In any crime novel, the killer should be hidden in plain sight, to get into the reader's head — according to bestselling crime writer Mark Billingham, author of Sleepyhead and the popular Tom Thorne detective series.
"I just really hate those books where there's a killer and suddenly in Chapter 43 he suddenly appears from out of a closet or something and you've never met him before," Billingham told Weekend Review at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature, held recently in Dubai.
The reader knows there is a killer and has seen the killings, Billingham said, and for him part of the fun of reading crime fiction is trying to figure out who the killer is.
"I know I've met the killer, he's somewhere, he's in this story, he might be that tiny little guy, that tiny little character that came in a little bit earlier and said ‘cup of tea, sir?' It might be the cop's best mate, it might be the cleaner or the copper's wife, or the copper's boss or that journalist we saw … to me that's what's interesting," he said.
Something he told his masterclass is that if a book stands or fails on the reader working out who the killer is, "it's probably a bad book".
"There has to be more going on than just the whodunnit; more than just working out who the killer is. It's not a crossword puzzle," Billingham said.
The ten-time novelist varied his return trip to the Literature Festival this year, adding a masterclass and both writing and hosting the festival's first literary quiz.
In his masterclass "Murder By the Book: How to Write Crime Fiction", attendees picked up key tips on how to improve their writing.
The honest depiction of violence is necessary, Billingham said, but it should not be gratuitous.
Striking this balance is "something you learn", he said. "You learn through getting it wrong. I think my books have got less graphically violent and I think darker in tone; but that's because it's not about what you put on the page, it's about what you hint at," he said.
While it is easy to "disgust a reader", making them care about what is happening to somebody "is more difficult", he continued.
The first 30 pages of a book should hook the reader, not necessarily with a blood-spattered crime scene, but maybe with an authorial voice.
It seems this is something Billingham has mastered, having won the Sherlock Award for Best British Detective and the Theakston's Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year award twice and been nominated for seven Crime Writer's Association (CWA) Dagger awards.
Despite advising against presenting gratuitous violence, honesty is important for the writer, even if it involves "some kind of graphic description" rather than writing "cartoon violence", he said.
"I'd much rather be honest about violence … than write cartoon violence where people are stabbed and punched and whatever and then just get up a week later and it's all fine; the bruises fade and off they go again like cartoon characters. Because that's not what life is like," he said.
Billingham's character Tom Thorne is "not always a particularly efficient cop" — he makes mistakes that cost him and the people around him a lot. The policeman is stubborn, Billingham's site reads, "and, as his name implies, can be prickly and tough to get rid of".
"But if he doesn't know when he's not wanted, his tragedy is that he doesn't always know when he is," it reads of the British cop that the author has admitted is similar to himself.
Billingham's first crime novel was published in 2001, after he had worked as both a TV writer and stand-up comedian.
Adding a new dimension to the literature festival in the form of its first literary quiz was therefore a natural transition for him.
"I just so wanted to come back," he said of the Dubai festival, "because in how many festivals do you get to ride a camel and get a henna tattoo done? And actually, to be serious, spend a week bonding with all these other writers," he said.
At most literature festivals, he continued, writers and authors "turn up, do your thing and you go home again", he said.
Billingham is hoping that the literary quiz will become a permanent feature with fewer session clashes so that more writers and festivalgoers could participate. Festival attendees could make up teams with writers — something that the author says would be a "great" experience for them.
Of the teams that took part in the first quiz, one solely comprising writers attending the festival. Surprisingly, Billingham said, they came in second place.
The crime novelist is at present working on the next Tom Thorne thriller. For every writer, he said, it takes two or three books before they will realise their own voice and how they want to write their books. "At that point it's a bit like you're a sum of all influences, you're a bit like every hard-boiled writer you've ever read," he said, "and it's hard not to be."
Writers, he continued, are all the same until they discover their own identity. "We're all chameleons, you know."
