Writing Whodunits: Why I Prefer the Private Eye

It’s one of those early decisions you have to make when you’re writing crime fiction. Do you want to work with the police or not? I decided early on that I preferred the private eye. That doesn’t just apply to my cosy reads, the STAC Mysteries, but my harder thrillers, The Handshaker and The Deep Secret, too.

I used to joke that I was too lazy to do the research on police procedures, and there is an element of truth in that. You have to get them right or you’ll have readers queuing up to tell you you’re wrong. In fact, the research required with sleuths, amateur or professional, is often just as challenging.

I find I have greater freedom with the plot if I’m using a private eye rather than a cop.

Taking the STAC Mysteries as an example, Joe is the key sleuth, the man with the supreme powers of observation, and the logical mind to wire up the different aspects of the crime. Sheila and Brenda are the support team, the people around him who point out the shortcomings in his deductions, and who are there to support him when the going gets tougher than he anticipates.

In this respect, it’s no different to having a central police officer who drives the investigation, with his 2IC and other junior officers, to support him.

But there are rules to the way police officers just approach an investigation and interrogation. Joe is under no such strictures. He can leap from A-K with bothering about B, C, D, etc. He doesn’t have to wait two or three days for forensic reports to come in. He can dive straight in and begin asking the pertinent questions. He can also come to conclusions which the police might not, very early on. In both The Filey Connection and The I-Spy Murders, for example, Joe decides it is murder long before the police could commit themselves, even had they realised it before him.

But Joe has his restrictions, too. Witnesses are under no obligation to speak to him as they are the police. Carful character construction is needed to get round the problem. In Joe’s case, it’s a mix of badgering, both curmudgeonly and persuasively.

I may be stretching suspension of disbelief with the police acceptance of his “interference”, as it’s often described, but I’m not the first author to do that. In reality the police are no more likely to rely upon Joe than they are a little old lady from St Mary Mead, and even back in the thirties, I doubt that they would have called upon the assistance of a Belgian genius.

And yet the readers accept Joe as they accepted Poirot and Miss Marple, and it’s not because we like to see a private individual put one over on the cops. It’s because the cosy mystery presents a problem that needs brains and observation to solve it, and the readers love to take on that challenge.

Finally, working as I do with a three-cornered MFF combination, allows me to have a lot of fun, usually at Joe’s expense when the two women, his best friends as well as his employees, begin ragging him.

I’m always impressed by the work of the police procedural authors, and I read my fair share of them; works by namesake Peter Robinson, Ann Cleeves, Crooked Cat’s Frances di Plino and Catriona King. But when it comes to producing novels, I’ll stick with my sleuth, thanks.