The Importance of Setting - by Harini Nagendra

This week's topic: How important is setting in your books? Do you write settings that you've never visited, and how do you go about this, if so? Give an example or two of setting in your own work and say how these scenes enhance the plot or create mood.

As a reader, I know I actively seek out books with strong, compelling settings. I look for mystery books set in times I have not lived through, in places I do not know. For me, this is the easiest and most fun approach I can take to learn more about the world and its history. When a good book of fiction gets me interested in learning more about a place or time, I often turn to a non-fiction book or research paper to learn more - but it's fiction that gets me interested in the first place. 

As a writer, while I work on crafting characters and plot, I'm most naturally drawn to setting. I believe a well detailed, believable setting makes the world within which the story or narrative is set come alive, compelling the reader to walk inside the pages, and inhabit the world of the writer alongside their characters.

When a writer chooses a setting, it's important to choose wisely. It’s the backdrop against which your story plays out, the scenery in the background – done well, setting can even take on some of the roles of a character itself, interacting with and influencing other characters to respond in ways that take them out of their comfort zones and make their inner worlds come to life on the page.

A setting can be real or imagined, and can draw on elements of culture, geography, history, environment, climate, economy, society – and much more. 

I set my colonial historical mysteries, The Bangalore Detectives Club series, in Bangalore of the 1920s - I am from Bangalore, but of course I wasn't born in the 1920s. I rely on research that includes old photographs and maps, archival documents and biographies, letters and newspaper articles, oral histories and recipes and other kinds of information to recreate the social, cultural, ecological and urban fabric of colonial Bangalore. 

Here's an excerpt from The Bangalore Detectives Club. Here, my goal is to describe the setting but also use it to draw a picture of the colonial times in which the book is located, and the colonial use of hunting, equated with masculinity, progress and the domination of man over nature.

Kaveri’s gaze took in every inch of her surroundings. The main hall of the Century Club glowed in the yellow light of the electric lamps, the sturdy furnishings of teak and rosewood offset by the delicate garlands of white jasmine, red roses and orange marigold draped around the pillars like serpents. The lamps were particularly impressive, mounted on tall iron pillars enhanced by ornate cornices and curls.

Outside, the gentle scritch-scritch of a broomstick announced the presence of a gardener, sweeping up the fallen leaves from the grassy lawn where dinner would later be laid out. A servant appeared silently on their left-hand side, bowing deferentially as he helped Ramu out of his coat. Ramu tipped the cart driver, telling him to have a good supper and to pick them up in a few hours. The carriage driver nodded cheerfully; his family lived nearby, and were expecting him home for dinner. 

Aware that the gesture made her seem more like a bashful child than a distinguished wife, Kaveri could not help but cling to Ramu’s side as they walked onwards into the club. 

Animal heads were mounted like trophies along the wall, repulsing and intimidating her. A series of glassy-eyed deer with impressive antlers gazed mournfully down at them, and two large stuffed bison heads drooped their once-lethal horns towards the couple, defeated. Kaveri tried her best to walk around the snarling bearskin that adorned the floor, and as she caught sight of the two life-sized tiger skins mounted on parallel walls, Ramu felt her shudder. 

In the fourth book of the series, Into the Leopard's Den - to be released in July 2025 - Kaveri goes to Coorg to investigate a murder, that then turns into two, and then three. I had a lot of fun visiting Coorg, reading about the history of coffee plantations and British settlers in the misty hills of Coorg, and working this into the setting. Here's an excerpt from the book, describing the landscape of Coorg, it's wealth intertwined with poverty and built on exploitation - 

The powerful car ate up the miles as the plains fell away from view. They climbed steadily. The open, grassy meadows and barren granite hills gave way to misty hills. Rolling down the glass, she stuck her head out of the window, greedily inhaling large gulps of the crisp, cool air. From this height, she could see thick forests draping the slopes like an olive green carpet, punctuated by bright green fingers of coffee on the gentler slopes. Embedded in the valley, small squares of emerald green paddy fields peeked out, like exquisite applique work on a silk sari. 

There was much wealth in the mountains of Coorg. And poverty. The ups and downs of the hill country’s fortunes had left their mark on the landscape. Along the edge of the coffee plantations, marked by the silvery-gray shade of the silver oak trees, she could see huts and hovels jutting out, black smoke rising from their chimneys. Their crooked walls and balding thatched roofs stood out like blotches against the vivid green landscape and the red-tiled bungalows. These would be where the workers lived. Ramu had described them to her in his letters. She wondered if she might find out more about Kupamma in these huts. 

And here's another excerpt, later in the book - some details on high tech equipment, while hinting at the bad blood between the British coffee planters and their Indian labour force, and dangers to come.

Soon, they arrived at the yard, where small piles of coffee berries had been piled up into neat mounds, waiting to be pulped. Ramappa ushered Kaveri to a chair in the shade of a majestic mahogany. But Kaveri went straight to the pulping machine, watching as the men loaded the berries into the drum. ‘Can I?’ she asked with excitement, taking hold of the large handle. She rotated the drum using the handle, breaking the skin on the cherries, letting the green seeds fall out. 

‘At school, I read about this bean separator in my physics textbook,’ she told Ramappa. ‘The centrifugal force created by the rotating drum spins the lighter pulp out into this channel above, leaving the heavier beans at the bottom.’ ‘I don’t know about any of that,’ Ramappa grunted. ‘But the machine gets things done very fast. Because of this dratted leopard, our pickers come late to work, and leave early in the evening, while the sun is still high in the sky. There are berries rotting on the bushes. Thanks to this machine, we can process them more quickly after picking. But we still need more people to harvest them.’ 

‘Lakamma picked a bad time to go for a temple tour?’ Kaveri asked sympathetically. 

‘The worst time for it. If madam was here, she would have never let things get so bad. She would have convinced the workers to return and exposed the villain spreading these rumours. Unless she is home soon, we will be left with very little to show for all our efforts this year.’ 

‘Do you believe in the ghost cat?’ she asked carefully. ‘I don’t believe in ghosts. Boyd must be behind it. Just like Fowler, he will suck the landscape dry in the name of profit.’ 

He swore fluently in Kannada, spitting a stream of blood red liquid into the bushes on the side of the yard. ‘I don’t know why Ponnappa doesn’t realise it. Men like Boyd can’t be allowed to roam free, causing havoc as they like. They should be chopped into pieces and fed to this leopard.’ 

Humpty Dumpty Was an Ovicide from James W. Ziskin

How important is setting in your books? Do you write settings that you've never visited, and how do you go about this, if so? Give an example or two of setting in your own work and say how these scenes enhance the plot or create mood.

2017 Macavity Award for Heart of Stone

The title of my post this week has nothing to do with setting. It’s more about plot. But never mind that. Read on.

For me, setting in books is as important as the characters, or even the plot. Is that a bold statement? I don’t think so. Mind, I’m not minimizing the importance of those other two elements, character and plot. Not at all. Rather I’m emphasizing the value of setting. Together, those three pieces make up the story. Without any one of them, your story collapses.

CHARACTERS

You need to have characters doing things in your story. Hitting people, kissing people, plotting unspeakable acts, fighting for right… Or even wrong, why not? And your characters don’t have to be people, of course. A dog can just as easily bite someone, lick someone/something, plot unspeakable (scatological) acts, or just sit there panting his hot breath into the air. Even inanimate objects can be characters, provided you give them something to want. A goal and some obstacles to prevent them from achieving that goal. I once wrote a short story—unpublished, alas—that recounted the life of a single dollar bill. What the bill bought, to whom it passed, where it fell into a puddle, and so on. (I didn’t say it was a good story.) But the dollar bill, identified by its serial number, was the hero of my tale. Now, if my story didn’t succeed—and it didn’t—it might have been for one very good reason: there was no compelling setting. (The character and plot weren’t all that memorable either.) Yes, there was a setting: the bank where the dollar went into circulation, the wallet where it spent a lot of time, the street where it got lost, the crackhouse, and other places I can no longer recall. Just enough setting to make it a story, but not enough to make it any good.

PLOT

There aren’t many plotless stories floating around out there. Even badly written books and poorly directed movies have plots. There’s structure, conflict, and things happen. Characters do something in some location or other, too. No matter if the plot is dull or flawed, it’s still a plot. Humpty Dumpty’s plot may seem simple on its ovoid surface: Humpty sits on a wall and falls to his death. Imagine the elevator pitch for this story: “Egg meets gravity, gravity wins.” Or, if you’re more scientifically inclined, a = Fnet / m, Newton’s Second Law of Motion. But wait, I hear you say. If Newton’s Second Law of Motion is involved…then Humpty must have been pushed! It was murder! Ovicide, my dear Watson.

SETTING

Okay, while you ponder that, I’ll get back to the matter of setting. Yes, you need setting to make a story. The better the setting, the better the story. It can even compensate for shortcomings in character and plot, though not in the case of Humpty Dumpty. Or my dollar story. Yes, better is always better for settings. The same holds true for characters and plots.

In my books, I’ve often leaned heavily on setting for inspiration. They give me ideas. And once I begin writing, setting helps keep the story in balance. Too much plot or too much character can bore the reader. Too much setting can do the same thing. Balance is the key. The three elements should complement each other, be inextricably intertwined such that if you change one, you break the threads of the others, and you’ve got a lot of work ahead to repair your story. 

If the setting inspires me to write a story, it follows that some readers might find that setting to be equally interesting and worthy of their time. I’ve set my books in New York; the Adirondack mountains; Hollywood; Florence, Italy; and Bombay, India, all places I know extremely well. I don’t write scenes in locations I haven’t visited. But setting is not merely location, it’s the whole experience that sets the mood and place. I’ve tried to build tension/interest in my settings with weather, cuisine, politics, history, and art. Here are a couple of examples.

HEART OF STONE (2017 Anthony Award for Best Paperback Original and Macavity Award for Best Historical Mystery—Sue Feder Memorial)

I remember the cool breath of the night woods on my neck. I see the glow of moonlight on the highest boughs, filtering down in a pale cast, weak and washed-out, fading into darkness. I smell the moss and the decay of the forest floor, heady, damp, musky. And I can taste the earthy mushrooms and bitter berries on my tongue. But most of all, I hear the pines whisper and sigh, their needles, like millions of tiny blades, carving voices into the breeze.

I’ve posted this passage before in this space, but I do it again now because it’s a good example of my own attempts to set the scene—and mood—with a one-paragraph intro at the beginning of the Ellie Stone mysteries. I wrote this in the hopes that readers would find themselves transported to the woods—perhaps recall the smells and sounds—and appreciate the beauty as well as the creepiness.

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CAST THE FIRST STONE (2018 finalist for the Anthony, Lefty, and Macavity awards)

“I see you found the place,” Dorothy said once we were seated in a booth. 
    She and Stemple sat on one side of the table, and I took the other. The setup felt like a police interrogation. I tried to break the ice and my own jitters by asking if Dean Martin and his friends might stop in. The two exchanged a glance. Archie Stemple snorted through his nose. 
    “Oh, no, Miss Stone,” said Dorothy, shaking her head in a most condescending manner. “Dean Martin wouldn’t be caught dead in here.” 
    My face flushed hot. “But it’s his place, isn’t it?” 
    “He merely sold his name to these people,” said Stemple, oozing even more arrogance than Dorothy had done. “In fact, no one comes here anymore.”

 

(The scene above takes place in 1962, in Dino’s Lodge, which was a real eatery on Sunset Boulevard.) 

If I had described my Hollywood setting by saying “Ellie was in Los Angeles for the first time,” I’d have produced the equivalent of a stick drawing. Such a lazy description sits on the page like a lump of dropped oatmeal. It lacks form, style, taste. There’s nothing compelling about it. Rather, I want to put readers in Ellie’s shoes. I want readers to share her wonder, excitement, and disappointment. That’s one reason I love writing in the first person. Every word tells you something about the narrator. 

I wrote scenes like the one above to show actual places that could suggest to readers the glamor of Tinseltown—or lack there of—through Ellie’s eyes. I believe it gives more dimension, depth, and believability to my Los Angeles setting. That Ellie believes Dean Martin might actually show up at the lodge to which he lent (sold) his name, should inspire surprise or curiosity in readers, especially those who might be expecting movie stars on every corner. Los Angeles is indeed a company town, but you’re not constantly rubbing elbows with the rich and famous, and you rarely spot them at the supermarket or local gas station. And Hollywood the area itself? Not as glamorous as you might think… Ellie’s visits to restaurants, a threadbare hotel, the Los Angeles Central Library, Malibu, and even Paramount Studios help paint a more accurate, complete picture of my 1962 Hollywood setting. And not necessarily through physical descriptions.

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Next is an example of more traditional scene-setting. The following paragraph describes a dining room in a fifteenth-century villa in Fiesole, Italy, just outside Florence. The idea here was to share Ellie’s reaction to her surroundings, all the while giving the reader a healthy dose of one of the book’s supposed attractions, namely a trip to Tuscany. I tried to describe a real place, not some fairytale palace where everything glitters and is in perfect repair. Instead, this place looks and feels like the villas I’ve enjoyed in Italy. It’s not perfect but… it’s perfect.

TURN TO STONE (2021 Barry Award for Best Paperback Original and Macavity Award for Best Historical Mystery—Sue Feder Memorial)

The bare floors, tiled in an ornate antique pattern, suggested a huge bordered carpet with eight-pointed stars and smaller flowers inside. A dappled mirror, its glass heavy and dark, hung on the north wall above a battered filigreed credenza. Sconces on either side illuminated the area with a faint, flickering electric light. Bright lighting, I was coming to realize, was not a prized feature in old Italian homes. An octopus of a crystal chandelier overhead provided little more than a glow from ten of the twelve working bulbs. Completing the picture was a gothic triptych that may or may not have been wildly valuable, depending on its provenance. Still, the lack of guile in the room’s trimmings led me to believe everything was genuine. They exuded sincerity and plain honesty while showing their age and wear.

    

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Now be careful with eggs. They’re quite expensive these days. And go pick up an Ellie Stone mystery and enjoy the settings. (The characters and plots, too.)

Xcvmcxn

Adding to the impact

How important is setting in your books? Do you write settings that you've never visited, and how do you go about this, if so? Give an example or two of setting in your own work and say how these scenes enhance the plot or create mood.

by Dietrich

Setting is the story’s anchor. A rich setting draws the readers in, grounding them in a time and place by adding color and tone to the story. It lends scope and adds to the pace and plot as well. It can be motivation for conflict, and it can act like an obstacle or an influence on the characters. And there are times when setting feels like a character itself.

Writing about places I haven’t been or times in which I haven’t lived means I have to sift through a lot of research to convince the reader of the story’s credibility. I need to immerse myself in the time and place until it feels like I’m right there — and all before I start to write word one. On top of visual descriptions, I need to draw on the senses of sound, smell, touch and taste to round it out.

To give an example, here’s part of the opening from my current novel Crooked. The idea here is to set time, place and mood while keeping the pace of the scene rolling forward.

“Was born in Montreal,” the old man said, taking the mint leaf from his glass, laying it down and sipping the drink, loving the taste, waiting politely as Graham tried to signal the elusive waiter, calling out, “Hey, señor! Por favor.” Snapping his fingers.
“You’re not in Mexico,” the old man said. “Here they go by camarero, and try perdone. And no snapping. You do, and they just let you sit, taking offense to it.” The old man mimicked snapping his fingers, his arthritis ebbing this past week. He’d been in a light mood, the sleeping pills and painkillers getting him through most nights, helping him feel less like a relic in these changing times of test-tube babies, man landing on Mars, and music he couldn’t begin to understand, one broad singing about “Hot Stuff,” another screeching about “Bad Girls,” then a guy who sounds like an emphysema case asking, “Do you think I’m sexy?” Plain awful, nothing like Glenn Miller or Kate Smith, or Jeanette doing “Porque Te Vas,” the local stations playing that one to death. He just hoped the medication wouldn’t disagree too much with the drinks.
Willing to talk about his past — those long-ago times when he topped Hoover’s most-wanted list — to anyone willing to cover the cost of a few rounds. 

And here’s another example from my upcoming one, Dirty Little War — my main character’s impression upon arriving in 1920 Chicago for the first time, finding himself in an environment that feels like an antagonist at this point. I think the description lends a sense of authenticity and also give a sense of raised stakes.

Coming to town with less than ten bucks of his coming-north money left, enough to cover the rent for a couple of weeks, that is if he only ate once a day, this city having a way of scooping out a man’s pockets. 
The wind chased in off the lake and it bit to the bone, but it was pushing back some of the reek from the Union Stockyards, its fetid ditch where the meatpackers dumped the eyeballs and bones that couldn’t be stuffed into the ballpark franks, the bubbly sludge and sewage draining into the ugly river flowing its way through town. Recalling something the slumlord said about the river being the prettiest you’d ever see, a kaleidoscope of sight and smell: green at the sausage factory, blue at the soap factory, yellow at the tannery — a sight you wouldn’t trade for anything on earth. Taking his hand from holding his collar closed against the wind, Huck covered his mouth and nose, moving faster along the tracks, the scraggly blades of grass wagging between the ties.

 

All Important Setting

 

Terry here with our question of the week- How important is setting in your books? Do you write settings that you’ve never visited, and how do you go about this, if so? Give an example or two of setting in your own work and say how these scenes enhance the plot or create mood. 

 I’m not sure even character is more important than setting. But by setting I don’t mean just location. I mean the weather, the physical elements of the scene, the atmosphere, and the response of the characters to all those things. Here’s a scene from An Unsettling Crime for Samuel Craddock:

“To my right the fenced-in property is strewn with equipment and leavings from the abandoned railroad tie plant that kept this town thriving when the railroads were big. Ties dark with creosote preservative lie scattered among knee-deep weeds. A few old railroad cars lie rusting alongside the fence. On the other side shacks are lined up close to one another. Most people who live here can’t afford paint, so the houses are whitewashed and weathered. They’re small, but mostly kept up, although a few lean as if they are tired of the effort to stay upright. Many have late season flowers blooming in the yards—zinnias and climbing roses. Several people are standing out on their porches, eyes trained in the direction of the woods toward the smoke.” 

 When you read this, if you aren’t thinking “bleak” and “poor people” then I haven’t done my job. I meant to invoke the smell of creosote—it’s pungent and unpleasant. I meant to imply that the town is no longer thriving. The word “abandoned” is deliberate. The railroad abandoned the town. No matter how poor they are, these people keep up their property, and here and there is a bright spot—flowers. 

But now there’s trouble. People are on their porches watching smoke rise through the trees.  Samuel Craddock is taking all this in as he speeds toward the fire. A terrible thing has happened, and this description is meant to enhance the sense of dread.

Jarrett Creek, the setting for my Samuel Craddock series, is based on the small town where my grandparents lived. The smell of creosote lingered in the air, especially on hot days. The town has many such areas as I described above, where the houses are kept up, but many are unpainted or listing to one side. In my Craddock books, I draw on my visceral memories of this town. In every book, I try to bring it to life. People write to tell me it could easily be their town. Does this mean I have been too generic in descriptions? I don’t think so. I think being specific triggers people’s memories. Even if they aren’t exactly the same, they are similar enough to create a strong sense of place. 

 But I also write about places I’ve never actually been. In my second Jessie Madison book, I write about a US FBI Search and Rescue Team diving off the coast of Lipari, an island north of Sicily in the Aeolian Islands.

“It was stunning. A rugged hill rose to the northeast with a citadel looking down on the town. There was a beach off to the west side of the port. …the sheer face of a cliff rose up, spanning this side of the island. It was beautiful and forbidding.” 

I’ve actually been to the Aeolian Islands. I’ve sailed around them and hiked up to the volcano. But I’ve never been diving there, because I’m not a diver. It scares me to death. So I wanted a site that was scary. 

 When I researched the actual site I chose, my search yielded sparse information. The site was deemed “extremely difficult and extremely hard to find.” The more research I did, the more I had the suspicion that no one wanted beginners or even intermediate divers to find the site, because it was dangerous. What a great spot to set my thriller! But it also meant I had to invent aspects of the site. I did so by reading about others sites in the area and extrapolating. I also spoke with some expert divers who told me what “difficult” and “dangerous” might mean. 

 So yes, I do use real places, but part of being a fiction writer is, well, the fiction part. Including using settings the way I want them to work—to enhance the action and to serve as a backdrop for the story. 

 I will leave you with one small, perfect illustration of the use of setting:

 “If you have never been outside a city at night when there is no moon, than you don’t know darkness. Without street lamps and neon and all the ambient glow in any town or city, night can be impenetrably black. Even a million stars won’t illuminate a path through the forest.” 

 This is what makes William Kent Krueger so readable. He knows how to use setting! In this passage from Sulfur Springs, you don’t need to be told that the character is entering “darkness”—both literally and figuratively. That’s how setting should be used.

Setting the Mood

How important is setting in your books? Do you write settings that you’ve never visited, and how do you go about this, if so? Give an example or two of setting in your own work and say how these scenes enhance the plot or create mood.

Brenda here.

Setting is essentially another character, especially in crime fiction. In my case, I use the Canadian landscape as the backdrop for my stories, because I know it intimately. It's much easier to create mood and describe the locations if I've visited the place I'm describing, but on occasion, I've researched an area and written a scene without having visited. I use Google maps and Google earth, and look up websites and images to get the logistics correct. I've even had readers who live in some of these places write to tell me that I got it right -- most gratifying when that happens!

In my first novels, I made up towns set in real geographical locations, but in my three, later series, I've used real towns and cities. I take liberties with businesses or houses, but overall, I work to get the geography correct. Many readers say they love following along the streets and visiting places with my characters that they're already familiar with. I had an American reader actually travel to Kingston to visit the places in my Stonechild and Rouleau series - how great is that?!

I like to incorporate the setting into the storyline without writing long paragraphs of description. The images and choice of language enhance the mood that I'm working to create. Here are a few examples from my work:

"She looked around the darkened street at the layer of pristine snow glistening on the sidewalks and roadway like spun sugar in the light from the street lamps. Errant flakes drifted through the air in their lazy tumble to the earth." - Bleeding Darkness

"The route took me to the outskirts of the village, the road hugging the shoreline and winding slowly north. Luckily the plow had been around early and the road was passable. Only a few houses dotted this back road, small homes with smoke pouring out of the chimneys with wood stoves the main source of heat. If I opened the window and leaned out, the smell of wood smoke and pine would fill my nostrils like love letters from the past." - In Winter's Grip

"The utter darkness that only comes in the country had settled around Liam where he stood at the edge of the Petries' garden, looking up at the night sky. A few hours earlier, a fitful breeze had sprung up, helping to hasten the rain clouds on their way, and the stars glittered like fistfuls of sequins spread across a black canvas." - Fatal Harvest

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*Insert Sex Scene Here* By Poppy Gee

 Love is in the air. How do you feel about writing sex scenes in crime fiction? Give a sample of your favourite love or romance scene from your own work and tell us your method for handling these relationships.

I hate writing sex scenes. They’re so embarrassing to write, especially since my sisters told me that whenever they read a sex scene in my books, they can’t help imagining I’m the character. That gives me writer's block.

In general, I feel like Australian writers are tentative in their approach to writing sexy sex scenes. In Australian films, for example, sex scenes are usually more comical than erotic. I struggle to think of an Australian movie where the sex scenes match the romance, seductiveness and alluring nature of those portrayed in American movies. 

I pinched the title for my blog post from a workshop run by bestselling author Alessandra Torre. The title *insert sex scene here* made me laugh because that’s what I do – I postpone the awkwardness.

In my debut novel Bay of Fires, the main characters are drunk the first time they have sex, and they do it in a guest house bedroom. It’s a rickety old bed and their enthusiasm makes the bed bang against the wall. They worry they’ll wake everyone up. I thought it was funny. I was also aware, as I wrote it, that I was taking the easy way out of writing the sex scene.

Feminist writer Kate Millett published Sexual Politics in 1969. The book was a sensation – it sold 80,000 copies and she was featured on the cover of Time Magazine. Millett talks about how the way that characters have sex, says something important about them and about the cultural politics and history of the time. She examined misogyny and rape in the novels of Norman Mailer, Henry Miller, D.H. Lawrence, drawing conclusions about what that says about patriarchal culture. A simple example of her theory, is how in the Victorian-era bodice rippers, the heroine is shy, reluctant, perhaps begging the hero to halt his seduction. He persists, and eventually she succumbs demurely to his efforts. The interaction reveals something interesting about feminine ideals in the nineteenth century.

Reading Sexual Politics was my writerly awakening. It showed me the potential that sex scenes offer a narrative. Of course, a good sex scene can simply be about the pure physicality of sex, but it’s interesting to consider what else it might do for your story.  

In my second novel, Vanishing Falls, my protagonist and her husband have a loving relationship, and their sex life is healthy, romantic and respectful. It was important to their character development to show this. Another character, Jack, a wealthy farmer and lawyer, visits a decrepit farmhouse where he pays to have sex with a woman while her husband watches on. And then there’s Cliff, a methamphetamine addict who watches porn in his back shed and fantasises about his wife’s best friend. When friends tells me they’ve gifted my book to a loved one, I think of these scenes and cringe. But these scenes do reveal something about wealth, class, and addiction in Tasmania. 

Patricia Highsmith writes sexual tension beautifully, without too much detail. May Cobbs writes fantastic lusty scenes. The sex scenes in Stone Cold Fox by Rachel Coller Croft are really fun and crucial to the plot. SA Cosby’s writes sexual interactions that are sharply atmospheric. Some of the most graphic sex scenes I’ve read in a crime novel are in the excellent novel My Absolute Darling by Gabriel Tallent. If I was critiquing sexual relationships in fiction, I’d include No Country For Old Men. The otherwise brilliant novel by Cormac McCarthy has Llewellyn Moss, aged 36, married to the 19-year-old Carla Jean. I loved that novel, but that relationship made me think the author was fantasising for himself. As a reader, you want to be lost in the story, not jarred out of it.

It's interesting that the raunchiest sex scenes in mainstream films, are often not in romantic movies, but in thrillers. This could be due to classification reasons. However, it also makes me think that I need to try harder with sex scenes. Maybe I don’t read enough of them. Feel free to recommend the best crime-fiction-sex-scene-depicting-books you’ve found...

Stayin' Jigless, by Catriona

Love is in the air. How do you feel about writing sex scenes in crime fiction? Give a sample of your favorite love or romance scene from your own work and tell us your method for handling these relationships.

I have written sex scenes. Four of them, to be precise. In the first one, the protagonist imagined her mother, retching with disgust, and she had to stop. The second sex scene was in the same book and this time the mother's image stayed away and the sex got completed but it was disappointing and left both feeling miserable. Third time lucky, a chapter later. It was satisfactory for the two characters and I don't think it was too bad as far as writing went either - the floweriest image was "a flooding sort of feeling like dipping ink in water", then one of them made a noise like a camping kettle, the kid woke up in the next room, and my heroine got the giggles.

Details and buy links here

The other sex scene was in a different book and the first person protagonist was leaning on the frame of the bedroom door, watching her husband's bottom, thinking it looked like a small animal chewing something bouncy, and preparing a killer line to deliver to whoever that was whose pedicured feet were waggling in the air. In the end she went with "Ta, love. I don't suppose you'd like to do my ironing for me as well while you're at it."

Guess what and where

I stand by these sex scenes. The marriage-ending one seemed like the funniest way to end a marriage and giving my heroine all that wise-cracking dialogue was pure wish fulfillment. I've never come home from a cancelled bookclub to witness this scene in real life but if I did I hope I wouldn't squander the dramatic potential by saying something dull.

The three sex scenes in the psycho-thriller were no less essential. And here's where I think sex in crime fiction can really earn its keep. It's a great place to hide clues. Second only to humour, sex scenes are the most ideal clue-cloakers. They appear to be there for other purposes, so you can smuggle pretty glaring stuff into the reader's brain without them noticing. 

Having said all that, my favourite love scene - hardly deserving of the description "sex scene", as you'll see - has nothing to do with the plot of the novel at all. But then this novel has as much love in it as it does crime. It's Gaudy Night, by Dorothy L Sayers, and it's one of the Peter and Harriet books where the murder intrudes onto their courtship, rather than the other way round. Poor old Dorothy; her husband was such a dud. I can forgive her writing Lord Peter and letting Harriet be happy.

They're in a punt on the Cam, Wimsey reading case notes and Harriet watching him. She considers "the flat setting and fine scroll-work of the ear", the "glitter of close-cropped hair where the neck muscles lifted to meet the head", "faint laughter lines", the "gleam of golden down on the cheekbone", the "wide spring of the nostril" a bit of sweat, a bit of sunburn, and she's just got to the "hollow above the points of the collar bone" when he looks up. 

She turns "instantly scarlet, as though she had been dipped in boiling water. Through the confusion of her darkened eyes and drumming ears some enormous bulk seemed to stoop over her. Then the mist cleared. His eyes were riveted on the manuscript again, but he breathed as though he had been running. So, thought Harriet, it has happened." 

So, thinks every reader who has been following them from Strong Poison, to Have His Carcase, to The Nine Tailors, despairing when Harriet disappears in The Five Red Herrings and Murder Must Advertise and just about ready to scream because it's p.281 of this book too . . . it has happened at bloody last!

Talk about a slow burn!

Cx

Sex? I'll pass. by Eric Beetner

 Love is in the air. How do you feel about writing sex scenes in crime fiction?

My books have quite a lot of action, violence, suspense. What they don’t have a lot of is sex or even romance, really. 

Not that I intentionally write chaste books, but it just sort of happened that way. Perhaps it stems from the one time I did try it and how I feel about it now. In an early novel I included a sex scene. I still stand by that it was true to the characters, advanced the plot and wasn’t extraneous or merely there for titillation. That said, when I look back on it now, it feels icky to me. I recently got rights back to that book and if I were to bring it out again, I would revisit that scene and maybe not cut it entirely, but rewrite it for sure. 

There is a very good chance that I simply wrote it poorly. As I’ve admitted, I don’t have much expertise in this area of writing. That includes reading. I don’t read a whole lot of stuff that has extended sex or deep romances. And I don’t mean smut or porn, but I’m not among the millions of reader who love so many of the epic fantasies that are huge right now. I’m not a Romance reader. I’m not the kind of reader who stops their scrolling when they see a book cover with a half naked model on the cover, male or female, and think “Oooh, tell me more”. But those readers exist in huge numbers. They want the steamy, the sexy, the bawdy. But they want it well written. (there’s a reason they give an award for worst sex scene in a book. It’s a minefield)  And there are hundreds of authors willing and eager to give it to them. Just not me.

I don’t consider myself prude. I’ve got no religious hangups about sex. I’m equally as uninterested in a same-sex scene and a straight scene. And yet, I don’t think it’s realistic to ignore sex entirely in books. It’s a part of life, therefore it should be a part of our characters. 

So maybe when I wrote my scene, and the later regretted it, I was just admitting this is not what I do well.

I avoid many things I know I don’t do well. I don’t write traditional Agatha Christie-type murder mysteries because I’m just not smart enough to reverse engineer a case and to use the sleight of hand on readers to make the solution anything less than obvious.

I don’t write about dragons and knights because I find it silly. I prefer the real world, but I’m glad those that want to delve into the fantastical have those options.

I don’t write about serial killers because they bore me and if an author is bored by their subject, then the reader will be as well.

So, I gave up writing about sex.

In my latest novel I do have a bit of an unrequited love. Or at least a what-could-have-been for two characters that stops short of actual romance because of the circumstances they’re both in. That ends up more Remains Of The Day than a hot, steamy romance. 

I mention it just so you know that I don’t ignore character’s feelings of love, or even lust. I wrote a whole book, The Year I Died Seven Times, about a man’s quest to get his girlfriend back and in my world, if knocking on death’s door seven times for a woman isn’t romance, then I don’t know what is. (that’s not the one with the sex scene if you’re wondering) 

So I’ve taken myself out of the game for writing about sex. Not that I won’t ever again. It if fits the story and it advances the plot, sex can tell us a lot about characters. Maybe I’ll practice a little first. Write some stuff and only show it to my wife. She’s already excellent at telling me if my attempts at sex are lousy.

A Time for Andirons

Love is in the air. How do you feel about writing sex scenes in crime fiction? Give a sample of your favorite love or romance scene from your own work and tell us your method for handling these relationships.

 

I don’t like writing sex scenes. Blame it on men are from Mars, and women are from Venus. Women baffle men, and men amuse and frustrate women. No wonder men like Harry Burns stared at the ceiling wondering how long he has to hold her before he can leave to clean his andirons. Confession: I didn’t know what andirons were when I first saw the movie When Harry Met Sally.  

            Men write sex scenes badly. John Irving has won the Bad Sex in Fiction Award several times. It’s an award for those godawful carnal howlers between the pages and for its gentle torment of the recipient. I’m convinced that location plays a part. James Frey received his award at the In & Out (Naval & Military) Club in St James’s Square, London, where 400 guests raised a toast to the winner.

            A writer is faced with two choices when it comes to writing sex.

            Write the physical, and get graphic, including all the squishy details, or write the emotional, which almost always sounds pretentious and unrealistic. In real life, the physical is often mumbles and fumbles and anxiety for both parties. I think this is why some men are self-deprecating about the bedroom. Again, I think of Harry Burns saying that his mother, disguised as an east German judge, awarded him a 5.5 for the dismount.

            Oh, and there are the descriptions. I’ll never forget Sylvia Plath describing her first time seeing bits in The Bell Jar. She described them as ‘turkey neck and turkey gizzards.’

Sex is powerful. I remember an interview with punk rocker Iggy Pop, where he described his first time. He says she was older than him, and did all ‘the work.’ What made me laugh, however, was how he described riding home…wait for it…on his bicycle, totally discombobulated, enough so that he was hit by a car, rolled off the engine and laid on the ground in the mist of post-coital daze.

           Call it puerile humor, but I hear the word ‘moist’ every time Sheldon Cooper in Big Bang says, ‘coitus.’ I think of Sir Thomas Beecham’s comparing a certain musical instrument to sex: “The sound of a harpsichord – two skeletons copulating on a tin roof in a thunderstorm.”

            As for sex in literature, there is a broad swath for quality across the centuries. No guy ever believed Letters to Penthouse were real, and I’m certain most young ladies know the reality of ‘relations’ is like Ray Romano trying every trick in the book to get seven seconds of dubious pleasure with his wife Debra; the inference is she could only dream of seven minutes in heaven. Life has its disappointments and funny moments, such as objects in the mirror are closer and smaller than they appear. I’ll say nothing about Sally’s deli scene.

What baffles me is readers don’t seem to mind awful violence, but not sex. Say ‘hell’ or ‘damn’ or put Mr. Whiskers in danger once in your manuscript, and the torches and pitchforks come out. Combine sex with religion, and especially with some profanity, the writer rides the rails to the land of one-star reviews. There is no clean way to write sex. I write sex in crime fiction, but I try not to make sex a crime.

Films from the Thirties helped me because there is plenty of subtext in dialog, and there are visuals to intimate sex and other adult behavior. Studios then had to tiptoe around the Hays Code, which stayed on the books until 1968. The fact that the Code existed implies Americans had sex on the brain. Abortion, gender fluidity, infidelity, prostitution, etc. were all there on the silver screen. We like to think we are hip, modern, and progressive.

We’re not. All we did was find new words for old behavior.

            In my noir landscapes, sex is often positive, recreational, or a means to leverage an advantage. In this excerpt from my Naming Game, Leslie, using the alias Maggie, and her future lover Vera talk about men; it’s assumed that society is stacked against women. There is a scene later where they visit a lesbian bar in West Hollywood. It’s 1951, but little has changed as to how people play to each other’s assumptions and fragile egos. Life is short, so have a laugh, enjoy yourself, and don’t forget your andirons in the morning.

“I’m not trying to down you or tell you what to do, Maggie. You’re your own woman. Do what you want. You’re young and you’re holding the deck of cards. Take it from me, you’re holding aces.”

“You’re not exactly retired,”

The coffee was ready and Vera poured.

“I might not be Miss Haversham, but I didn’t marry a Thalberg to secure my future.”

“You seem to do just fine.”

“All I’m saying, Maggie, is use men before they use you. Men talk. Learn to listen. Phillip is a talker. He doesn’t seem like it now but he’ll talk. He’s just a little shy boy. Mother him a little. The problem right now is you intimidate him.”

“I intimidate him?”

“Honey, you haven’t seen his other secretaries.”

“You think Phillip will open up more?”

“I do. Give it time. But be ready to be disappointed.”

“Disappointed?”

“Yep.” Vera stopped for a sip. Leslie did the same. The coffee was strong. “Phillip is like the winter weather report. You hear all the hype in the forecast. When the storm happens, all you get is a few inches that’ll leave you wondering if it was worth all the publicity.”