Crime - Truth and Fiction Exercise

My favourite crime show!

My writing centre (QWC) and the talented Meg Vann hosted another amazing writer's workshop - Research for Crime Fiction. This one was made even more special by the setting - The Queensland Police Headquarters, which hosts the Qld Police Museum. What a perfect place to study crime research!

All writers went along with a brief outline of the crime novel they would like to work on. My crime fiction is Warracknabeal Kids: 

In the summer of 1939, a freak fire tore through the Warracknabeal Racetrack, destroying the decrepit clubhouse, but nothing else. This was suspicious enough, as the insurance payout would fund a much needed rebuild. When the town scallywag, 13yr old Harry Conner, finds a dead body in the burnt-out ruins, there's no doubt this is foul play. But the body disappears and no one believes him, not even his father, the local sergeant. Harry is on his own solving this case and he's wondering if it has anything to do with his own mother's disappearance two years ago. Perhaps his father knows more than he's saying. Meanwhile, across Victoria, the state is experiencing the worst bush fires it has ever seen.

My story was inspired by learning the clubhouse really did burn down in 1939 and the circumstances were suspicious (locals said the insurance payout was the most luck that track had ever seen). I decided to add a body and a town full of quirky characters. Real life provides plenty of prompts for murder mysteries, just watch the news or read the papers. But if a real crime inspires you, how can you go about using it for a novel without offending people involved?

One exercise we tried was to mix up events, characters and locations from different eras and crimes. We walked around the Police Museum taking note of the crimes and artifacts that interested us. This is something you could try using online resources for your news articles. Here's the steps we took and my responses:

1. Choose one person (victim, investigator, witness, etc) and record three details about that person: Eileen O'Donnell was one of the first women officers in Queensland, joining the force in 1931. She was good at catching bag snatchers. Women could not make arrests, but mostly did typing or chaperoning male officers when they arrested young women.
2. Choose one setting and record three details (from a different source): A vet surgery was the setting for Brisbane's notorious cat-lady murder. Found inside was the body and blood samples from two people, one belonging to the victim. Smell of ammonia and cat urine. Smooth linoleum floors. Very violent struggle.
3. Choose one incident/event: 1977 string of rapes and murders. Victim found in apartment by boyfriend. He had been at night classes at local TAFE before discovering the body.

The next step is to change any names (people and locations) and mix the elements together for a story idea. This is what I came up with:

   'Step back love, don't want to taint the crime scene.' Officer Robert Hacker put an arm out in front of officer Joyce Malloy, as if protecting her from stepping into traffic. 

   He'd already warned her several times on the way to this scene that it might be brutal and she could wait in the car if her stomach wasn't up to it.

   Joyce let out a 'humph' and stepped around Hacker's arm. She'd been on the force since 31. Her and Louise the first women officers in Queensland. Five years. Hacker had not yet served six months and he was giving her orders. 

   In her time on the force she'd seen robberies, assaults, wife-beatings, but, as she peered into the doorway of the veterinarian's office, she acknowledged she'd never seen anything this bad. Through the stench of feces and urine wafted ammonia, and in crates cats howled for release.

   Joyce stepped over the dead woman's extended arm, taking care not to tread in the glossy dark blood spread across the otherwise dull linoleum. 

   Another one dead. Women in men's professions. This one a vet, the last a lawyer. The knife used to rip the life from the deceased left by the body, just as the report had said about the previous victim.

   'Woah, you're a bit keen there Joyce.' Robert stomped in and for a moment almost lost his balance, slipping in the menacing fluid.

   He looked down, up at Joyce, back down, then threw up over the body.

Think you'll give this a try? It's a worthwhile exercise, you never know what you'll end up with!

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Blame the Environment

What Does Your World Do?

I've come across some more insightful information about settings and worldbuilding that I wanted to share with you. You can see my recent post on settings here: Using Settings Effectively For Fiction.

Do you know why your story unfolds in the setting you've chosen?

• it seemed like a pretty place
• you live there, and you know all the locations
• it's a fantasy so you made it up

Any of those sound familiar? You might choose a setting for your own reasons, but WHY is that setting important for your characters and your story?

My current WIP is a mystery set in 1939 in a remote town of Victoria, called Warracknabeal. My reason for picking this location was because an interesting event occurred in this country town at that time. This sparked my 'what if' thoughts and a story idea formed. 

BUT, I could have easily changed the location to suit my story needs. I could have made the location an inner-city football club, or a Polo-club in England instead of the country town racetrack. Changing the location would change my characters, their motives and the way they interact with their surroundings.

I'm re-doing Holly Lisle's writing course How To Think Sideways and applying the steps to my current murder mystery, The Warracknabeal Kids. In lesson 7, Holly addresses the process of worldbuilding. Simply put, she suggests you can avoid a lot of superfluous writing when doing your pre-writing work in building your background world by asking two questions:

• Does this bit of worldbuilding create a conflict for the story?
• Does this bit of worldbuilding force a primary character to change?

Conflict and change. That's it. These are the elements that will add a good pace and interest to your story. The scenery, weather, culture, etc, it's all has to contribute to the plot.

Sometimes there is an obvious connection. The Book Thief (Markus Zusak) protagonist's family hides a Jewish man in their basement, and the story explores how this both risks and enriches their lives. This is set in Germany during WWII, and without this setting the story would loose the strong tones of fear, defiance and hope it carries so beautifully. 

In the movie Avatar, we see the visual splendour of the alien planet's environment, not to show us pretty landscape but to make a clear binary for the destruction caused by the humans. We are technology, they are nature and the protagonist must choose a lifestyle because you can not infinitely pass between the two, something must force a change. And it does.

An important thing to remember about your story's world, or setting, is that it includes the location, time and history. A location's past contributes to the story.

Great, you know the setting needs to push the story forward but how can you find ways to do that?

James Frey in How to Write a Damn Good Novel suggests once you've made a decision to set your story in a certain time and place, you should do some research to provide ideas for conflict and subplots. For example, while researching Warracknabeal and Australian life in 1939 I came up with a few interesting elements to add to and push the story and subplots:

• The infamous Victorian 'Pyjama Girl' murder was still unsolved, but new information led to newsreels being shown in cinemas. 
• On the 13th January 1939, the 'Black Friday' fires affected approximately three quarters of Victoria.
• Films released in 1939 (I'll have to dig deeper to find when they came to Australia) included; The Wizard of Oz, Gulliver's Travels, Another Thin Man (a mystery) and Gone With the Wind.
• Australia was still recovering from the Great Depression.
• WWII would break out later that year.

Those are just a few points that I can work into my story. This is not just to give the reader a glimpse of country life in 1939, but to create an understanding of the characters, their motivations and their limitations. I like the idea of backdropping my story with the 'Pyjama Girl' investigations and updates, and the experience of the fires would have an impact on residents and may create a lynch-mob attitude to a firebug in their own town.

You could also do up a map of your setting and see what physical barriers and opportunities there are. Google maps is always a helpful tool for that. If you're at the edit stages of your story already, this is a good way to find ways to link the various plots of your story and to revise with setting value in mind.

Old picture of the main street of Warracknabeal

A movie clip I found about the early days of racing in Victoria:

Disappeared Racecourses

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