Making elements of your writing stronger. If you write mysteries, thrillers, action/adventure, suspense, psychological mysteries or psychological thrillers, this may be just the book you need.



It's filled with information you can easily apply to your writing. You'll find the insider lingo, crime methods, investigative techniques and even rules of evidence that can give your writing the boost of reality it needs.

the chapter on "language." Not only does it give you the lingo that police, detectives, and criminals use, it lists prison slang, "on the road" slang, and useful legal terminology. There are checklists to consult when your characters are on fact-findng missions. There's even a chain of command chart for organized crime families.

In certain areas of the book, the charts concerning chain of command and so on were Los Angeles based. That is interesting, and serves as a good guideline to start with, and is extremely useful if your stories are set in LA; however not all states are the same. It would be a good idea to check the area you're writing about to determine any differences or similarities the charts in the book indicate.

write a detective story!

Martin Roth has been writing for forty years, and in the last twenty, his focus has been largely on crime writing. He has written several television scripts for a variety of detective and crime shows, and has taught classes at both UCLA and The American Film Institute.

It is filled with useful information. You'll turn to it again and again.

Computer crimes, larceny, sex offenses, white collar crimes, explosives, INTERPOL, narcotics, jargon, evidence, and more: this book doesn't miss a trick!

Interested in buying this? Support Writing.Com by making your purchase of The Writer's Complete Crime Reference Book   from Amazon.Com!

Created Jul 27, 2003 at 4:01pm • Submit your own review...