Great article from the Guardian on writing detective fiction by Rohan Gavin. Check it out!

http://www.theguardian.com/childrens-books-site/2016/jan/26/tips-writing-detective-fiction

Excerpt: “I love detective novels because, like a favourite dish, you always know what you’re going to get, but you never know quite how it’s going to be served up. Detective stories always have a crime, a clue, a suspect, and an investigator (or two), but the art is in making it feel fresh. With Knightley & Son I tried to cook up an outlandish mystery, where the main suspect is not a person, but a book.

Going back to my time at film school, when I first began writing, I learned that every good mystery needs a “maguffin” – a nonsense word the legendary director Alfred Hitchcock made up, to describe the elusive object that keeps a plot moving. The maguffin is an object of intrigue that everyone is pursuing, but no one quite understands, usually until the end of the story….”

(Tuesday January 26 2016)