Realistic Thrillers: Balancing action, emotion, and authenticity in crime fiction

At a literature festival where panels blur into polite applause, I find myself interrogating a thriller writer about whether he has ever been a spy. This is not entirely a joke. When you read enough geopolitical thrillers, suspicion becomes a reflex.

Alex Shaw smiles in a way that reveals nothing.

Shaw writes men and women who move through intelligence corridors and war zones with unnerving competence. His protagonists dismantle operations before lunch and carry the psychological residue long after. As a crime fiction obsessive who reads about murder to unwind, I recognise the appeal immediately. His characters are trained, disciplined and slightly apart from the world they protect.

He is quick to correct assumptions. “I personally don’t have any experience in the military,” he says. The authority in his books comes from observation and research, not service. He chooses military and intelligence backgrounds because those characters begin as ordinary people who undergo extraordinary training. “After that training, they aren’t quite like ordinary people anymore,” he says. They return changed. Distant. Trying to find normal again.

That emotional displacement interests him more than spectacle. His characters react to fear and anxiety like anyone else. They simply interpret those feelings differently. “These aren’t Terminator-type characters,” he says. “They’re real people doing extraordinary things.”

As someone who mentally casts herself as the future author of a crime novel she has not yet written, I am listening carefully.

Shaw’s own life reads like backstory material. He spends the late 1990s in Kyiv teaching drama and running a consultancy before being recruited by Siemens. Business takes him across the former USSR, the Middle East and Africa. Today he is an active member of the International Thriller Writers and the Crime Writers Association, with bestselling series including the Aidan Snow SAS novels and the Jack Tate books.

His approach to pacing is uncompromising. He prefers to open with action. “I don’t like when a film spends ten minutes showing normal life before anything happens,” he says. With recurring characters such as Aidan Snow, Jack Tate and Sophie Racine, he knows readers assume survival. His job is to disrupt that comfort. “My job is to make the book as exciting as possible and persuade the reader that maybe the main character won’t survive.”

Authenticity, for Shaw, lies in restraint. He avoids technical overkill. “Most readers don’t need a page describing bullet velocity or gunpowder composition,” he says. He focuses on character first. When writing about places he has not visited, he studies them closely. A green door on a side street. The angle of light across a building. Small details that anchor exaggerated action in something recognizable.

He writes during school hours. Children dropped off by eight. Words until three. Ideas arrive unpredictably. He makes notes. He looks across a body of water and imagines what might explode there. Across his work, skill and emotional cost carry equal weight. He writes characters shaped by loss, by fractured childhoods, by choices that narrow their futures. Sophie Racine, unmarried in her early thirties, embodies how professional life bleeds into personal consequence. “The skills matter,” he says. “But it’s important that these extreme characters still feel realistic.”

We talk about whether crime fiction is getting darker. He shrugs at the premise. There are subgenres for every appetite. He includes humour deliberately. “You can’t have darkness all the time,” he says. Readers want justice. They want motive. They want consequences.

When he wrote his first book, he assumed his audience would resemble him. Men raised on adventure stories and Bond films. Instead, many of his UK readers turn out to be women aged 45 to 70. The United States skews differently. Messages now arrive globally. He writes for accessibility, not a demographic stereotype.

On AI, he draws a firm line. Research tools are one thing. Writing scenes is another. “That would feel like cheating,” he says. “The ideas have to come from you.”

There’s a running joke that crime fiction fans are mildly unhinged. I put that to him directly. If readers who relax with murder mysteries are suspect, what does that make the writer?

“I think all writers are a bit crazy, regardless of genre,” he says, without hesitation. Then he undercuts the stereotype. He is squeamish. He does not enjoy horror films. Crime, he believes, is not about gore. It is about justice. Readers want to understand motive. They want to see consequences. They want order restored.

That answer lands differently when you have spent years reading fictional killings for comfort. It is less about darkness than resolution.

When I was younger, I was told writers are daydreamers who invent characters they secretly want to be. I put that to Shaw and ask if it is true. He partly agrees. His first protagonist, Aidan Snow, borrows heavily from his own life. Same city. Similar work. “When you start writing, you often write what you know,” he says. Over time, the resemblance fades. Characters grow independent. They absorb observation. They become composites of people encountered, studied, imagined.

He is clear about the limits of invention. He can research what it is like to be a 75-year-old Japanese man. He can read, interview, observe. He still calls it interpretation. “Much of what we write is based on ourselves and the people we’ve known,” he says.

For someone who reads crime fiction with alarming enthusiasm, that is both reassuring and unsettling. The line between observer and participant is thinner than we pretend.