Crime Fiction in the Creative Writing Classroom

by Michelle Pretorius

During a recent visiting professor appointment, I had a discussion with the students in my MFA “The Craft of Fiction” class in which we set out to explore the value of popular fiction as a vehicle for change. Most of the students told me that they were either discouraged or told outright by the writing programs they had attended for their undergraduate degrees that speculative writing would not be acceptable for workshop submissions. The expectation of so-called literary writing was explicitly stated, with a high value attached to it by academic institutions. Because of this, and spending years actively avoiding genre writing, most of them seemed hesitant about their ability to write speculative fiction for the class. There were even a few who admitted that reading fantasy as children and young adults was the reason they wanted to become writers, but that they felt that they had lost something, their artistic center as it were, through the years of training to be so-called “good” writers deemed worthy of the name “literature,” as valued by academia. Creative writing as academic subject only saw growth in the late 1960s and early 1970s during turbulent times in which students demanded more relevant coursework (Swander 13), yet it seemed to quickly have created its own elitist ideas about what types of literature were worthy of study. It was in this same MFA class I taught, titled “Genre Writing for Social Activism,” that students became giddy after reading Paolo Bacigalupi’s eco-thriller, The Water Knife, our first novel for the semester. “This is the most fun I’ve ever had reading for a class,” one student exclaimed, a sentiment echoed by the rest of the group. My students were excited. They were eager to jump into discussions not only about the issues raised in the novel concerning climate change, but particularly about the craft elements that went into constructing a novel that is character-driven, has an intricately constructed plot, and handles elements of setting and theme with an expert hand. Isn’t this what we as educators want? To have our students excited about reading and the possibility to affect change with their writing? Isn’t a passion for the subject and relevance in the field something departments with declining enrollment should encourage? And as Crime and Speculative writing is in such demand, aren’t we neglecting our duty towards our students by not introducing and preparing them for the demands of the market?

I had a similar experience to my students when proposing a study in Crime Fiction for my own Ph.D. dissertation. I was met with skepticism as to the academic merit of such work due to its reputation as being formulaic. This formulaic reputation of crime fiction harks back to the mass production of pulp magazines such as Black Mask, as well as the Golden Age of Crime Fiction as exemplified by the clue-puzzle mysteries of Agatha Christie, in which character development took a back seat to plot. Despite these expectations of the earlier works of Crime Fiction, contemporary readers of all genres demand not only plot, but also solid character development, along with layered meaning and great language-level writing. There is also a pervasive presence of crime in many novels with widely accepted literary merit, in example Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Nabokov’s Lolita, and the Nobel-winning Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee. Though the earliest recognizable detective story is commonly acknowledged as Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” featuring proto-detective Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin, themes of detection in literature can be traced as far back as Oedipus, and detection is also a common theme in the works of Defoe and Dickens. Julian Symon’s history of crime fiction, Bloody Murder (1972), is an attempt to assess the literary merit of the genre, and indeed, the conclusion at which he arrives is that the genre cuts across the so-called highbrow and lowbrow evaluations of artistic merit.

Whereas literary fiction is often characterized as character-driven, and genre fiction as plot-driven, the boundaries between the forms are becoming increasingly blurred. Character-driven crime novels, such The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith, have received recognition as works of literature, and character-driven novels have more recently become the norm in the crime fiction genre—consider the three childhood friends, Jimmy, Dave, and Sean, in Mystic River by Dennis Lehane, as well as the connected cast of detectives in Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad series. In the same vein, works of high literature, like Coetzee’s Disgrace, increasingly employ crime as a vehicle to comment on society. The genre also often subverts formulaic expectations by crossing genre boundaries, as in Peter Hoeg’s novel Smilla’s Sense of Snow, which combines crime fiction with a historical perspective, as well as speculative elements, to comment on Danish colonialism in Greenland. According to Jesper Gulddal and Alistair Rolls in their essay on the critical-creative nexus in detective fiction, “the writing of detective fiction always involves a critical positioning in relation to established genre conventions.”. It is exactly this critical positioning that creates an awareness in the creative writing student of the tradition in which their writing will be placed in the literary landscape.

In The Limits of Critique, Rita Felski expounds on the need to understand how literature not only acts as a representation of culture, but how it affects us as readers and how it changes culture. That as a piece of art, literature affects the thoughts of people and the composition of societies. Crime fiction as a genre is ideally positioned to make cultural identity visible to students, through the ideological positions manifested in the tension between societal rules (as manifested by the law) and what qualifies as deviance from those rules. John Dale, in his essay “Crime Fiction” states, “Just as Hammett and Chandler took murder out of the English drawing rooms and dropped it back into the streets, so it is the emerging writer’s job to make crime writing relevant to today.” (127) As an instructor who desires to help students see creative writing as a social process in which they can view themselves as readers and writers who digest the expressions of others and express their own to contribute and influence cultural conversations, I find crime fiction an ideal lens through which to do so.

As John Lutz notes, “An effective private eye short story will have all the qualities of good short fiction, and in addition will feature artistry in foreshadowing, theme and the planting of clues and will involve a chemistry that adds interest and meaning to the conflict between the hero and villain” (175). To this, I want to add that Crime Fiction places particular emphasis on the craft elements of fiction such as character revelation and dialogue, setting and tone, and of course, structure and plot, since each of these elements become crucial clues as to the solving of the crime or mystery. For the purpose of this paper, I’d like to discuss my experience in an undergraduate-level course I teach titled “The Craft of (Crime) Fiction,” and the value of using crime and detective fiction to teach craft to nascent writing students. I placed the Crime part of the class’ title in brackets to emphasize that Craft will take precedence in our approach and that Crime fiction would be the lens through which we focus our discussions. To this end I assigned a craft textbook commonly used in undergrad writing programs, in addition to the crime anthology, A New Omnibus of Crime, edited by Tony Hillerman and Rosemary Herbert, alongside other selected stories from crime and detective greats such as Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle, and the Akashic Noir series. As a guide to the particular requirements and trope expectations of the genre, I also drew from Hallie Ephron’s Writing and Selling Your Mystery Novel: The Complete guide to Mystery, Suspense, & Crime in my weekly discussion themes and lectures.

Some of the students in my class were avid fans of Poe, Christie, and Doyle, and had devoured countless other crime novels, but for the majority this was their first introduction to the genre outside of film or television. In a writing course, it is necessary to expose students not only to the work they will be emulating, but also to an awareness of the tradition of the genre: “To write without any awareness of a tradition you are trying to become part of would be self-defeating” (Addonizio and Laux quoted in Swander 16). To this end, I approached the first half of the class as a hybrid literature and writing class, to introduce them to the development and different sub-genres of crime writing, starting with the first recognizably modern detective story, Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” published in April 1841. Whereas I usually include multiple genres in my creative writing classes, crime fiction often transcends the borders between genres and is therefore an effective vehicle to examine issues, such as race as a social construct, and how they are expressed in creative writing. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is also an ideal starting point for this particular line of enquiry. Whereas there are no people of color in the story, it does present a multicultural society in the city of Paris and, through its origin and expression, concerns itself with a threat to white dominance. Students, after reading the almost 50-page story, often express frustration and dismay at not having access to the clues that point to the ultimate culprit, the escaped Orangutan. A valuable lesson is then learned early on in the class about giving the reader as much information as possible to involve them in the narrative and to avoid twist endings. This is a lesson not only for crime, but for all fiction writing, as it cautions against an information dump early or late in the narrative in favor of a gradual curated reveal of character and plot throughout the narrative.

In our exploration of the genre we move from the three early detective stories of Poe, to the Sherlock Holmes series and into the Golden Age of Crime Fiction as exemplified by Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers. In class, we compare the three great early detectives, Auguste Dupin, Sherlock Holmes, and Hercule Poirot. We examine the influence that each has had on their successor, as well as what innovations the author spearheaded in the form. Then, in Christie’s Miss Marple series, we encounter the first major feminist innovations to arise in the genre, in the form of the first female detective—Miss Marple. A main topic of conversation during class centers on how the actual approach to solving the crime changes with Miss Marple, how empirical knowledge in the male detectives is replaced by Miss Marple’s deep knowledge about her community and the need to protect it. During this first section of the semester, we then also talk about the formulaic expectations of the adventure-detective hybrid as in Holmes, and the clue-puzzle mystery and cozy, as exemplified by Christie.

At this point, the Hillerman and Herbert anthology is introduced, as it presents stories by major crime writers in chronological order to show the natural progression of themes and concerns in crime writing over the past hundred years. The hardboiled genre is discussed as a reaction in the USA to the formulaic writing that dominated in the Golden Age, and this signals a return to realism as exemplified by the writing of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and James Cain, which in turn directly led to the development of Noir—still a major presence in fiction writing across genres today, as it deals with modern man’s struggle with and oppression by pervasive systems of power beyond his control. Thrillers, whodunnits, mysteries, police procedurals, suspense novels, and so on are all sub-genres of the umbrella term “Crime Fiction,” and students learn the particular demands of each and to identify how their own story ideas can be served by the genre demands of each throughout class discussions.

Along with our discussion of the genre, we also take a weekly look at craft elements in the selected craft textbook and how those elements translate to the genre of crime. Most often, students notice how craft elements gain particular importance in crime writing, since all are integral to both conceal and reveal the ultimate unmasking of the guilty party; students also notice how this emphasis can strengthen writing in literary and other genre writing. When looking at openings, students learn the importance of creating a hook: “A good beginning must do many things and do them all at once. It should raise questions, set up character and situation and hook the reader in by suspense, atmosphere, and a promise of things to come” (Dale 127). All narratives need to create some uncertainty—questions posited, secrets hinted at, information suppressed. The questions created by the opening are not only a vital hook that keeps the reader engaged, but create room for the reader to become an active participant in the reading process. After all, the readers find clues in the setting and objects, as well as find meaning in character actions and dialogue. As human nature is central to understanding motive, crime stories utilize the personal and emotional story of the character in conjunction with the external action and must therefore contain both chronic and acute conflict to reveal information. Students have to learn to promise their readers something in the beginning of their stories by supplying them with a mystery, and use craft to keep that reader engaged until the promise is fulfilled at the end of the story and the mystery is solved and guilty party revealed.

As for choosing a protagonist, students have a plethora of choices—the PI, the amateur detective, the police or FBI team, or a number of alternative incarnations of these forms, or they may choose the criminal or victim as a protagonist, as is the case in many Noir narratives. Essentially, the crime story features three main characters: the victim, the detective (or some representation of the law), and the criminal or guilty party. Whichever protagonist they choose in a crime narrative will be an “other” in society. The detective usually stands outside of mainstream society to observe or remark on it; the criminal at first appears to be part of society but is revealed to be a threat to it; and nothing others like being dead, as in the case of the majority of victims in the genre (Kim 1). Students learn to let the facts about their protagonists emerge gradually and only to reveal as much as the reader needs to know in the moment to move the story forward. This revelation of character happens through sensory details, but also through dialogue and often through actions and what is not said. Students learn the art of pacing in character revelation, since every action, every description or piece of dialogue may be a clue for the crime reader, who is already skilled at making connections. They also learn to use internal monologue with their protagonist to heighten doubts and increase tension. When characters are presented in shades of grey, as is the case with good character development on the part of the writer, they are more human, which heightens the story’s suspense, as readers will be uncertain about the outcome of the characters’ choices. At this point I often remind students of the old Creative Writing advice that a story should be surprising, yet convincing. When characters are well developed, their actions have the element of surprise, yet what is revealed about them to the reader should make those actions convincing.

Setting gains particular importance in crime fiction. Golden age detective stories focused on country and rural settings, whereas early detective stories and later hard-boiled narratives gained significance through their treatment of the urban landscape. “Setting,” as John Dale notes, “not only determines atmosphere, mood, characters, plotline, and the nature of the prose, setting is character” (128). Next to the trifecta of victim, criminal, and detective, setting becomes the next most important character in the crime story. This is due in part to the place-based nature of crime: setting can reflect a particular society and what constitutes deviance, and the particular physical features of an environment can provide clues and insights into the circumstances of a crime. Students learn that setting encompasses more than place and can includes the era, speech, mannerisms, values, and customs of a specific time. In Peter Hoeg’s Smilla’s Sense of Snow, for instance, the wintry landscape and the postcolonial relationship between Denmark and Greenland becomes an overarching presence through setting, which in turn plays a big part in solving the mystery. When describing the aspects of a particular setting, students learn to be specific and concrete, while allowing enough room for the reader to make connections and fill in the gaps. I often invoke the “2+2 rule.” My students are mandated to give the 2 + 2, the necessary information for solving the mystery, but to leave the answer for the reader to figure out not only on an overarching plot level, but also in the sentence-level omission or revelation of a character or object. Setting and atmosphere help to create and reinforce this relationship of engagement and concentration between writer and reader.

One of the most important parts of craft that crime fiction offers to teach nascent students of writing is the exploration of structure, plot, suspense, and tension. Structure refers to the overall design of a story, while plot deals with causality, the how and the why of a sequence of events. Detective fiction in its formulaic sense has a built-in structure. A crime is committed, throwing the world out of order, and a detective must follow a series of clues and discoveries to solve the crime and restore that order. There is also a built-in dual-time narrative: the crime is point zero, and the narrative progresses linearly through the detective’s investigation, but those discoveries also move back in time to reveal what happened to the victim. This structure gives a scaffold to beginning writers who may be daunted by the idea of plot. First of all, as is the case with all good fiction, students have to decide what their characters want and the obstacles that would prevent them from attaining those wants. The most common wants in crime fiction are money, sex, power, and revenge, and the plot usually revolves around the obstacles that keep the guilty party from attaining those wants. When characters have to make a decision or interact with others, there should also be an amount of friction created by conflicting desires and uncertainty as to what will happen during this interaction. Even small scenes should have inherent conflict that builds up to make larger scenes that drive the narrative forward.

Students also learn that melodrama should be avoided in favor of original and truthful interaction between characters, which will resonate and in turn evoke an emotional response from the reader. Here, suspense does a lot of the heavy lifting in a plot, as it is tied up with anxiety and therefore superior to surprise, which can come off as cheap if it is not seeded well. Students are already versed in the dissatisfaction readers experience with a surprise ending and therefore know that the beginning and middle of the narrative need to build to a logical conclusion. Although ambiguity is found in real life, most crime fiction demands closure that is not contrived to feel satisfying. All the craft elements of the story therefore gain weight as the narrative draws to a close, each turgid with meaning and revelation. 

Seasoned readers of crime fiction are detail-oriented and are quick to call out inconsistencies or mistakes made by the writer in describing setting, procedure, or the veracity of a situation. Crime fiction, unlike other speculative genres is based in fact and the realities of a society in time; as such, research is an integral part of the crime writing process. Through teaching crime fiction in the creative classroom, I also incorporate research as a fundamental part of the writing process. Students have to do fundamental research to support their story, be it through using library sources to look up facts about forensics, DNA processing, and interrogation techniques, or through doing primary research by interviewing a law-enforcement officer or visiting a specific place and gathering facts about it. Moreover, they learn how to incorporate that research into their writing while still keeping story and character as their main driving force, a skill that transfers to all forms of fiction writing. In the incipient stages of writing their story, students do a short presentation on some integral element that they had to research and share their discoveries with the class, as well as how they will implement these into their plot.

Each class consists of writing exercises meant to explore these craft elements, in addition to scaffolding the development of students’ first complete story. Since much of the creative writing classroom centers on critique and convergence, the groundwork for creative innovation in the genre is laid early on in the course when I give a short lecture on creativity and the importance of divergent principles in coming up with original ideas for fiction. Students then put this into practice through freewrites, which are recorded in a hand-written journal. The first ten minutes of each class is devoted to a creative prompt—a push to generate ideas for creating characters, premises, and unique plots. Students write in their journal with the understanding that, though it forms part of their grade, it will not be subjected to close scrutiny by anyone. They can therefore explore creative possibilities without fear of judgment.

Readings for the class consist of up to two stories for each session, in addition to a weekly chapter of the craft textbook. Discussion of the assigned stories for the day is combined with a discussion of the craft element discussed in the week’s craft reading. I assign weekly informal journals, in which students are tasked to make connections between the readings and their own writing exploration. Then, in class, students discuss their discoveries, first in a small group setting, and then as a whole class. I find small groups of three students extremely effective in allowing even reticent students to partake in discussions and venture opinions without feeling self-conscious, a model that has transitioned effectively to online instruction using Zoom breakout rooms. By allowing small group discussion, students feel more prepared to speak up in the full-class environment and more frequently contribute their opinions about a topic that they may not be all that familiar with yet. The class is then concluded with a writing exercise that puts the craft discussion into practice while scaffolding, over the course of the semester, the creation of the students’ final projects. These writing exercises are completed at home and handed in along with other weekly deliverables.

Scene and character exercises, short writing assignments, and group discussions ultimately culminate in a longer crime story that is workshopped in small groups before being presented first in a small group setting and then to the whole class for a traditional workshop critique. The story is then rewritten using feedback and other revision techniques discussed in class and the textbook, and handed in at the end of the semester. Students are given free reign as to which genre of crime fiction to write their story in, as long as a crime is integral to the narrative. The expectation is that this story incorporates all the craft elements of fiction into a plot-driven narrative with nuanced, three-dimensional characters, an opening hook, and a paced rate of reveal that culminates in a logical and satisfying conclusion.

Ultimately, students learn that a crime narrative pays particular attention to craft elements and needs to effectively incorporate research in addition to doing character, plot, setting, dialogue, conflict, tension, and suspense. That is, the skillful wielding of these elements translates to successful storytelling in literary fiction, as well as other genres. Students also learn that crime fiction is not only critically positioned in relation to established genre conventions, but that it is situated in time and place and is therefore a vehicle for social commentary. The genre, through its mass consumption, has the power to influence readers’ opinion, and students realize that their writing can affect change in the world they inhabit. Crime fiction is therefore not only a worthy subject of academic inquiry, but also a powerful instructional tool in the teaching of creative writing.

Works Cited

Dale, John. “Crime Fiction”. The Handbook of Creative Writing, Ed. Steven Earnshaw, Edinburgh UP, 2007. pp 126-33.

Felski, Rita. The Limits of Critique. U of Chicago P, 2015.

Gulddal, Jesper, and Alistair Rolls. “Detective Fiction and the Critical-creative Nexus”. Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of Discourse, vol 20, 2016. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/309189226_Detective_Fiction_and_the_Critical-Creative_Nexus. Accessed 13 September 2020.

A New Omnibus of Crime. Ed. Tony Hillerman and Rosemary Herbert. Oxford, England: Oxford UP, 2005.

Kim, Julie H., editor. Race and Religion in the Postcolonial British Detective Story. McFarland & Co., 2005.

Lutz, John. “Short and Shamus.” Writing the Private Eye Novel. Ed. Robert J. Randisi. Cincinnati: Writer’s Digest Books, 2002.

Poe, Edgar Allen, and Wilbur S. Scott. "The Murders in the Rue Morgue". Edgar Allan Poe Complete Tales and Poems, Castle Books, 2001, pp.117-40.

Sayers, Dorothy, L. “An Introduction to the Omnibus of Crime”. The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays, Ed. Howard Haycraft, Simon & Schuster, 1976. pp 71–109.

Swander, Mary, Anna Leahy, and Mary Cantrell. “Theories of Creativity and Creative Writing Pedagogy.” The Handbook of Creative Writing, Ed. Steven Earnshaw, Edinburgh UP, 2007. pp 11-23.

Symons, Julian. Bloody Murder. Viking, 1985.