Whenever I visit a foreign city, I love to find a crime novel set there. The best crime fiction uses location like a central character, offering a unique insid§er’s guide, traversing hidden places and social strata. Ten years ago, when my younger sister moved to Amsterdam, I started to visit the city often. While it is a highly atmospheric place, Amsterdam produces a fraction of the crime fiction coming out of Oslo, Stockholm or other capitals. Nicolas Freeling set his Van der Valk detective stories in Amsterdam half a century ago, but these are largely forgotten today.
I found myself searching for a novel set in the Dutch capital with a contemporary police character, similar to Ian Rankin’s John Rebus, whose beat is Edinburgh, or Michael Connelly’s LA homicide detective Harry Bosch. But there wasn’t one — at least, not in English. So in 2013 I moved to Amsterdam myself, to try writing my own. It felt like a gap in the crime-fiction market that might interest a publisher, but before getting close to a deal, I confronted an elementary question: how do you invent a police detective?
It helps if you start out as one, as author Jorn Lier Horst did. Horst was a senior investigating officer in the Vestfold police district, south of Oslo — the beat of his William Wisting character, who has a growing international following.
Other novelists have studied the work of police detectives up close. Connelly started out as a crime reporter for the Los Angeles Times. In the introduction to Crime Beat, a collection of his newspaper articles, he describes how one real-life policeman — Sergeant George Hurt — served as a study for the character of his LAPD detective Harry Bosch.
Connelly recounts noticing a deep groove in Hurt’s glasses, in the part that rested on the ear. “It seemed like a little detail, till I saw him hooking his glasses in his mouth and chewing on them at a murder scene,” he writes. “He chewed those glasses so hard it left that groove. It was an epiphany about his character, his concern for the victims — a communion with them, if you will.”
Or, like Ian Rankin — who is celebrating three decades of his John Rebus character in print this year — you might find your detective springing fully formed from your imagination.
“It’s happened,” Rankin jotted in his diary in 1985, while sitting in his home in Edinburgh’s Arden Street (soon to become Rebus’s own flat): “An idea for a novel that started as one situation and has blossomed into a whole plot . . . ”
***
For me, creating a detective in a foreign country required hard research. It began with an undercover operation in the Amsterdam red light district with the Dutch National Crime Squad, who granted me permission to shadow them. Sex work in the red light district is legal, yet most sex workers are from elsewhere. One street, Molensteeg, is known locally as Little Hungary, due to its population’s background. How did they get there?
Leading the operation that evening was a detective named Henk — a clear-eyed, shaven-headed police veteran with a background in the psychology of trauma. He owned a Yamaha motorbike, and looked like both a biker and a Buddhist. So my character, Detective Henk van der Pol, was born (I would give him a BMW bike).
For me it began with an undercover operation in the Amsterdam red light district with the Dutch National Crime Squad
My experience that night revealed dark truths. I watched as Henk talked to a Hungarian sex worker. Her leg was bruised but the detective later explained that traffickers were using physical violence less now, preferring blackmail and psychological methods — “better for business”. All this found its way into the opening 100 pages of my debut novel. But that was only the start of what turned out to be a two-book, 640-page story, and a bigger challenge lay in wait: how to stay ahead of events?
“A classic mystery involves the detective being ahead of the reader, however canny that reader might be,” explains Henry Sutton, director of the University of East Anglia’s new MA in crime fiction, and a crime novelist himself under the pseudonym Harry Brett. “And yet the writer should always be ahead of the detective.”
Logically, this should imply devilishly intricate plotting — thinking multiple moves ahead. Yet while some crime writers do plot meticulously, many leading ones don’t seem to do this.
“So much of it is improvisational,” Ian Rankin told me, when I interviewed him last year. “The way a book comes to me is a kind of rough magic. Where do the stories come from? Sometimes they decide on a certain route that isn’t the route you thought they ought to go down.”
***
In my case, the answer was more research — accumulating some critical mass of story material and incident. After I left my job to write full time, entire days passed in odd circumstances: roaming the silent forest beside Driebergen in the Dutch interior, where I envisaged a chase sequence loosely inspired by Geoffrey Household’s classic pursuit thriller Rogue Male; a (five-minute) stretch in a cell at Leiden police station to understand how my detective might empathise with a kidnap victim. Slowly, various plot lines organised themselves into a cohesive narrative.
Entire days passed in odd circumstances: roaming the forest beside Driebergen, a stretch in a cell at Leiden police station . . . Slowly, plot lines organised themselves
It may be that the most experienced authors have developed a sixth sense for where to take a story. Like Rankin, Val McDermid has had books in print for 30 years now; she has sold more than 11 million copies worldwide. What clues could she give me?
“One of the ways writers stay ahead of the reader and their protagonists is that we work backwards from the crime to the killer,” she explains. “Often I’ve known the nature of the crime long before anything else in the book. Once I have that central idea, I have to figure out who is behind it and why and how they engineer what they’re doing, and the mistakes they make that allow the detective to reach a conclusion. Coming at it from that direction makes it much easier to hold things back from the reader.”
Another issue that may preoccupy the crime writer: the question of what to do with a detective over the course of a series. Typically, a character will start out around their midpoint in life, with sufficient experience to be credible in the role yet with a career still stretching ahead of them. This is what Rankin did in his first Rebus book Knots & Crosses, published in 1987. Inspector Rebus aged in real time, hitting retirement in Exit Music, two decades later.
But then Rebus came back, and has continued to return for a further 10 years — so far. “I’ve had to slow down his ageing dramatically,” Rankin told me. “I keep saying, ‘No, not another Rebus book.’ But then another one emerges. I can’t complain. Highland Park just brought out a Rebus 30th anniversary whisky, the flavour profile being: ‘Dark, complex and with a long finish’.”
Older detectives can have tremendous appeal: their experience, mental scars and physical limitations create a heady complexity
Older detectives can have tremendous appeal for an author. Their experience, street contacts, wiles, mental scars and physical limitations create a heady complexity. And there is always the possibility of going back in time — a well-marked path in Scandinavian crime fiction, as trod by the late Henning Mankell in The Pyramid, a collection of short stories taking his Kurt Wallander character back to various earlier stages of his career.
Jorn Lier Horst has done this too. In his most recent novel, When It Grows Dark, William Wisting works on a case in 1983.
“I had this investigative impulse to find out about him when he was a younger, more optimistic man,” Horst told me at this year’s Bristol’s CrimeFest convention. “It’s not dissimilar to how a police detective approaches the interview subject: what lies in this person’s past that can help account for what he has become?”
Or, the author could just decide that the character won’t age. This path has form, too.
“While there have been various interpretations of Miss Jane Marple for screen and radio, the character in the books remains timeless,” says James Prichard, executive chairman of Agatha Christie Ltd and great-grandson of the “Queen of Crime” herself. “Adaptations must be rooted in the original text but must also have their own creative life and be given room to grow. It’s what keeps Christie so contemporary and able to appeal to modern audiences.”
As Arthur Conan Doyle discovered with Sherlock Holmes, the important thing is not to kill the character off. Not only might this go unforgiven, but it also probably won’t work. Readers will find a way to resurrect her or him. And in this sense, too, the world is set to rights. For what the greatest detective creations enjoy is that most sought-after of endings: a secular immortality.
Daniel Pembrey’s “Night Market”, part two of his Amsterdam detective story, is published by No Exit Press; @DPemb
Illustration by: Louise Richardson
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