Does crime feature in your romance?

Do you need to know more about how the law worked in the period in which your novel if set?

Do you want to know what a scrivener is?

If so, you need true-crime writer Steve Wade’s useful guide to sources of information. 

  • Books – Steve recommended dictionaries of law aimed at students, and PACE (the Police and Criminal Evidence Act). 

  • Internet - For the historical novelists amongst us, there is the Old Bailey Online, the Times Digital Archive, and the National Archives.

  • Newspapers and magazines – The British Library has a newspaper archive, and universities with law schools keep back copies of magazines such as the Police Review.

  • People – some former policemen and journalists have first hand knowledge of a crime and its investigation.
 
For a list of books covering criminal behaviour, contact Steve via his website www.stephen-wade.com. He stressed that, though you are writing fiction, you need to get your facts right. If you have written a novel set in England in 1840 and there is a scene in which a criminal is gibbeted, then you have dropped a clanger. And to find out why, you will just have to get digging!

Written by Eileen Hathaway