to avoid the tourist-brochure...
Bondi Beach presents crime writers with a deceptive challenge: how do you transform Australia’s most photographed stretch of sand into authentic criminal territory without falling into tourist brochure territory? The iconography is so embedded in global consciousness that writers often mistake...