Thriller Writers Listen Up

I may not ever read the book that inspired this post by James Scott Bell at The Kill Zone, I find most 40's and 50's noir to be much the same, but this post, 11 Keys to Making Your Novel a Page Turner has some good advice.

There are some really good passages in there to read, but the eleven keys are:


1. A decent guy just trying to find his place in the world
2. The trouble starts on page one
3. Unpredictability
4. A nasty but charming bad guy
5. Sympathy for the bad guy
6. A spiral of trouble
7. A love triangle
8. A crisp style
9. A relentless pace with a tightening noose
10. Honor
11. A resonant ending

Without the supporting text some of these may be scoffed at, but whilst scoffing I encourage you to jump over to post and read the passages following each key. You will find great advice like this that bolsters the second key, starting the trouble on page one:


HE WAS DRIVING AN MG—a low English-built sports car— and he was a tire-squeaker, the way a wrong kind of guy is apt to be in a sports car. I heard the squeal of his tires as he gunned it, and then I saw him cutting in front of me like a red bug. My car piled into his and the bug turned over, spilling him and the girl with him out onto the street.

Turns out the other guy and girl are not hurt. The guy walks over to Jim and sucker punches him. He's about to stomp Jim's face into hamburger when the girl who was with him grabs him from behind.

The guy's name is Buddy Brown. The girl is Wild Kearney (her real name. Love it!) And immediately Jim is drawn to her—another noir trope. She is a "bronze-blonde" but "looked like the kind of girl that would be with winners, not losers, top winners in the top tournaments and never the second-flight or the almost-good-enough. Not the kind of girl that I'd ever known."

So here we have both violence and potential romance from the start. And the Lead is vulnerable in both toughness and love.

The rule here is simple: Don't warm up your engines. Get the reader turning the page not because he's patient with you, but because he needs to find out what is going to happen next!

I have that series about the importance of first lines and first passages. Whenever I need to spell out why I continue that series I might refer to that final paragraph. "Get the reader turning the page not because he's patient with you, but because he needs to find out what is going to happen next!"

Anyway it's a good post, well worth reading to provide a boost to any writer. And who knows, maybe I will read John McPartland's Big Red's Daughter. If it pulled James Scott Bell into a "fictive dream" it might be well worth the time.