What are the basic elements of a crime investigation story?
I've been delving a lot into the the crime investigation genre, and at first I thought "Simple, just start of with Who, What, Where, When, Why and How and you've got yourself a story!" but I quickly realized it's much more complicated than that.
A crime solving story has Leads, it has Witnesses, it has Clues, it has Unexpected Discoveries... and I'm just lost in a sea of possibilities...
So I've tried to reduce the basic structure of a story to this:
- There is a protagonist who tries to find out the "Who, What, Where, When, Why and How" of the case
- There are Clues which may or may not go somewhere, and must be interpreted by the protagonist to have any meaning.
- There are Witnessess who serve both to bring light to the case or muddle it further.
- There are Misdirections normally due to simple human nature that can cause someone to seem guilty.
- There are Leads which are advancements in the plot as the protagonist makes sense of everything else
- And there are Culprits which are responsible for whatever the protagonist is investigating.
So my question is... am I leaving anything out? Is there some fundamental aspect to an investigation I'm forgetting? Bear in mind I consider Plot Twists to simply be a form of Misdirection.
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Motive. Why did the person do it?
Helpers and Hinderers. People who assist in or impede the investigation. They can range from the detective's partner to evil minions to muckety-mucks on either side. This is apart from witnesses; these are people who can either bring information (clues, evidence) or hide it, who can provide witnesses or remove them, who can create misdirection or clear it up.
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Scanning the boldfaced terms on this page, I have to laugh aloud because it makes me imagine a novel about a crime investigation without a crime! That would be a most intriguing book indeed – and I think I will write it, right after my book without an antagonist.
But to answer your question, the most important thing for me in a crime investigation story are the investigator protagonist and his or her investigation.
Crime investigation fiction is a story of a process and the character and the mind of the person who drives, or is driven, by it. Crime fiction, if done well, is psychological fiction. The crime investigation is a situation into which the protagonist is cast and which serves as some sort of psychological test that will uncover his character.
That is maybe not the traditional way these novels are written. Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple do not actually have much of a character. But it is the way crime investigation fiction is done in tv and movies today. They are no longer about riddles being solved, but about inspectors facing their own inner demons as personified by a crime, or being broken or healed by their lives, of which the police work is merely a part.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/24789. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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