Oh holy land of research

I’m a crime writer, a genre famous for its gritty realism. Raymond Chandler and his important predecessor, Dashiell Hammett, took the crime novel away from Agatha Christie’s country houses – with their butlers and colonels and candlesticks – and thrust it down the mean streets of 30s and 40s America.

That transformation was wholly good for the crime novel and in the Christie vs Chandler wars, I’m Team Chandler all the way.

And yet, though the crime novel was irrevocably changed by Chandler, I’ve been a poor student of his lessons.

None of my crime novels is massively realistic and the most recent, The Deepest Grave, is a modern police procedural that concerns itself with the hunt for Arthurian relics. The book ends – massive spoiler alert – with an actual swordfight.

Chandler would have choked on his lime juice and gin cocktail at that, and at much else. But you know what? I don’t care.

I do believe in methodical research, but I also believe in imagination. In a contest between the two, imagination should always win. Or rather – to phrase the same thing more accurately – the story should always win. The story is the only thing that matters.

So take one obvious problem with the modern crime novel. Here are two simple truths:

1. Modern police services uses a wide range of specialists and a major investigation may well involve dozens of officers across a huge range of job roles.
2. Readers want stories that involve a relatively tight group of investigators. If you started to have a dozen or more significant investigators, readers would lose track, stop caring and stop reading.

How do I solve that problem? In a word: merrily.

I just toss my policing manual out of the window and have my character do what I want her to do

 A well-known crime novelist, who is also a former police officer, once started reading one of my books. Two days after she started, she contacted me. She told me that she loved my writing (and thank you for that, ma’am), but she was unable to read the book because of the gazillion procedural errors I had committed in my first fifty pages.

And – I don’t care. My readers don’t care. Indeed, even most police officers don’t care. I’ve also been told, by police officers, that my books capture the exact flavour of the police service – the rules, the hierarchy, the banter, the awkward shift of a macho culture towards something more twenty-first century in its habits.

And, whether that’s true or not, I STILL DON’T CARE.

I care about just four things: the story, the characters, the characters and the story.

Plausibility

Now, it’s also true that, in caring about my story, I need to care about my readers’ reactions. Suppose I committed some obvious howler in my opening fifty pages – let’s say I arrested a character and held them for seven days without charge. That might be plausible in some parts of the world. In modern Britain, it’s inconceivable. Any crime reader would know that. They’d bridle at the story I was trying to tell.

At the same time, my character operates best and most interestingly alone. Police forces often require officers to work in twos, because then if evidence is acquired, there are two eye-witness reports not one. So one of my constant juggling acts is to find ways to spring Fiona Griffiths away from the rules. Sometimes that’s her own rule-breaking. Sometimes it’s because a superior officer, short of resources, winks at a short-cut he or she expects not to matter too much. Sometimes, it’s simply the force of circumstance.

I need to dance along the line of reader-acceptability and story-intrigue. Both of those things matter, always.

There’s another thing too.

Detail

Detail matters. It’s often the little specks of quartz in a story that give it its dazzle. Some examples:

The custody cell / Strange Death of Fiona Griffiths

Fiona, undercover, is put into a custody cell with a woman who has secrets to spill. I clicked around online to find out what those custody cells looked like and found two intriguing facts.

One, they’ve built horrible little stainless-steel units that have a sink built into the top of the toilet. That means there’s just one appliance to install and one that’s pretty much destruction-proof.

Two, UK rules require custody cells to enjoy natural sunlight, which you might think involves an actual window, except that the Cardiff custody suite has solar tubes bringing sunlight down from the roof into the depths below.

Those weird little facts that gave a feeling of utter realism to those moment in the cells. And not just realism. They brought a kind of dislocated strangeness that was utterly right for the scene.

Oil strikes / The Sons of Adam

Back when I was writing historical fiction, I wrote a story about two brothers who were involved in the oil business. One struck oil in the Middle East, in Persia as it was then known. The other struck oil on Signal Hill in California and then, later, in West Texas.

Those oil strikes weren’t really fictitious. I dug out accounts of the original strikes and kept very close to the actual facts of what happened. Oil strikes aren’t all the same and the real-life details I used – a hollow booming sound, a leak of gas, a dead goat, the violent upthrust of a genuine gusher – gave utter life and plausibility to my story.

I also told readers in my author’s note that I’d kept close to the truth, so readers had a real sense of, yes, this is how it was, this is what an oil strike felt like, back in that golden age of oil-discovery.

Detail, plausibility and the freedom to jump

I’ve talked so far about two big benefits of research – even if, like me, you are not exactly famous for the exactitude of your research.

Keeping within the bounds of plausibility – that matters. The details research can give you – those matter even more.

But I want to add a third ingredient too. The freedom to jump. Quite often, I think writers feel constrained from letting their imaginations rip, because they worry, “What if it’s just not like that? I can’t write about the Battle of the Whatever, because I don’t know if they used spears / slingshots / muskets / spiny molluscs / laser guns. Better just to skirt the issue.”

So – find out about the Battle of the Whatever. Go read a book. You’ll be able to settle the spear / slingshot / musket issue. Better still, you’ll find out that, say, a rainstorm early in the battle caused a lot of problems with wet gunpowder and you might find yourself writing interesting details about how Musketeer Jones was grappling with the problem of how to open a paper-wrapped cartridge without ruining the powder inside. Your research is giving you a springboard into the story. Actively making an entrance, not passively permitting access.

Weirdly, all this remains true if you’re writing SFF.

Andy Weir’s The Martian was a work of pure imagination – but one that depended on intense, brilliant research.

And, OK, he was limited by the chains of near-future science and technology, but suppose you were writing steampunk fiction involving the Battle of the Whatever.

Brilliant! So on the ground you have Musketeer Jones grappling with her paper-wrapped cartridges. And up above, you have two warlocks in a zeppelin, hurling spiny molluscs down from the sky. The minute, detailed realism of the former somehow rubs off on the latter. Your actual historical research is lending a baffling kind of authenticity to your warlock / zeppelin / mollusc combo. Throw in some quick Wikipedia research on spiny molluscs, and bingo! You have a scene set to sizzle, my friend.

(And hey. I just opened up a Wikipedia page on spiny mollusks and whaddaya know. Some species are cannibalistic and can eat through each other’s shells. Your scene just got better again.)

That’s it from me. Summertime calls. I am off to barbecue a mollusc.

What about you? Are you Trappist? Do you love a barbecued mollusc? Why would anyone want to bite a bullet? How can an oil strike kill a goat? Oh my, we have a lot of problems to solve, my friends. Let’s get started.