From Issue 6, September 2002:

Crime Pays

Lucy Scher cracks the genre code

Many writers do not understand the differences between the mystery and thriller genres. The Crime genre encompasses far more than these two. Lucy Scher takes us on a tour of the main crime genres.

The principle informing the ideas in these articles in ScriptWriter Magazine about genre is that each of us is our own best resource for defining how the story we are writing can resonate emotionally, and we can then make the practical choices about characters and events to supply the meaning and the entertainment required in the screenplay. Writers rarely appear to sit down and decide to write in a particular genre. It is more likely that a character, a situation or an actual event provides the impetus to write a story.

In my experience, the question of where your story comes from is almost always revealed in one or two significant moments in the script. The problem with significant moments is that they don’t automatically dictate the story. I have been known to say, like most of us, in some surreal or comic or tense moment in my own life and being as articulate as I am, ‘Cor, this could be a film!’ What moments like these don’t tell us is what happened before, after and at the end; who is doing it and what all the subplots are. Yet that moment or situation still grabs us as something significant. Take that moment, unpack it and work out why it is important. My guess is that it will always be because of the emotional resonance it contains. You can then take the tools of genre – explained in these articles – to define and structure a screen story around it.

The reason for this preamble will become clear later. Crime is the broad genre I want to look at this time. Since crime informs numerous genres, it may be useful at the script stage to make some observations about the types of crime and the types of stories used to tell them. The joy of crime in terms of screenplays is that it offers an obvious structure: a crime is committed, the crime is solved and justice is delivered. This can then be dissected and played with, but in screen stories the concept of justice, the resolution to the story, is the emotional key to this hugely complex subject.

Injustice is something of which we all have experience. The process of growing up involves learning that life isn’t fair. If we are lucky, this truth is learned in a safe and secure environment and includes realising that you can’t always have what you want when you want it, be it an ice cream or more of Mum. Moving down the scale, the experience can of course be much more brutal, that is, being exploited or living in an environment which is manifestly unjust.

Whatever our individual experience, the concept of justice means something to all of us. It is this meaning, almost instinctive, which emotionally involves us in stories about crimes. Our expectation about how justice is delivered and to whom rests on the type of story. If your screenplay is informed by or is structured around a crime, it will be fruitful to think about your treatment of justice as early as possible. If you don’t do this work you may not deliver the necessary emotional punch in the story that will satisfy your reader or audience.

Usually, if a crime is committed for personal gain, for example, murdering or terrorising someone for profit or some other self-interested goal, then the audience require some form of justice be delivered to the perpetrator. However, the same actions with different motives such as mercy killing, breaking the law because the law is unjust, or being cleverer than the law, may not require the perpetrator to be brought to justice.

CONT. in Issue 6.