Writing Crime Fiction That Talks to Readers, Not Past Them

When I started drafting the Thorkild Aske novels, I made a list of every forensic term, police abbreviation, and procedural acronym I had come across during months of research. The list grew long and impressive. Then I read the first three chapters aloud and felt them grow distant, like overhearing a conversation through a closed window.

Norwegian crime fiction has always carried a strong sense of place, and the books I admired most were the ones that felt grounded in human behaviour rather than institutional shorthand. Writers like Jo Nesbø and Karin Fossum trusted readers enough to let the story breathe, and I wanted to follow that lead. The risk of leaning too heavily on police procedural jargon is that you start writing for a small club of insiders rather than for the people who actually pick up your book.

In Australia, where crime fiction has an unusually devoted readership and where regional voices from Perth, Brisbane, and the smaller towns in between are reshaping the genre, that kind of club mentality does not play well. Australian readers tend to respond to character, setting, and the slow build of psychological pressure. They also use a wonderfully direct kind of English, the sort that calls a spade a spade, and that has shaped how I think about clarity on the page.

This piece is about the choices I make to keep the language in my novels accessible without sacrificing the procedural credibility that crime readers rightly expect.

The Jargon Trap Many Procedurals Fall Into

Procedural jargon is seductive because it promises authenticity. A detective who rattles off a code at the radio sounds like a real detective, at least to readers who already know what the code means. The problem is that most readers do not know, and they do not want to feel that their enjoyment depends on knowing.

When I read crime novels that lean on acronyms and shorthand, I find myself pausing to decode rather than feeling swept forward. The narrative loses momentum, and the emotional thread I cared about gets tangled in technical reference. A good crime novel should make the reader feel they are inside an investigation, not auditing one.

There is also a quieter cost. Every unexplained term creates a small moment of distance between the writer and the reader, and those moments add up. By the time the plot pivots in chapter twelve, readers who struggled through chapter two have often quietly closed the book.

What Police Procedural Language Actually Signals

When a writer leans on procedural terminology, they are usually trying to do one of two things: signal authenticity or signal authority. Authenticity comes from getting the small details right, from understanding how a real investigation moves. Authority comes from sounding as though the writer knows more than the reader does.

I want the first and I try to avoid the second. Readers who feel talked down to do not tend to stay loyal. They may finish the book, but they will not remember it, and they will not pass it on to a friend at the local bookshop in Adelaide or recommend it at a writers' festival in Melbourne.

There is also a question of trust. If I explain a piece of procedure clumsily, the reader begins to wonder what else I have got wrong. If I hide behind jargon, they wonder whether I understand it myself. Plain language, carefully used, signals that the writer has done the work and can translate it for others.

Acronyms and Terms That Trip Up General Readers

Some procedural language is genuinely useful. Knowing the difference between a suspect and a person of interest, or between an interview and a formal interrogation, helps the reader follow the story. Most of it, however, exists only to compress information for the people who already share it.

A short list of offenders includes the all-points bulletin that nobody outside law enforcement actually requests, the "modus operandi" that gets repeated in every third crime novel, and the endless parade of two-letter agency abbreviations that mean nothing to a reader who picked up the book because they liked the cover. Each one is a tiny speed bump, and stacked together they become a wall.

In Australia, where English is spoken with its own relaxed confidence and where readers often arrive at crime fiction through a friend or a podcast recommendation rather than through genre gatekeepers, those walls are particularly damaging. A reader in Hobart who reaches chapter four and still feels uncertain about what just happened is unlikely to push through.

How I Keep Authenticity Without the Acronyms

My approach is to learn everything I can about the procedure and then write the version a thoughtful investigator would actually say to a colleague over coffee. That usually means longer sentences, fewer codes, and a bit more context.

If Thorkild Aske needs to describe a forensic finding, he tends to describe the finding itself rather than the lab process that produced it. The reader gets the same information in a form they can use, and the book keeps moving. I also try to let characters disagree about procedure, because real investigators often do, and disagreement is a far more engaging way to convey technical detail than exposition.

It helps that I treat research as a separate task from writing. I gather the material, I note the terms, and then I leave most of them behind when I sit down to draft. The story gets the benefit of the research without the burden of the vocabulary.

What Australian Readers Notice

Australian readers are remarkably attentive to voice, partly because Australian English itself is so distinctive. A character who says "I'll grab a coffee this arvo" feels immediately real, and a character who says "I shall obtain a caffeinated beverage this afternoon" feels like a visitor from another planet. That same ear for natural speech applies to procedural language, and writers who ignore it lose ground quickly.

The Australian market is also unusual in scale. With a relatively small population and a strong tradition of supporting local authors, every reader counts. A novel that alienates a handful of readers in Sydney or Fremantle has lost a noticeable percentage of its potential audience. The economics push writers toward accessibility, and the cultural instinct pushes them there too.

I have noticed this most clearly when readers in regional areas write to me about the Thorkild Aske novels. They tend to respond to the atmosphere, the moral weight, and the way isolation shapes the investigation. They do not ask whether I got the forensic acronyms right, and they are right not to.

Finding Balance for International Audiences

Translating the books into English and other languages adds another layer of complexity. A piece of jargon that feels obvious to a Norwegian reader may mean nothing to an Australian one, and the reverse is also true. Working with translators who understand both the source and target cultures has been essential to keeping the voice intact.

It also helps to think about pacing rather than terminology. A well-paced scene explains itself through action and reaction, which means I can keep the technical language spare and let the reader do the work of understanding. The same approach scales across markets, and it is something I explore further in How Geographic Isolation Shapes the Tension in My Stories, where the setting itself does much of the heavy lifting that jargon often tries to do badly.

Approach	Effect on Reader	Effect on Authenticity	Risk
Heavy procedural jargon	Slows reading, creates distance	Signals insider knowledge	Alienates general readers
Plain language with context	Keeps narrative momentum	Builds trust through clarity	Requires careful research
No technical detail at all	Maximum accessibility	Reads as unrealistic	Loses genre credibility
Selective, explained terms	Engaged, informed reader	Feels grounded and honest	Easy to overuse one term

What I Use Instead of Jargon

Where another writer might drop in an acronym, I tend to describe the action. Instead of "the forensic team photographed the scene," I write about the camera shutters and the careful angles. Instead of naming a regulation, I show the character following it.

Character voice carries a lot of the weight. Thorkild Aske is not a man who speaks in codes, and his narration reflects that. When he needs to explain something technical, he does so the way a real person would to a friend, which usually means without the technical vocabulary at all.

The simplest test I use is the pub test. If I cannot imagine saying a sentence out loud at a bar in Bergen or Brisbane, it probably does not belong in the book. That test has saved me from more bad writing than any rulebook ever could.

The thing worth holding onto is that crime fiction is, at its heart, a conversation between the writer and the reader. Jargon closes that conversation down. Plain language, used with care and respect for the reader, keeps it open, and an open conversation is what makes a book worth remembering long after the case is closed.