Things to Avoid on Crime Writing – Working Undercover – Part 1

These scenarios will help you enhance your being detective; and you working as an undercover.
COPS AND DOCTORS

You can find the constant favorite in both crime and historical fiction. You’ll witness it in ER, NYPD, and in thriller shows like the X-files. The doctor says “OK but only for a minute” or it’s touch and go.  The next few hours would be very vital, or we don’t know what’s going to happen. It could be in a minute, or in a few days, you will never know with the coma cases. The law enforcer usually says nothing and just chews the situation in frustration.

Scully and Mulder actually devoted a lot of time hanging around in hospitals but you won’t notice it so much because the patients are not your immediate criminals or witnesses.

Get a new trend and add some spice and tension. That’s the way to get around this one. Maybe the patient is related to either the doctor or the law enforcer. We can also conclude that the doctor is not an expert detective as compared to the cop. But don’t forget the “Dick Van Dyke” syndrome that leads you into a whole new situation of cliché.

NEW PARTNER

In this situation, an expert law enforcer would have to acquire a new partner after the death of his old one. The newbie is keen, active and eager to please. Sometimes he might be burned out from his personal problems. This can be visible in modern-day films like the Lethal Weapon Movies. Screen writers have to make some twists and tension at the first few part of the series by having Mel Gibson as the ultimate suicide case, and that gave the first film an edge; however, it was lost in later installments. By the time the fourth part came along, they had been shifted in to a buddy movie relationship that all drama was lost in favor of a light comedy scenario.

You need to do some serious threatening if you want to utilize this kind of situation. Some of the people have tried having a dog as their partner in K9, having their mom as their partner in Stop! Or my mom will shoot. Sometimes, they also have tried having foreigners as their buddy in the movie Rush Hour.

We also the robot buddy in the sci-fi movie Robo-Cop, the alien partner in Alien Nation, the Magician partner in Jonathan Creek, and so forth. The list will just go on and on. However you engage with it, filling in the blanks is an easy in this situation. What you need is something new, something that would make it more real.  The likes of having a cop being given the politician doing a meet-the-people situation would also be a good scenario.

THE NEWBIE IN THE MORGUE

Once only the province of young students in Quincy, this turns up on in the CSI series. There are usually two ways on how to execute this situation. Either the rookie cop rushes out, hand at mouth, or he stand still, detached and ignored, as the autopsy proceeds.

Inspector Morse tied to subvert this scenario by having the old timer as the delicate one, and a twist of having the rookie as the pathologist.

Whatever you do, you have to ensure that you will not give the pathologist a chance to be self-satisfied and patronizing while explaining big part of the situation. In the UK, this is over-executed in silent witness and walking the Dead, and is considered as a lazy way to advance the story.

THE COMPLAINING LIEUTENANT EATS UP THE COP

This happens to every protagonist in films and television shows. In the movie Dirty Harry, he was rarely out of his superior’s office. It usually wraps up with the superior and the cop snarling at each other. So let’s make a twist, how about one of them completely calm and still? Or how about having one of them being deaf? That would be a different twist.

If in any case you might write this scene, please do not utilize lines like “I’ll have your badge for that!” or “I’m not covering for you this time!”

THE DEFENSE LAWYER

This is one of the favorites in NYPD Blues. Once you have introduced the suit and the briefcase with a touch of the slick hairstyle, this guy will say “My client has no further comment” or “You had no right to talk to hi without me there!” Then, everybody knows the rest.

Again, serious though is required to bring a new twist to this scenario. Your lawyer could have been a former law enforcer who knows all the moves, or a relative or lover of one of the cops? How about the lawyer who is inevitably defending himself?  It may come up in different creative situations.

THE CAR CHASE

The movie Bullit and the French Connection was the prime mover of this scenario, and the movie Gone is 60 seconds brought it into the 21^st century, but this scenario has mostly become tired. There are a lot of ladies and children to avoid on the street, many traffic signs to hit, and a lot of police cars to trash before your audience becomes jaded.

As the years pass by, James Bond movies have been utilized all the possible permutations, so you will have a difficult time to come up with something new. It would be a little better to add some tension in another way. In your aim to make it fresh, the chase element has sometimes been dropped altogether in favor of the race against the time in the movie Speed or Die Hard with a Vengeance. In order to succeed, you should acquire a good reason for the odyssey to take place; a disastrous outcome if it’s not successful.

But you also have to bear in mind that too much carnage and your readers will start to be reminded of the movie The Blues Brothers. And don’t use the scene that your main character is driving on the wrong side of the one way street, it is being overused.