Common TROPES in biba’s books
From serial killers and cold cases to hidden identities and dark secrets, these are some of the ingredients I love putting into my crime novels.
If you’ve read more than one of my books, you’ll probably have noticed there are certain things I return to again and again.
I love complicated investigations. I love secrets. I love taking something that happened years ago and showing how the consequences can reach into the present. And I particularly love giving my detectives a collection of apparently unconnected clues and watching them slowly work out how they fit together.
These are often described as crime fiction tropes. That doesn’t mean every story using them is the same. Far from it. Tropes are simply familiar elements that tell us something about the sort of story we’re about to read.
And these are some of my favourites.
Police Procedurals
This is probably the trope most closely associated with my crime novels.
I enjoy the process of an investigation almost as much as the mystery itself: the crime scene, forensics, witness interviews, CCTV, door-to-door enquiries, post-mortems, suspect interviews and all the small discoveries that gradually begin to build a picture of what happened.
Of course, real police investigations can take months or even years, so crime writers have to compress things. But I like the investigation to feel grounded in reality. I want readers to feel as though they’re sitting in the incident room alongside the detectives, seeing the evidence arrive and trying to make sense of it before they do.
Serial Killers
There’s something particularly frightening about discovering that one murder isn’t an isolated crime.
The moment investigators realise they may be dealing with a serial killer, everything changes. Suddenly they’re not simply trying to solve a murder. They’re trying to understand a pattern, work out why particular victims have been chosen and stop the killer before somebody else dies.
As a writer, that gives me the opportunity to play with patterns, connections and psychology — and to leave clues that might not make sense until much later.
Cold Cases
I love a crime with a history.
An old murder, disappearance or injustice can lie dormant for years until something happens in the present that brings it back to life. A new body is discovered. An old possession turns up. Someone begins asking questions. A witness finally decides to talk.
Cold cases also allow me to explore one of my favourite questions: what happens to a secret when the people involved have spent years believing it was safely buried?
Usually, the answer is nothing good.
Hidden Identities
Someone isn’t who they say they are.
It’s such a simple premise, but it opens up endless possibilities in a crime novel.
A false name, a concealed past, an unexpected relationship or an entire part of someone’s life that nobody else knows about can completely change an investigation.
It also raises an interesting question for readers: how well can we ever really know another person?
Dark Secrets From the Past
This one appears in my books a lot.
Something happened years ago. People covered it up, moved on or convinced themselves it no longer mattered.
Then somebody starts digging.
I particularly enjoy stories in which solving the present-day crime means going backwards. The detectives can’t understand what is happening now until they discover what happened then.
And the people who have spent years protecting that secret generally have very good reasons for wanting it to stay hidden.
Missing Persons
A missing person creates a very different kind of mystery from a murder.
At the beginning, nobody knows what has happened. Has the person left voluntarily? Are they frightened? Are they hiding? Have they been abducted? Are they even still alive?
That uncertainty creates enormous tension because every hour matters, while the investigators are often working without knowing whether a crime has actually taken place.
It also gives me plenty of opportunities to reveal that the missing person’s life wasn’t quite what everyone thought it was.
Race Against Time
Crime fiction naturally comes with stakes, but I particularly enjoy increasing the pressure.
Perhaps someone else is in danger. A witness has disappeared. A suspect is about to flee. Another victim may already have been chosen.
Once the detectives know the clock is ticking, careful investigation has to compete with urgency. They still have to get it right — but now they have to get it right quickly.
That’s usually when people start making mistakes.
Cat and Mouse
Sometimes the investigator is hunting the killer.
Sometimes the killer knows they’re being hunted.
And sometimes they’re watching the investigator right back.
I love that shift in a crime novel, particularly when the person committing the crimes begins reacting to the investigation. It makes things personal and changes the balance of power.
The detective is no longer simply solving a puzzle from a safe distance. They may have become part of it.
The Dark Side of a Community
Respectable streets. Affluent neighbourhoods. Quiet villages. Close families. Successful businesses.
I love putting murder somewhere it doesn’t appear to belong.
Crime fiction is particularly good at peeling back the surface of a community and revealing the grudges, affairs, rivalries, resentments and secrets underneath.
The victim may have appeared ordinary. The neighbours may all insist nothing ever happens there.
Give the detectives a little time.
Psychological Profiling
Evidence can tell investigators what happened. Sometimes behaviour can help them understand why.
I’m fascinated by the psychology behind crime: victim selection, patterns of behaviour, escalation, staging and the choices an offender makes before and after a murder.
Profiling isn’t magic, and it shouldn’t simply produce the identity of the killer. What makes it interesting to me is the way behaviour can help narrow the possibilities and suggest what sort of person the detectives might be looking for.
And, occasionally, what they might do next.
Final Reveals
This is perhaps my favourite part of writing a mystery.
The best reveals aren’t simply shocking. They make you mentally flick back through everything you’ve already read.
The clues were there.
Something that seemed insignificant suddenly matters. A conversation takes on a different meaning. A character’s behaviour finally makes sense.
I want the reader to be surprised, but I also want them to have had a fair chance of working it out.
If some readers guess the answer early, that’s fine. In fact, I rather admire them.
Why We Love Familiar Tropes
One of the pleasures of crime fiction is that we often know some of the ingredients before we begin.
We know the missing person probably has secrets. We know the twenty-year-old murder is unlikely to be irrelevant. We know that when the detective announces they’ve finally understood something, we’re about to discover whether our own theory was right.
But knowing the tropes doesn’t mean knowing the story.
For me, the fun lies in taking those familiar ingredients and asking different questions. Who is lying? What really happened? Why now? What has everyone missed?
And, most importantly:
Who did it?
A Question for Your Book Club
If you’re reading one of my novels with your book club, see how many of these tropes you can spot.
Which ones made you pick up the book in the first place? Which did you enjoy most? And is there a crime-fiction trope you will happily read again and again, no matter how many times you’ve encountered it before?