What I read when I’m not writing crime fiction
Crime fiction is built around pressure: a secret kept too long, a decision with consequences, a person pushed beyond the limits of ordinary behaviour. When I am away from the desk, I often look for books that offer something different. I want language that slows time, ideas that open a wider world, or characters whose problems cannot be solved by following clues.
Reading outside the genre keeps my imagination flexible. A novel from another tradition can change the way I see silence, landscape, family, memory, or guilt. A history book may provide a stranger and more complicated motive than any invented plot. Even a short story with no crime in it can teach me how to begin later, leave something unsaid, or end at exactly the right moment.
This is what I read when I’m not writing crime fiction: books that unsettle my habits, sharpen my attention, and remind me that suspense is only one way to hold a reader.
Literary fiction and the force of ordinary life
Literary fiction is often where I go to study people without the protective structure of a mystery. There may be no body, investigation, or final revelation. Instead, the tension grows from a marriage that is quietly failing, a friendship altered by envy, or a family carrying an old wound through several generations.
These books are useful because they take small moments seriously. A pause in conversation, an object left on a table, or a familiar street seen at the wrong hour can carry enormous emotional weight. Crime novels need this kind of attention too. The central mystery matters, but readers also need to understand what a character stands to lose.
History, biography, and the evidence of real lives
I read history to escape the neatness that fiction can sometimes impose. Real events rarely follow a clean arc. Motives overlap, institutions behave unpredictably, and individuals may act bravely in one moment and selfishly in the next. That uncertainty is a powerful lesson for anyone writing about human behaviour.
Biography offers another kind of research, even when I am not looking for material. A life story reveals how a person edits their own past, how public identity differs from private experience, and how memory becomes a form of storytelling. These questions are close to the heart of crime fiction, where truth is often partial and every account has a point of view.
Reviews can also reveal how differently a book is understood once it enters the world, which is why I return to thoughtful critical reception alongside my own reading notes.
Poetry and the discipline of compression
Poetry teaches concentration. A poem may create a landscape, a conflict, and a complete emotional shift in only a few lines. It asks the reader to notice rhythm, sound, repetition, and the charge carried by a single word.
That discipline is valuable when writing prose. A crime novel can contain many characters and several timelines, yet each scene still needs a centre. Poetry reminds me to remove explanations that the image has already supplied. It also makes silence feel active rather than empty.
| Reading choice | What it gives me | How it influences fiction |
|---|---|---|
| Literary novels | Emotional complexity and close observation | More layered characters |
| History and biography | Contradictory motives and social context | Less predictable behaviour |
| Poetry | Precision, rhythm, and compression | Stronger scenes and sharper language |
| Essays | Argument, curiosity, and perspective | More thoughtful narration |
| Travel writing | Place, atmosphere, and cultural detail | More vivid settings |
Travel writing and unfamiliar landscapes
Travel writing is valuable even when the destination is not part of a future novel. It shows how place shapes thought. Weather, architecture, food, local customs, and the distance between communities all influence what people fear and what they consider normal.
I am especially interested in writing that avoids treating a place as scenery. The strongest travel books pay attention to work, class, history, and language. They reveal the gap between the visitor’s first impression and the deeper reality underneath it. That gap is a natural source of narrative tension.
Landscape has always carried emotional force in northern storytelling. A road, shoreline, forest, or winter town can become part of a character’s inner life. Reading about unfamiliar places helps me return to familiar ones with fresh eyes.
Essays for a wider field of thought
Essays allow a writer to follow an idea without forcing it into a plot. I read them on subjects such as psychology, politics, science, art, memory, and ethics. They are often short enough to read between periods of concentrated work, yet expansive enough to disrupt a settled opinion.
For a crime writer, essays about justice and responsibility are especially absorbing. Legal guilt is only one form of accountability. People can be responsible to their families, communities, victims, or their own private moral code. Exploring those distinctions helps create conflicts that cannot be resolved by a single verdict.
Essays also protect against tunnel vision. A writer who reads only within one genre may become too familiar with its signals. A broader reading life brings in different structures, voices, and ways of asking questions.
Reading habits that keep the imagination open
There is no perfect reading list for a writer. The important thing is to move between forms and levels of difficulty instead of treating reading as a professional task alone. Some books should be studied closely; others should simply be enjoyed.
A useful personal reading rhythm can include:
- A novel with a voice or structure unlike your own
- A collection of poems read slowly over several weeks
- A work of history or biography grounded in primary sources
- An essay collection that challenges a familiar assumption
- Travel writing that makes place feel socially and emotionally real
The best choice is often the book that creates a little resistance. If the prose is unfamiliar or the subject lies outside my usual interests, I have to pay closer attention. That effort can later become a new approach to character, pacing, or atmosphere.
Returning to crime fiction with fresh eyes
After time spent with other kinds of books, crime fiction feels newly precise. I notice the machinery of suspense again: the withheld fact, the altered alibi, the meaningful detail that seemed insignificant at first. Distance makes familiar techniques visible.
Reading beyond the genre also deepens the questions beneath a case. A mystery can involve justice, but it can also involve grief, belonging, power, loneliness, or the stories people tell to survive. Those subjects belong to every kind of literature.
A writer’s reading life does not need to resemble the books they publish. It can wander widely and remain private, curious, and unresolved. The important thing is to keep encountering language that changes the way the world appears.
Explore the books, translations, press coverage, and background behind Heine Bakkeid’s fiction, then choose a book outside your usual genre and let it alter the way you read the next mystery.