How to Start Your Crime Story. Or Not. by KM Rockwood

Grab your readers right away. Start with the action. A body needs to show up in the first chapter (or even the first page.)

All good rules for writing crime fiction.

I’m always tempted to start with an information dump. After all, the readers need background for the characters and the story, right? But—if it’s all ho-hum details and no action, nobody’s going to read far enough to engage with the characters anyhow. So important background needs to be included in short spurts which should also serve another function, preferably advancing the plot.

So while my first draft is usually info-dump heavy, one of my goals on the next go-round is to extract the essential information and disperse it throughout the story.

“In the car on the way to the action” is another trap I tend to fall into. What better than to have a dialogue between characters that sets up the story and demonstrates participant’s traits? I suppose it may work for some skilled authors, but in my writing, it comes across as stilted and awkward. By this point, I recognize the problem, and either start over again or, if the beginning has got the story going, treat it like an info dump and go back to fix it on the second draft. Firmly park the car and disperse the important details.

Akin to that is describing a character’s physical appearance by having them look in the mirror. Since I tend in the direction of not enough physical description, rather than too much, that’s never been a problem for me.

Skip any mood-setting description. It may be intended to set the scene and the tone, but nobody besides Snoopy thinks it’s a great idea to start with “It was a dark and stormy night.”

The unnamed or mysterious narrator, observing from afar, can feel chilling and create tension, but unless it’s in the hands of an exceptionally talented author, it often ends up feeling like a cheap trick. Readers aren’t usually fond of ethereal, nameless characters. Sometimes, though, I’ll come to the end of an intriguing story and realize I still don’t know the main character’s name. It’s always been a story in first person point of view where I find myself identifying so closely with the character I don’t need a name. It’s just “me.”

Then there’s the popular TV meme of the scene of the murder. Usually outside with crime scene tape delineating the area, emergency

vehicles scattered around, often with their flashing lights (but the sirens muted—otherwise how could the audience hear the dialogue?) and official personnel scurrying around with clipboards, evidence containers, and body bags. Our main character is being brought up to speed by others on the scene. Works much better visually than on paper.

Prologues can feel like an awkward attempt to set up a story. They can be abrupt and distancing. Most editors these days seem to feel they should be avoided.

Maybe, though, rules like this are made to be broken.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson, opens with a cryptic gift of a pressed flower. It immediately signals an intriguing long-ago mystery before the actual story begins.

Never start with a dream. It can frustrate readers and make them feel cheated when they realize that a dramatic scene in which they have invested their attention is not real, even within the context of a fictional story.

Yet many would say that Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, which starts with "Last night, I dreamt I went to Manderley again,” is a perfect start to her story. Note, though, that there’s no attempt to entrap the reader by pretending it’s anything but a dream.

The “fake action” scene is similar to this. An exciting beginning which turns out to be a movie or a video game. I can’t think of any examples that “work” for me.

Philosophical openings don’t work for most of us, although some writers with serious depth to their works can carry then off.

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”

That famous start to Charles Dickens’ The Tale of Two Cities also breaks “any more than thirty word in a single sentence and the reader’s mind will check out” rule of thumb.

How do you like the starts to crime stories, both the ones you write and the ones you read?