Writing The Bestselling Crime Novel

The months of October and November were not good months for me healthwise — an almost incurable staph infection followed by sinus surgery. During my many hours of lying around too miserable to work or flat out too high from all the medication, I read a lot of mindless page-turner books. Several were crime novels.

I now have identified the consistent elements that make a crime novel a guaranteed bestseller. The fact that all of the books I read were NY Times Bestsellers speaks volumes about our great American populace (including me).

Hit all the points below and you’ll find yourself a bestselling author.

Make your hero an FBI agent. Your hero has to be with the top law enforcement agency in the country. This is necessary for the inevitable turf war that I’ll expound on later. Suffice it to say that your hero cannot be a rookie deputy sheriff in Sioux City, Iowa.

Also, using the FBI as a backdrop will allow you to give your hero access to all the coolest technology. No one is going to believe that 22-year old deputy sheriff Ezekiel Minyard has access to pilotless drones. (Sorry, ladies, but with the exception of Agent Starling, the hero has to be male. I didn’t make up the pattern; I’m just reporting on it.)

Paradoxically, your hero has to be a superstud both physically and mentally, but is hated by the boss. You’d think that a worker who can solve everything would be well-liked by his superiors, but not so in a good crime novel. In each encounter with the boss, there has to be an argument in which the boss counter-intuitively tries to restrain the hero and make him conform to stifling and ineffectual departmental policy. Do not feel the need to explain how in the world an outright idiot became the boss and the brilliant crime solver has never risen about the rank of agent.

Unfortunately for the hero, he cannot be happily married. Not only must his wife be long gone by the start of your story, your hero has to pathetically pine away for her. He lost her because of all the long grueling hours he puts in catching murderers. She couldn’t take it anymore and she left.

Not only did she leave him, she left the state and moved across the country. The hero’s ex-wife never lives across town; she has to live across the country. This makes the hero even sadder because he never gets to see his one and only child, which they agreed to have even though it was obvious from the beginning that the hero loved his work more than his family.

There has to be a turf war. Once news gets out of the kidnapping/sex-slave abduction/murder in little-known Butte Falls, Oregon, your hero must travel to the crime scene on one of the FBI’s private jets. No Delta Airlines. Somehow the jet is able to land on Butte Falls’ 15 foot runway.  And despite the fact that Butte Falls is only 1 square mile in size, your hero has to take a Bell helicopter from the airport (where the private jet is now in a field because it needed 2985 more feet for a proper landing) to the crime scene. A car simply won’t do.

Once your hero arrives at the crime scene, he must immediately get into a fight with the sheriff. For starters, the sheriff will be pissed because the Bell helicopter will have blown his hat off. Second, no self-respecting sheriff would ever allow the FBI to take over an investigation without throwing all kinds of hell.

It doesn’t matter that a local law enforcement official has NEVER won a fight with the FBI. Your sheriff must act outraged and, quite frankly, surprised that the FBI would take an interest in the death of a federal judge.

There has to be lots and lots of murders. If real life played out like life in a crime novel, the population in the U.S. would be about 1000 people. In your book, the antagonist has to kill entire swaths of the unsuspecting public. No need to explain how your hero is such a great crime solver even though people are dropping like flies.

Before capturing the killer, 63 cops must be killed. During the investigation phase of the book, your hero must hate all state law enforcement officials. He hates them because they’re ignorant and they’re “hicks.” However, inexplicably, when it comes time to capture the killer, which occurs at night in a warehouse in the worst part of a major urban center, all kinds of state and local police will be involved — and they all must die.

Your hero can get shot, a flesh wound maybe, but it’s best to allow him to escape unscathed. Primarily, he needs to avoid serious injury so that he can smirk at his boss once he catches the killer with his highly unorthodox methods. Despite the removal of a prolific murderer from the general public, the boss must excoriate the hero one last time and shout something completely stupid like, “Do you realize how many rules you’ve broken? There’s going to be hell to pay!”

Keep these themes in mind and you can’t miss. When you hit the big time with your novel, please give a shout out to me.

Advertisement