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These how2rite titles may help you in your writing life. Click the jacket to order. For others click here
Crime
the crime writer's handbook
plotting and writing suspense fiction
write away
writing the modern mystery
writing mysteries
writing the novel from plot to print

The Crime Writer's Handbook
by Douglas Wynn

In alphabetical order the book shows how to commit murder, listing 65 ways to kill, from contrived accident to throat-cutting. It explains what the victim and the murder scene will look like, and what clues give the game away. Chapters on police procedures, what happens in the courtroom and post-mortems help lend convincing detail.

The author explains what rigor mortis, corpus delicti, and folie a deux are and draws on real life and fiction to provide a reference for aspiring literary killers.

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Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction
by Patricia Highsmith

Quills and carbon paper and typewriters are things of the past; but here Patricia Highsmith reveals the universal secrets of the writer's craft.

Suspense writer Highsmith tells it as she sees it. Here she discusses technique before words are even written down in the first place.

Highsmith was born in Texas in 1921, grew up in New York, spent most of her life in Europe and died in Switzerland in 1995.

Her creation, the great conman Tom Ripley wanders Europe and lives on in her books and the films made of them.

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Write Away
by Elizabeth George

Prolific crime Writer Elizabeth George is one of the most successful writers of crime fiction in the world and here shares her experience with would-be novelists, and with crime fiction fans alike.

Drawing extensively on her own work, and that of other bestselling writers, she illustrates her points about plotting, characterisation and technique with clarity.

Elizabeth George has said that those who are succesfully published are those who do not give up.

Here, she includes frank extracts from diaries kept as she wrote each novel.

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Writing The Modern Mystery
by Barbara Norville

Norville describes the most popular styles of mysteries, discusses plotting, character development, and background, and tells how to prepare and submit a manuscript.

A common failing amongst new writers was, not surprisingly, is inexperience. Norville was a Mystery editor for ten years at Simon & Schuster and in a career of more than 20 years turned many authors into professional writers.

She developed a set of blueprints to ease the way, and this book is a distillation of those blueprints.

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Writing mysteries
edited by Sue Grafton
Mystery fiction is a species all its own, and writing it can be a special type of puzzle.
This book is almost a writer's conference where readers will learn how to make their stories more taut, more real, more immediate, and more fraught with tension.

The book's contributors are all members of the Mystery Writers of America who know well the mystery story form, and theyl help readers learn it.

The writers know how to tighten the screws of suspense, and they promise to hand readers a tool to loosen the nuts and bolts of the craft.

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Writing the Novel from Plot to Print
by Lawrence Block

Block is a hugely successful writer of crime novels and for some years was a columnist with Writers Digest in the USA.

Here he chats openly about the work of a crime writer as seen through his own experiences.

The book offers aspiring novelists guidelines for developing plot ideas, characters, and the storyline as well as rewriting the manuscript, finding a literary agent, and getting work published.

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