Hi Reader,

I'm writing my first crime-fiction novel. Actually, it's my first novel of any kind, and I spent a long time thinking about how to open it.

I wasn't thinking so much about the plot, because I already had a sense of where the story would go. What I wrestled with was the point of view. Who should we follow first? The detective is the obvious answer. Safe. Familiar. Readers know where they stand with a detective. But I wanted something different, so I opened with the killer.

Standing in the shadows, waiting. Heart hammering. Watching a man walk toward his own front door not knowing what's about to happen. While writing that chapter, I had to get inside the head of a murderer. The cold and calculating actions. The way someone can tell themselves a story and convince themselves they're right. He deserves this. I've earned the right to kill him. They believe in themselves and their actions.

What surprised me was that the people I've shared that opening chapter with all said they couldn't stop reading it. They wanted more. They want the rest of the book. Maybe they were just being polite, but it felt like they really were keen to read on. In any event, they'll just have to be patient.

I think the killer's perspective was the draw, which made me ask, why?

It's something I'm still turning over as I continue to write. The easy answer is the puzzle. Crime fiction gives the reader a problem to solve. Clues. Suspects. Timelines that don't quite add up. There seems to be a real pleasure in unravelling all the threads and a sense of satisfaction when everything, finally, clicks into place.

If it were just the puzzle, I suspect we'd all be happy doing crosswords. But we're not. We want the body. The grief and fear and the weight of a life cut short. We want the bloody mess that a simple puzzle can't give us.

The puzzle is a frame, filled with something much darker and more sinister than a crossword or sudoku could ever be.

That makes me think that fear and uncertainty are big parts of the why. Crime fiction is where most of us go to feel afraid, but with a safety net. We sit in a chair or prop ourselves up in bed. The house is quiet. Maybe there's the odd creak, or the sound of an outside storm, but we're safely tucked up with our book and then somewhere in the middle of chapter twelve, a character you've grown fond of does something you know they shouldn't, or one of your favourites is killed. Your stomach drops, or your body stiffens. Maybe you take in a sudden gasp of air. That's real emotion. Your pulse actually quickens. Your body reacts to the story you're reading as if it was happening in real life. But, you're in control. If it all becomes too much to bear, you can put the book down. You can skip to the end. You won't, of course, but you could. That's the deal. Crime fiction puts you right up against danger. The locked room, the wrong suspect, the killer who's still out there, but it gives you just enough distance to breathe and escape.

Psychologists call this 'excitation transfer'. The tension you build while reading bleeds into the relief when it resolves. The higher the stakes, the more satisfying the release. Which explains why a good crime novel can leave you genuinely exhausted. But, in a good way.

Maybe it also explains why people who wince at the nightly news and turn off the television, or stop scrolling social media, will happily read about a dead body for three hundred pages. The news is real and shapeless and often doesn't end. Crime fiction has a pattern. The violence is behind glass. You can look at it, be absorbed by it, and know that no-one is actually being hurt.

Of course, nothing in life is ever that simple, including readers of crime fiction. There's a moral complexity, which is where it gets really interesting.

Real life doesn't give us permission to sit with uncomfortable feelings. If someone does something terrible, we're supposed to be clear about it. Condemn it and move on.

Crime fiction disagrees.

The crimes that stay with you, the ones you're still thinking about a week after finishing the book, almost never involve a simple 'monster'. They involve a person. Someone who you may have come to like. Someone who had a reason to make their decision. Their actions make a horrible kind of sense, given what they were carrying. Looking at it through their lens, you think, maybe, just maybe, in another life, under different pressures, maybe, that could be me.

You don't like the thought. But there it is.

Crime fiction holds up the worst of human behaviour and says: Don't turn away. Look. It makes you examine life through your own moral compass, which, sometimes, can be uncomfortable.

Writing a killer's interior monologue taught me this more than anything else. You have to find the logic in it, even when the logic is broken. You have to write a person, not a monster. Because the truth is, it's almost always a person.

But if I had to pick the deepest pull, the thing that brings readers back again and again, even when they can't say why, I'd say it's the sense of justice.

Not the legal kind, necessarily, because justice isn't always just. It's the idea that someone, eventually, will care enough to find out what happened. That the dead won't stay invisible. That cause and effect will hold, and the truth will surface.

The real world constantly fails at this. Real murders go cold. Real investigations stall. Real victims are reduced to a paragraph in a news report and then forgotten when the next story comes along. Real killers grow old and die, and nobody ever answers for what they did. Those in Australia, or at least in South Australia, would be familiar with the death of Bevan Spencer von Einem in December 2025. Gaoled for life over the murder of Richard Kelvin, and linked to the notorious Family murders of the 1970s and 80s in Adelaide, he never admitted guilt. Never named names. He took his secrets and knowledge about The Family to his grave.

Crime fiction corrects all of that. At least in our imaginations, which, I think, is where we all live more than we care to admit.

When Daniel Smith, my detective in The Ledger, walks into a scene and starts pulling at threads that his superiors want left alone, he's doing something readers already know needs to be done. He's saying this matters, someone has to know what happened. He'll pay for it, because the job costs every good detective something, but he goes searching for the answers any way.

I believe the best crime fiction detectives are always flawed. They're flawed in ways that seem to make perfect sense. Carrying too much weight, both physically and mentally. Drinking a little more than they should. Unable to leave something alone when the smart move would be to let it go. They're damaged by their proximity to the worst things people do to each other, and they go back in anyway. There's something aspirational about them. Their refusal to look away in a world that constantly offers an easy out, the good detective makes the hard choice.

I write crime-fiction because I wanted to write something that explores all of this. The way fear settles in and doesn't quite leave. The way an 'ordinary' person can do something catastrophic or unimaginable, and still be someone we recognise and like as a person. True to the stubborn, irrational need to understand, even when the understanding comes too late to help anyone.

If you're a crime-fiction reader, you already know what I mean. You've felt it at one o’clock in the morning, still in your chair or propped up in bed, the house quiet around you. Your eyes tired, yet refusing to close. Not quite ready to put the book down. Just one more chapter, or two.

Those feelings are the whole point. They're why I read, and now write, crime-fiction.
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KEN LYONS Author ​kenlyonsauthor.com​ ​​

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