Hi Reader,

I read John Sandford's first Lucas Davenport novel, Rules of Prey, a long time ago. It still comes back to me, even now. I certainly don't remember all the fine details, but I do remember the feeling of the story. I remember the discomfort that didn't sit well when I finally closed the book’s covers.

I think that’s the test of a good book. It's not about whether you enjoyed it at the time, which I certainly did with Rules of Prey, but, I think, it's about whether the story keeps coming back years later.

Most crime novels don't pass that test. You can have a genuinely good time with a book, find the detective sharp and the ending satisfying, and still find that it's mostly gone from memory by the following week. The plot worked. The puzzle was fair, but you closed it and moved on as a different book took its place. That’s where most books sit.

So, what separates the forgetful ones from those that stick with you?

I've been thinking about this for a while, and I reckon it comes down to three things: character, detail, and moral weight. It's not just about plot or prose, although they are important mechanics of a good story. It's really about those other three.

Let’s take a look at character first.

I'm not talking about a detective who is interesting to spend time with, though Lucas Davenport is that too. I'm talking about characters who sometimes make you feel uneasy.

(Spoiler alert!)

In Rules of Prey, the killer is a lawyer. Someone who works inside the legal system, whose job, in theory, is to understand justice and apply it. Sandford shows us that proximity to the law doesn't necessarily create moral order. It creates a better cover. You keep waiting for the killer's logic to make a horrible kind of sense. And then, it does. That is the unsettling part.

Then there's Lucas Davenport himself. He's a homicide detective, but he also designs war games on the side: board games and simulations in the days before computer games were a thing. The first time I read that, I thought it was just a character quirk, something to distinguish him from every other cop on the shelf. But after thirty years working in policing, I think it's actually one of the truest things in the book. The best cops I knew didn't just follow procedure, going through the motions in the hope of solving a crime. They thought laterally. They built models in their heads. If I were the offender, what would the game look like from my side? What are the rules, and where do they break? Lucas's game design isn't incidental to how he thinks. It's part of him. He uses the same skills and applies them to his work as a detective.

That's what I mean by detail.

The detail that works best is the one that tells you something true about a character that the plot doesn't always require. It's unnecessary in the best possible way. Lucas could be a good detective without his game design mentality, but that added dimension brings more depth to his character. It's why we believe in him.

And then there's moral weight, which is the hardest thing to manufacture, and is something I think readers can feel when it's missing. We might not conceptualise it, but we feel it deep inside.

Like I said in an ​earlier email​, the best crime fiction makes you examine your own moral compass. The good stories leave you with questions that don't close when the case does. Things like whether a person who understands the law better than most of us can still choose not to follow it, or whether the systems we trust to produce justice actually do. Those questions follow you out of the book and into the real world.

That combination of unsettling character, unexpected detail, and a moral question (or two!) the book refuses to answer for you, is rarer than it should be. You can outline a believable and admirable detective. You can construct a twist. But you can't manufacture the sense that the writer actually wrestled with those questions inside the book. That sense of morality builds up through the story, but it’s not always something the reader is conscious of.

I think about this a lot with the novel I'm writing right now. There are two characters at its heart, and both of them are carrying something from their past that they can't set aside. One is doing something the law would not sanction. The other is trying to decide whether to stop her. The longer it goes on, the less certain he is that he wants to. Writing them is harder than I expected. I think it’s because those three things together are a high bar to meet, and you can only really tell whether you got there once it's done.

It’s something I’m conscious of, even if the reader isn’t.

P.S. – Which crime novel are you still thinking about, years later? Hit reply and tell me. I'm genuinely curious what it is, and what it is about the book that won't let you go.

KEN LYONS Author ​kenlyonsauthor.com​ ​​

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