Building Trust Between Two Strangers in Crime Fiction
Writing a scene where two strangers form a bond is one of the most demanding exercises in crime fiction. The reader must believe in the relationship before they can believe in the plot. Trust cannot be declared; it has to be earned sentence by sentence.
In the Thorkild Aske series, much of the tension comes from alliances formed in impossible circumstances. Aske is a man adrift in his own life, and the people he meets, investigators, witnesses, suspects, fellow outsiders, are often his only lifeline. When Australian readers in Melbourne pick up one of my novels, they recognise this dynamic from their tradition of character-driven crime writing.
Australian readers have a particular appetite for psychological depth, served by publishers like Text Publishing and Scribe who have long championed literary crime fiction. At a panel during the Sydney Writers' Festival, I am reminded that readers want the slow accumulation of credibility between characters, not shortcuts.
The process I use is less a checklist than a habit of attention. I watch how people actually behave when they are unsure of each other, the hesitations, the over-politeness, the way one character offers information to test whether the other will reciprocate. Trust, in life as in fiction, is built in the gaps between what is said.
The First Encounter: Setting the Stage
The opening moments between two strangers carry enormous weight. I always begin with physical positioning, who stands, who sits, who controls the door. In a Norwegian police station or a harbour-side café in Bergen, the architecture of the room becomes part of the dialogue.
Eye contact is another tool I lean on heavily. A character who looks away too quickly feels evasive; one who holds the gaze too long feels threatening. The reader registers these signals long before the characters do, which gives the writer a chance to mislead or foreshadow.
Finally, I consider what each character is hiding. Trust cannot grow in a vacuum; it needs soil made of secrets. When two strangers meet, each is carrying a private burden, and the scene becomes interesting the moment one suspects the other has something to conceal. That suspicion is the first thread of connection.
Dialogue as the Bridge
Conversation is where most trust is negotiated, and I treat dialogue as a form of bargaining. Each line is a small offer: a fact, a feeling, a question. The other character decides whether to accept, deflect, or counter-offer.
I avoid expository dumps in these early exchanges. Instead, I use subtext, a question that means something else, a silence that speaks louder than the line before it. A character who asks about the weather may really be asking whether the other person is safe to be around.
Pacing matters as much as content. Trust-building dialogue needs space. Rushed conversations feel false; the reader needs to feel the weight of each pause. I often write more than I need and then cut, keeping only the lines where something actually shifts between the two characters.
Vulnerability as Currency
Trust deepens when one character risks something in front of the other. Vulnerability is the currency of these scenes. A confession, a hesitation, a moment of visible fear, any of these can move two strangers from suspicion to solidarity.
Writing these moments convincingly requires understanding how people actually behave under pressure. I have spent considerable time researching forensic psychiatry so that my characters react in ways a clinician would find plausible. Trauma, paranoia, dissociation, these states change how a person speaks, listens, and decides whether to trust. Getting the psychology right matters because readers in Australia and elsewhere are increasingly sophisticated about mental health portrayals.
There is also a rhythm to vulnerability. Too much too soon, and the characters feel unrealistically intimate. Too little, and the reader never buys the eventual alliance. I let vulnerability arrive in waves, each one slightly larger than the last.
Backstory and the Stages of Trust
Backstory is another tool, but it must be deployed carefully. Two strangers do not tell each other their life histories within the first hour of meeting, and neither should they on the page. What I do is seed small fragments of history into the dialogue, letting the reader piece together what each character has survived.
In the Thorkild Aske novels, Aske carries his past into every room he enters. Other characters sense this weight, even when they do not understand it, and that ambiguity draws them closer. Australian readers often tell me they appreciate this economy, that a few well-chosen details can suggest a whole life without slowing the narrative.
Different scenes call for different methods, and I find it useful to think about trust-building in distinct stages, each with its own technique and its own effect on the reader.
| Stage | Character Action | Psychological Driver | Reader Effect |
|---|---|---|---|
| First contact | Defensive posture, measured words | Fear of exposure | Suspicion |
| Dialogue exchange | Terse questions, subtext | Testing the other | Curiosity |
| Shared risk | Revealing a secret or fear | Mutual dependence | Sympathy |
| Test or betrayal | A choice that could go either way | Loyalty under pressure | Believability |
| Quiet affirmation | A small, consistent gesture | Relief and recognition | Satisfaction |
This table is something I return to when a scene feels flat. If the dialogue is heavy but nothing else is happening, the characters are talking too much. If the action is busy but no one has revealed anything, the reader has no reason to care. Trust needs both words and silence.
Backstory shapes motivation, and motivation shapes trust. A character who needs something will trust faster than one who has everything to lose. Trust becomes a transaction that must leave both parties feeling they have gained something.
Writing Habits That Help
Some routines make this work more reliable when I sit down to write. The trick is to make these habits invisible in the finished prose.
- I sketch a brief emotional history for each new character before the scene, even if it never appears in the book.
- I write the first meeting twice, once in summary, once in full scene, to find where the real tension lives.
- I read the dialogue aloud, listening for moments where one character offers more than the other can accept.
- I cut any line that explains the trust; the reader should feel it arrive, not be told it has arrived.
- I keep a notebook of observed stranger interactions, overheard in a Melbourne café or on a Perth train, that I can mine later.
Over time, these habits become a kind of inner ear for trust. The writer stops thinking about the technique and starts hearing when a scene rings false.
The trust between two strangers, once earned, becomes the engine of the rest of the novel. Readers remember the moment a character first lowers their guard, and they remember whether the writer made them feel that shift. In crime fiction especially, where betrayal is always a possibility, the early bond carries the weight of everything that follows.
When I revise a manuscript, I look for those first meetings and ask whether the trust, when it comes, feels inevitable in hindsight. If it does, the reader will follow the characters anywhere. If it does not, no amount of plot can rescue the novel. Trust on the page is built the same way it is built in life: through patience, attention, and the willingness to risk a small piece of oneself in front of someone who could easily walk away.