I’m often asked why I choose to write crime fiction. I could flip that back at people and ask them why they read crime fiction? Why spend our creative lives immersed in lies, secrets, and violence when the world already feels uncertain enough? For me, the answer is both simple and complex: crime fiction gives me a way to understand human nature, to hold a mirror to society, and to connect with readers on the deepest emotional level.
The Pull of Crime Stories
There’s something uniquely compelling about crime fiction. At its heart lies a puzzle, a mystery that needs solving. When I write, I am constantly balancing tension and release, weaving together questions, false leads, and revelations that keep both me and my readers turning pages. Crime fiction pushes me to inhabit the darkest corners of the human mind, to imagine what drives someone to cross moral lines, to commit acts most of us would never dare. And yet, in the very act of exploring the darkness, I often find moments of light: resilience, courage, and a profound hunger for justice.
For me, writing crime fiction isn’t about shock value or gore. It’s about storytelling at its most demanding. A crime novel must be carefully plotted, its twists both surprising and inevitable, its characters layered and flawed. Writing in this genre keeps me sharp, every scene has to earn its place, every clue must be planted with care. It’s a constant challenge, and I thrive on that challenge.
I also love how the characters seem to take on a life of their own. I once listened to the great Ian Rankin explaining how his characters had minds of their own and even he, as their creator, was sometimes surprised by how they drove the story. I’ve experienced this myself… let’s just say, I’m as amazed by some of their actions as you the readers are!
Holding a Mirror to Society
But crime fiction isn’t just about the mechanics of a mystery. It is, in many ways, a social commentary. Every crime committed in a story says something about the world in which it happens. Every victim, every suspect, every detective carries with them the imprint of society’s anxieties, injustices, and fears.
When I write, I’m not only asking “Who did it?” I’m also asking, “What does this say about us?” Why do we fear certain crimes more than others? How do power, privilege, and prejudice shape our ideas of guilt and innocence? In my novel Witness, for example, I explore what it means to speak up and be heard, what it means to be a woman and a mother and a partner, and what it costs to stay silent. Those are questions rooted not just in fiction, but in the world we live in every day.
For me, crime fiction becomes a safe space to wrestle with unsafe truths. It allows us to confront fear, betrayal, and injustice in the controlled space of a story, to shine a light on the shadows we might otherwise ignore.
Writing for the Reader
Of course, I don’t write in isolation. Crime fiction is nothing without its readers. One of the reasons I am drawn so powerfully to the genre is the way it pulls readers in as co-creators. When you pick up a crime novel, you are not a passive observer, you become the detective, weighing clues, questioning motives, anticipating twists. This is one of the real challenges for me; how do I make sure my work stands up to scrutiny of people who are fundamentally interested in pulling things to pieces? I hope I achieve it by making people forget that that’s what they like to do, by carrying them along in the story.
I love writing stories that invite readers to play that game with me. I want them to feel the jolt of suspense, the shiver of dread, the deep satisfaction of seeing order restored, or the lingering unease when it isn’t. I still get comments on the end of Between the Lines, and it sometimes makes me wonder if I shouldn’t have left it there, but I like that mystery. If a reader tells me my story kept them awake at night, or made them question everything they thought they knew about a character, then I feel I’ve succeeded.
Ultimately, I write crime fiction because it allows me to explore the human condition in all its complexity, the darkness and the resilience, the secrets and the truths. It grips me as a writer, and I hope it grips my readers just as tightly.
Crime fiction, at its best, isn’t simply about crime. It’s about us.
Comment below on why you like to read crime – is it your favourite genre (like me) or something you dip in and out of?
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