Balancing Realism With The Need For Dramatic Coincidence
Every crime novel lives in the uneasy space between what could plausibly happen and what the story requires to happen. A detective chasing a thread through Melbourne's laneways should not stumble across a suspect by accident, and yet certain revelations demand a collision. The challenge is not whether to use coincidence, but how to disguise the machinery behind it so the reader leans forward instead of pulling back.
Scandinavian crime fiction, the tradition I come from, tends to work with cooler plotting. Norwegian writers lean heavily on atmosphere, motive, and the slow accumulation of small misjudgments rather than theatrical twists. Translating that sensibility for a wider readership, particularly Australian audiences where prizes like the Ned Kelly Awards reward procedural rigour, means accepting that coincidence will sometimes intrude. The skill is in letting it intrude at the right depth.
For me, the work begins with characters whose routines are specific enough that chance encounters feel earned. Where a Thorkild Aske story might place a hinge at a Stavanger ferry terminal, an Australian-set equivalent could manage the same beat in a Sydney pub off George Street. The geography doesn't dictate the coincidence, but the geography helps make it plausible. More about how the series is assembled, including publication history and international editions, is documented on my official author website.
The Reader's Contract
Readers of crime fiction grant a narrow permission. They agree to a controlled realism: ordinary streets, recognisable motives, the friction of bureaucracy and weather. Within that frame, they will accept leaps that other genres would not be allowed. A forensic technician in Brisbane arriving at a scene in the nick of time strains the contract; the same technician with a brother on duty at the hospital reads as backstory doing double duty. The trick is to keep the fictional world believable enough that the agreement holds.
When I draft, I keep a private list of the coincidences a scene asks for. Most are trivial — a phone ringing at the right moment, a taxi taking the wrong route through Northbridge on a wet Perth evening. They pass unnoticed, which is exactly what I want. It is only the larger hinges, the ones that change the direction of a chapter, that require serious engineering. A small coincidence is a grace note; a large one is a load-bearing wall.
Two Varieties Of Plot Convenience
| Feature | Forced Coincidence | Earned Coincidence |
|---|---|---|
| Origin | Authorial demand | Character routine and motive |
| Geographic logic | Loose or ignored | Respects distances and time zones |
| Reader awareness | Breaks the fictional dream | Glides past unnoticed |
| Distribution | Clusters near climax | Spread across the book |
| Typical risk | Loss of trust | Almost none when planted well |
| Common refuge | Twist endings | Quiet revelations |
The points above are not rules but tendencies. A forced coincidence is not always a failure — sometimes a chancy ending is exactly the note the genre requires. The discipline lies in choosing deliberately rather than reaching for the easy gear. A book that knows which variety it is using at any given moment almost always reads better than one that drifts between them.
Planting Coincidence In Character
The most reliable method I have found is to motivate coincidence through established behaviour. If a character is already inclined to walk the same stretch of Kings Cross at a particular hour, then seeing a face they recognise becomes a function of routine rather than authorial convenience. The reader, primed with the habit, processes the encounter as inevitable. The coincidence is still there on the page, but its shape is supplied by the character.
This is why I write detailed biographies for even the minor figures. A waitress who appears twice in a novel needs a home suburb, a shift pattern, a reason to have chosen the particular café in Parramatta. Once that scaffolding is in place, her appearance in a later scene feels like visiting an old acquaintance rather than a structural trick. The work of plausibility is invisible, and that is the only kind worth having.
The Geography Of Convenience
Place is the silent partner in any coincidence. Australian readers bring a fine-grained sense of distance and time zone to the page, so a meeting in Perth that influences events in Cairns the next morning reads as faintly improbable. I lean on that awareness by ensuring long-distance coincidences justify themselves through flight times, weather, or shared travel. A cyclone grounding flights across the top end can fold two characters into the same departure lounge without strain.
The same instinct helped me when plotting stories set outside Norway. Scandinavian geography is spare, populated sparsely across long fjord systems, and the dramatic shortage of population gives coincidence an almost mythic weight. Bringing that sensibility into a setting as layered as Hobart or Adelaide demands a denser scaffolding of plausible connections, and the writing time balloons accordingly. Geography, in this sense, is pacing made of stone.
When Coincidence Drifts Towards Suspicion
Most problems surface in revision, when the book is read aloud scene by scene. A plot that felt seamless at the writing desk often reveals itself to be stitched together by overuse. If a character encounters the right person twice in sixty pages without sufficient biographical reason, a reader browsing in a Melbourne Dymocks will sense the contrivance before they can articulate it. Their attention narrows, the page grows heavy, and the spell is broken.
The remedy is rarely to delete the coincidence outright, only to relocate it. Sometimes the same event can be triggered by a different character, in a different suburb, with a different piece of background. The thrust of the plot is unchanged, and the book breathes again. Recasting beats in this way is one of the quieter satisfactions of second-draft work, and one of the more underrated.
Conventions Of The Nordic And The Local
Norwegian noir and Australian crime fiction share an appetite for procedural detail, yet they part company on how openly they admit coincidence. The Nordic stream tends to treat accidental meetings with a kind of resigned gravity, as though the world is indifferent and characters happen to drift into each other. The Australian strand, perhaps shaped by the sprawl of the country itself, leans toward the engineered intersection: suburbs chosen, flights booked, shifts aligned. Writing for an Australian audience means honouring that expectation while importing the patience of the Scandinavian tradition, and the cross-pollination has made my plotting more honest than it would otherwise have been.
Letting Characters Drive The Coincidence
Ultimately, the coincidence belongs to the character, not to the author. When the protagonist is fully drawn, the chance encounter stops being a piece of stage machinery and becomes a stress test: how does this person respond to the unexpected? If the answer reveals something new about them, the coincidence has earned its place. If the answer is simply that the plot moves forward, the book has taken the cheap route.
In the Aske novels, the larger coincidences double as character moments. A chance sighting is also a hesitation, a grief, an unfinished thread from an earlier book. The dramatic convenience and the human truth occupy the same space, and the reader leaves the chapter remembering the character rather than the trick. That quiet residue is what a coincidence ought to leave behind.
Most writers I know edit coincidence in layers: a first pass for plausibility, a second for character, a third for rhythm. The final test is simple: I read the chapter on a slow train heading north from Adelaide, and if I forget I am reading a constructed thing, the page is doing its job. For anyone curious to see the hinges put to work, the next place to begin is the opening chapter of After the Fire, where the quiet machinery of coincidence is set in motion.