Hi Reader,

I like to read a lot of different books. Mostly crime fiction. Sometimes it’s hard and gritty ‘fast and furious’, and sometimes it moves along at a slower pace. The slower stories tend to be more psychological than action packed, but they still keep me reading and turning pages. And, as someone who’s writing their first novel, it makes me wonder why. What makes each tick?

For me, I think the slow burn psychological thriller can be more unsettling. They’re the kind of stories that make me wonder what’s going to happen next. Sometimes, that feeling is uncomfortable, and while I think humans generally don’t like discomfort, there’s something in those pages that keeps drawing us back. We feel the discomfort. We might not like it. But we need more of it. It builds tension that we can’t ignore.

A lot of crime fiction tends to be a little more action focused. They’re the page-turners, the ones with bodies turning up and people getting hurt either physically or emotionally. There’s always something exciting just around the corner. Lee Child’s Reacher series is a perfect example. Reacher smashes through the plot like a freight train. Nothing stops him as he brings the bad guys to justice while leaving a trail of destruction along the way. You don’t want to put the book down because you know that more action awaits on the next page. And the next. And, probably, the next.

But, there’s an important distinction to be made here. Pace and tension are not the same thing.

Pace is how often something happens. How often a bad guy gets hurt, or a killer strikes, or the cops close in. Tension is more subtle. It’s what sits underneath the story. It’s that feeling of dread that encompasses you as you read.

A story can be both fast paced and boring at the same time. Something exciting might be happening on nearly every page, but as a reader, we haven’t had time to form a relationship with anyone involved. We haven’t come to like, or dislike, a character and so we really don’t care about what happens to them on the page. We have no ‘skin in the game’.

The slow burn is the opposite. We might read dozens, or even a hundred or more pages where nothing dramatic seems to happen. And yet, there’s a sense of dread building up over the course of those pages. We get to know the characters intimately. They’re almost like family in some respects, and we fear what’s going to happen to them. Every time we turn a page, our stomach twitches and tightens, even just a little, wondering what’s next.

Sarah Bailey’s The Dark Lake is built this way. It’s a story I thoroughly enjoyed, even though it wasn’t a thrill-a-minute wrecking ball. Bailey’s lead character, Detective Gemma Woodstock is called out to a murder in a small New South Wales country town. It’s the lead-up to Christmas, a time when most people are happy and enjoying their lives, but there’s something troubling about the case she finds herself on. Rosalind Ryan was a beautiful, universally liked, but close to no one woman who was found strangled and floating in a lake, her body surrounded by roses. What Bailey doesn’t rush in the story is the reason Rosalind’s death unsettles Gemma so much. Rosalind was someone from Gemma’s past. Someone who was tied to a boy Gemma loved in high school and his suicide that Gemma has always struggled to come to terms with. The case and her memories circle each other for most of the book before they’re finally brought together at the end.

Michael Robotham does something similar in his book Life or Death. The main character in that story is Audie Palmer. Audie breaks out of a Texas prison the day before he’s due to be released after serving ten years for an armed robbery that left a man dead. He’d admitted his guilt and done his time, earned his freedom, but when he broke out everyone assumed it was to reclaim the missing millions from the robbery. The whole book revolves around that assumption, which begs the question: why would he throw away the freedom he’d already earned? Robotham doesn’t jump right in to explain it. He lets it sit for a while. Lets you wonder why Audie broke out. There are flashbacks to the robbery and the still missing money. The tension builds all the way through the book until, at the end, everything makes a terrible kind of sense. Another thoroughly enjoyable book that doesn’t need flashbangs going off on every page.

And that, I think, is what makes a good slow burn story. They’re not boring. They don’t withhold information for the sake of it. They make us think, and the weight of not knowing the answer to the underlying question keeps us going.

These are the stories that mimic real life policing. The investigations that stall, where you need to just sit with what you have until the next piece of the puzzle falls into place. Sometimes that took days, and sometimes weeks, but eventually you got the piece you were hunting for, the one that makes the others make sense.

That feeling of helplessness, the time spent waiting for the final piece, was uncomfortable, but it was also the part where the real tension lay. Rather than the thrill of the physical chase, it was the frustrating lack of knowledge that clawed at the gut, making you feel uneasy. The unknowing was the catalyst to keep going, to keep pushing, to finally put the whole thing together.

As a reader, I sometimes want the thrill of speed. Something happening on every page, a reason to keep flipping. I enjoy those stories and will sometimes binge a series based on those thrill-a-minute scenes, but the books I go back to, the ones I tend to remember more, are the ones that made me wait. The ones that made me think about the characters and what was happening to them. They’re the ones I become more emotionally attached to and make me care.

As a writer, I’m finding it harder than I expected to balance pace with tension. How often should I have something exciting happening to entice the reader on? How much should I slow it down to let the reader build relationships with my characters? Slowing it down, building that tension and sense of dread, is hard, but it’s something I continue to work on so that hopefully, you, the reader, enjoy the story as much as I am enjoying writing it.

Not every thriller needs to race. Some just need you to sit still long enough to get to know the characters. To care about them and be afraid of what comes next. They let you fall into the story as you move through the pages, engaged and invested.

P.S. – Name a slow-burn crime novel that got under your skin, one that nearly made you give up but, in the end, you couldn't put down. Hit reply and tell me. I want to know what made you stick with it.

KEN LYONS Author ​kenlyonsauthor.com​ ​​

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