“There really must be a murder,” wrote detective mystery scholar Howard Haycraft, “or at least a major felony –– otherwise, what’s the point?  Who’s ripping off the hand towels at the Dorchester Hotel is hardly the business of a mystery novel.”   It is a quote about a truth that seems deceptively obvious, but is one I wish I’d read some years ago.  I learned, through the process of writing three pieces, including my second supernatural crime novel The Broken Ones, that a satisfying mystery revolves around twin dark stars, one of which is the crime.

I began writing The Broken Ones in late 2010, after a fairly long haul working on a nascent crime television series.  It was a fortuitous sequence of events.  I wrote my first novel, The Dead Path, almost by the seat of my pants, with only a back-of-brain inkling that I was writing a crime novel with ghosts in it.  But after it was published and I began work as one of the key writers on this crime series, it became increasing clear to me what I’d done and what I was doing: spinning stories around a key event.  In The Dead Path, the crime was the murder of a child that opens a hidden door to a history of nasty killings; in the TV series, the event was a fatal bombing.  Through the course of working in a room with other writers, it became crystal clear how important the crime itself is to the strength of the story. Willard Huntington Wright said it well: “There simply must be a corpse in a detective novel, and the deader the corpse, the better.”

The crime is where criminal, victim, and investigator meet.  It is the catalytic ignition point of the story.  From this point, I began to realise, you have to work backwards and forwards: backwards, to ensure the motivation of the criminal to commit the crime is plausible and strong, and the victim he or she chooses is the right one for the story; and forwards, to see how the investigator or victim reacts to the crime, what he or she does to solve it or flee its consequences, and what the perpetrator does in concert.  Which brings me to the second ‘dark star’ I mentioned about which a story revolves: the protagonist.  Whether he or she is the investigator, the criminal, or the victim, he or she must be interesting.  We don’t have to like him, but we do have to understand him.  We don’t have to think him good (lord forbid, in fact; too much goodness makes for somewhat boring characters), but we do have to think him real.

Real.  And truthful.

And the truth is the prism through which the writer must inspect all the events leading up to the crime, and all the twists and turns that make up the unravelling of that crime that we call ‘the story’.  Every action must be truthful.  Each should be surprising, because that’s why we read fiction and watch television drama and films: to be surprised.  But each must also be true: it must be what the character we’ve chosen to create would truthfully do, not what we the writers would like him to do.  We can’t shoehorn actions in that don’t fit the characters – readers and viewers can smell a lie a mile off.

So, writing The Broken Ones was, for me, a careful to the point of tedious exercise in plotting – and by plotting, I mean inventing Oscar Mariani’s investigation into the murder of a young woman step-by-step, trying to make each step surprising to me (and, hopefully, to the reader) and truthful to Mariani’s character and the rules of the dystopian world I’d created.  For months I worked at a magnetic whiteboard covered in index cards upon which I’d written scene synopses, and which I’d shuffle around, back, forth, into the bin and out again. It was in equal parts fun and frustrating.

And the process reminded me of something an acting teacher taught me a long time ago: “Acting is living truthfully under imaginary circumstances.”

So is writing.

I recently watched an old Inside the Actor’s Studio where James Lipton interviewed Sean Penn.  Penn said that his work ethic revolved around having the “uncommon thought about a common matter”.   Or, seeing the world in a different and surprising way.  And if ever there was a ‘truthful’ actor, Penn is he.  If you are embarking on writing, or stuck in your writing, I highly recommend watching this inspiring clip – the truth, in story and in character, may just set you free.

It's really helped me.  Right now, I'm developing my own crime TV series with the brilliant people at Hoodlum Entertainment, and it is an exhaustive, exhilarating process of checking that a suite of interesting characters is acting truthfully in the light of a terrible crime.  I look forward to surprising you with what that crime is, but there's no surprise that I've taken to heart that there really must be a murder.