Behind the Scenes of Finding Marco: Sparks, Sub-Genres, and Structure
As an avid reader of crime fiction, I always find myself wondering at the final page: what came first - the crime, the characters, or the core concept? I love how the genre explores logical processes, relies heavily on landscape, and dances on a knife-edge by leaving subtle clues while maintaining suspense until the very end.
During lockdown, I decided to try writing a crime novel as an experiment. But first, I needed a spark with enough fire in the belly to see me through.
Finding the Sparks
As I've mentioned in a previous post, Finding Marco grew from two distinct seeds that had been fermenting in my mind for years:
The strange phenomenon of a forgotten block of land tucked away in an inner Melbourne suburb.
A fascinating nugget of trivia about the tiny percentage of people who use a catastrophic event to completely vanish and start a new life.
There is actually a third, crucial spark, but I am keeping that one under wraps because it gives away too much of the core plot. (Fair warning: if you read the novel and correctly guess what that third spark was, I'll happily send you another of my books at half price!)
Choosing a Path
Next came the framework. Crime fiction is a broad church with endless sub-genres, but I settled on a police procedural starring a young, inexperienced rookie: Penny Matheson. Little did I know that developing Penny’s backstory would leave me with loose ends to tie up, ultimately dragging me into writing a sequel!
The Power of Multiperspectivity
As an avid reader of crime fiction, I always wondered how authors pulled off complex plots. Now, as a newly minted crime writer, I've discovered a bizarre truth: the true driving influences behind a novel only become clear after you've written the last word.
Back when Frederick Forsyth’s thriller The Day of the Jackal first hit shelves in 1971, I was captivated by its sharp, focused glimpses of diverse people and situations before the main plot even kicked off. That tight, modern, multiperspectivity style stayed with me. When I stared down a blank page with no idea where my story was heading, I decided to borrow that introductory approach.
Before I even knew my way forward, I had introduced:
The death of Angela Snell’s husband in his Hawthorn bed.
The smoky aftermath of a destructive house fire in Geelong.
A woman watching a Melbourne-bound train pull out of the Geelong station, convinced she caught a glimpse of someone she knew.
How these vignettes would eventually weave together was anybody's guess. But they gave me the courage to push on and build the plot from multiple perspectives.
The Missing Piece
Looking back, I’ve also noticed that missing family members play a recurring role in my books. I’d have to dig deep into my own psyche to figure out why, given my own life has been entirely free of such dramatic mysteries. Perhaps it's simply that as human connectivity becomes more central to the lives of my characters, the inverse - sudden disappearance, or people never truly being found - naturally has to come into play.
If you decide to pick up a copy of Finding Marco, I hope you enjoy unravelling those missing pieces as much as I enjoyed writing them.