How to write a crime fiction guide

A Crime Fiction Guide consists of information about Crime Fiction and the subgenres. Readers will understand more about Crime Fiction and the subgenres after reading the guide.

Crime Fiction consists of various subgenres: Detective Fiction, Whodunnits, Private Investigators, Suspense, Thrillers, Legal Thrillers, Hard-Boiled, and others. Once you are familiar with the various subgenres, you can start writing your Crime Fiction Guide.

When you are ready to write your Crime Fiction Guide, you could select a subgenre and  write down some information you have gathered about that specific subgenre. Then, you could give an example of the subgenre such as a short story or an excerpt in a book you wrote.

You can do this for each of the subgenres that you would like to include in your guide.

After you have written down your information about the different subgenres you chose for your guide, then your next step would be to discuss the different characters in Crime Fiction. This would help readers to recognize the different characters, so they could identify them while they read.

Crime Fiction features a protagonist such as police officers, detectives, amateur detectives, private investigators, or other detectives. The protagonist is normally the main character. However, the villain sometimes tells his story about how he became a villain.

Crime Fiction also has a villain. The villain is the one who has committed the crime, and they have the motive, weapon, and the opportunity. There can also be more than one villain.

Crime Fiction also has suspects. Suspects may or may not have committed the crime. They may have the motive, weapon, or the opportunity to commit the crime, but they don't have all three.

In your Crime Fiction Guide, you might write down information about the types of protagonists, so that readers know more about them. You also might want to go into more detail about the terms motive, weapon, and opportunity.  

The next step in your Crime Fiction Guide you might want to include is settings, especially Locked Room Settings. This type of setting is common in Detective Fiction. 

Locked Room Settings

A locked room setting is where a crime is committed and there doesn't seem to be a way to escape. Things seem impossible, but they aren't because there is always a possible solution to this type of setting.

Several authors used locked room settings in their crime fiction stories. One example was Jacques Futrelle in his story, The Problem of Cell 13. The main character believed he could escape his cell.

Another example of a locked room setting was The Leopold Locked Room by Edward D. Hoch. A crime was committed in a room, and the suspect and the victim were in the room with the door locked, but the suspect didn't shoot the victim.

Authors build suspense in their stories when they use this type of setting. Readers want to keep reading so they can find out how the criminal escaped from the locked room.

Your final step is to put everything together. After you have your pages typed, you might go through and edit your work. You need to make sure you don't have any typing errors, punctuation errors, or grammatical errors. You also want to read over your manuscript and check how it reads. Does it read smoothly? Have you covered everything you wanted to in your guide? Are you satisfied with the final manuscript? If you are, then you might want to have a friend read it so you can receive his or her opinion. You also want to make sure that readers will understand your Crime Fiction Guide.

You might want to get it published if you have enough pages.

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