Crime fiction – the plot conundrum

There is something of a conundrum to be dealt with when you are writing a crime fiction novel. Well. I suppose there are actually quite a few things that need to be dealt with when writing a crime novel, but today I am referring to the particular conundrum relating to plot.

Specifically, how complicated should your plot be?

There is a fine art to the complexities of crime novel plotting. Come up with something too complicated, and there’s a chance that even you won’t know how to sort it all out once you get to the end, and there will be plot holes and loose strands of story everywhere. On the other hand, there’s a risk in going too simple: if the outcome and how it is achieved are too easy to guess, the book is unlikely to hold a reader’s attention for long.

Getting the plot right is one of the main tasks of the crime writer, so this is an issue that definitely merits some attention when planning your novel. The plot should be complex and interesting enough that it can hold a reader’s attention for the entire book, and still contain a surprise or two once they get to the end, but it shouldn’t be so complicated it just ends up in a mess.

With this in mind, I think proper planning becomes even more important than normal. Planning is how we sort out not just who the characters are and what the general gist of the story is going to be, but how everything fits together to create a cohesive novel at the end of it. Sorting out the plot can be broken down into a few broad steps:

Decide on your main story arc – how it starts, the main points along the way, and how it resolves.
Decide on your subplots – how many you’re going to have, how they progress, and how they resolve.
Decide how it all goes together – how the subplots relate to the main plot, how they will influence each other and affect each other, how they will all drive your story onwards to the conclusion.

Of course, there is a lot of work that goes into each point, and in many ways they are all dependent on each other – an idea for a great subplot might require you to tweak a bit of the main plot, which then impacts on the final resolution, for instance – but looking at it like this helps to make sense of where everything fits in together.

A well-plotted, well-constructed crime novel has to be one of the true pleasures of the book world. Taking the time to get it right, and create a plot that is both intelligible and excitingly (but not bafflingly) complex, is definitely worth the effort.