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It is a truth universally acknowledged that a crime writer possessed of an idea for a novel must be in want of characters.

All right, so we have our basic idea. What has triggered it off? Where has it come from? That perennial question, often as unanswerable to writers as it is to the readers who invariably ask it. To which the response has to be, who knows? Anything could have given birth to it: an intriguing incident that’s been squirrelled away for further use and suddenly raises its head with possibilities; the unexpected recall of an atmospheric place; a niggle that’s been buzzing around in your subconscious. It may be a new, exciting snippet of news that’s sparked off possibilities for a story; it may have lain dormant for a long time; but now the seed is there, ready to germinate.

And here too are the shadowy figures in the wings, waiting to put flesh and blood on the skeleton idea. No problem, one would imagine … it’s relatively easy to put together a few random people to carry the story through, isn’t it? Maybe, but the tricky bit lies in making them come alive enough for the reader to recognize and identify with, to care enough about.to want to turn the pages and reach the end of the book. They have to be realistic, recognizable and believable in an imaginary world in which chaos, crime and violence exist, or which will certainly intrude; a world most people will hopefully never encounter.

In an ideal situation, there would be a convenient recipe handy, a formula for creating such characters, but I’ve never been able to find it. In the end, I believe it has to be largely intuitive, relying on one’s own experiences and observation of how people speak, think and act. Human nature doesn’t change. The human race continues to possess the same propensities for good or evil, intelligence or ignorance, kindness or cruelty, love or hate, the same capacities for jealousy and revenge as it always has. But how readers will see the characters you have envisaged in the way you wish needs a good deal more thought.

How much does physical appearance matter? To begin with, readers need to be given a general but not necessarily lengthy picture of the sort of character you are envisaging when they are first introduced. Appearances being notoriously deceptive, something about them, the sort of first impression we get when we meet someone for the first time, is probably a better option than a detailed description at this point. We can leave it to the reader’s imagination to do the rest, to build up their own impressions as the book progresses and more of the character’s traits are revealed through their speech and actions.

It may be advice that’s been given too often, but it’s not a bad idea to try to get under the skin of one’s characters. Look at how actors do this, stepping into the life of a role and being that person – and then look at how successfully they handle characters when they turn their hands to writing, be it novels or plays. Live, eat, breathe with these as-yet-imaginary people. Try to understand just how they will respond in any given circumstances (not least when they are under stress), learning everything about them, their idiosyncrasies, their habits, good or bad, as well as you know your own (some of which you might never have suspected you possessed). You can’t help but bring them to life.

As writers, we should know far more about the characters we’ve brought into being than ever ends up on the printed page. Like an iceberg, the ninety per cent mass below the surface supports what shows above the water. It can be self-defeating to give too much chapter and verse, slowing the pace if the story is mainly one of action; or worse, boring the reader. Better to allow for some speculation about them and their role in the puzzle that is a detective novel: why they have acted in such a way, what has motivated them. The satisfaction of working it out for themselves is after all is one of the things readers of crime novels enjoy.

Having said that, it’s worth remembering that if the book is not set in the present day. attitudes and opinions are bound to be influenced by the times in which people live. I have written crime fiction set in the past, ranging from the early Edwardian age to the 1930s, all in all a period of incredible social change. The holocaust of the First World War, beginning in 1914, turned the world upside down and afterwards, for most of the people who had lived through it, life was never the same again. Working men who had experienced the horrors of trench warfare and fought alongside those previously thought to be their betters had gained different attitudes towards social class. Women who had shown themselves capable of taking on men’s jobs during the war now sought independence and careers of their own. A million young men were amongst the countless number who lost their lives, leaving behind a spinster generation: the maiden ladies who later turned up in so much post-war fiction. Writing today, we must beware of attributing modern mores to characters who lived fifty or a hundred years ago, or vice versa. How someone thought and behaved about racism in, say, the Twenties or Thirties might not – probably wouldn’t – be how that same character would react today.

I am often asked if my characters ever take over and begin to take the story in another direction. Well, if such a thing should seem to be happening, I would take a good hard look to find where I’ve gone wrong. Maybe the character doesn’t fit in and should be part of another story altogether, but it’s more likely that they have stepped out of character in some way. They are not acting consistently with how they have been presented until then. It is sometimes necessary to ask readers to suspend disbelief, but not to overlook aberrations of character. As writers, we have to hover over our creations with a coldly critical eye. Consistency is vital, and unconvincing deviations jump off the page and take away any belief in the person you have so far created. If I find one of my characters persists in acting as they shouldn’t, they have to be put firmly in their place, or summarily dispensed with.

That isn’t always so easy. These people are your creations, your darlings, and you have learnt to like if not to love them … even the baddies – vices being more interesting than virtues. Villains can be great fun to create and to read about. We may smile and admire their cheek while deploring what they’ve done. Conversely, someone who is too nice for their own good can be at best irritating or worse, dull. But in an effort not to bore the reader, it’s sometimes too easy to fall into the trap of creating grotesques, caricatures rather than characters, or another Frankenstein monster … all best avoided, unless it happens to be your deliberate intention to feature such in your novel. I suppose, if we’re being honest, most of us are rather dull in real life, but this is not to say your characters should be. Nor do they have to be larger than life, although they can be believable if you believe in them enough, and consistently show in credible ways that you do.

Of course, creating the principal character is always the main concern. When I wrote my first contemporary detective novel, I had no idea that Inspector Gil Mayo was to feature in another twelve. Crime fiction was a new venture for me and I had no way of knowing whether such a book would succeed or not. I knew from writing my previous books that my central character had to be not only someone whom the reader could recognize and identify with, care enough about to want to read to the last chapter; but also someone I strongly believed in. So, when Mayo finally became established in my mind, he was an expat Yorkshireman, living and working in the Midlands, on the edge of the Black Country. Plain-speaking, down-to-earth, shrewd, occasionally bloody-minded, but basically soft-hearted. The sort of person I was surrounded with as I grew up, and knew well.

Unless he was to be a cliché, a stage Yorkshireman, he had to have other qualities. I was naive enough at the time to have no idea that showing him as particularly unusual or quirky, even outrageous in some way, was considered a good thing. I settled for the man as he first appeared to me. He didn’t carry any emotional baggage, he wasn’t a loner though he was a widower with responsibilities for his teenage daughter. At that point his love life didn’t exist, though that was soon to be remedied when he met Alex Jones, a fellow police officer. He enjoyed walking holidays in Scotland, his favourite tipple was a single malt and his passion was music, mostly classical. He was logical, persistent and a demon for work, and I did allow him a strong streak of perceptiveness, that indispensable gift to all fictional detectives, which must happily get them there in the end.

The so-called Golden Age of crime novels, where the focus of the story lay on the amateur detective, with the police a barely acknowledged presence, had by then long been left behind. With the detection of crime becoming more and more a matter of police officers working as a team, the police novel needed more than a detective inspector and his sergeant or sidekick to get to the heart of the mystery, solve the puzzle and apprehend the murderer. Inspector (later Superintendent) Mayo had to acquire assistants.

Detective Sergeant Martin Kite was younger than Mayo, impulsive and good-natured, a locally born, married man with a young family, willing to work hard but not ambitious enough for promotion if it meant moving his family away. The temperaments of the two men were not in any way alike but they worked well together. I have found that the influences of background and environment are useful tools for adding other dimensions to a character and I think it helped in this instance that Mayo and Kite had their roots in similar backgrounds, areas of historical significance in the Industrial Revolution. The tough character and typically dry, self-deprecating humour of the people of the Black Country is something very akin to that of people living in the north of England: an inheritance in both cases from the harsh times in which their forebears were forced to exist.

The possibilities of a career for an ambitious woman in the police was something which had interested me for some time. As the only woman so far in Mayo’s team had been Jenny Platt, a young WDC, I felt the time had come for more balance. Hence the arrival of a new assistant for Mayo in the person of Sergeant Abigail Moon. Abigail was young, university-educated, a high-flyer who had been through the rapid promotion process. She was everything the rest of the team, including Mayo, was not and therefore provided a good contrast and another dimension to spark off the other members of the team. She lived alone and was highly ambitious, and achieved inspector status before long.

What all this amounts to, of course, is that characters are only formed through the filter of the writer’s mind; there can be no set rules to follow, except learning to develop an eagle eye for inconsistencies and a ruthlessness in correcting them.

Sitting alone all day, over-caffeinated, making up stories and lies about imaginary characters on a word processor in the hope that someone will have the courage to publish your efforts is a cross that writers have to bear. But if and when someone does … well, like childbirth, the agony of producing it is soon forgotten. And meanwhile, who is that new character, hovering in the wings?

Integrating characters and their relationships with the setting and storyline is a key skill for the crime writer. June Thomson’s contemporary series, set in rural Essex and featuring two police detectives, reached ‘an extraordinarily high level of achievement, standing perhaps second only to P. D. James … in the art of combining the puzzle story and the novel of character’, according to H. R. F. Keating in Whodunit? He chose To Make a Killing for his list of the hundred best crime and mystery books, making the point that Inspector Finch enters the story ‘only after more than eighty pages have gone by. June Thomson uses those pages to give us three fine character studies of people who come to seem as real as anyone we have known in the flesh.’ Although she established her reputation with novels about investigations conducted by police officers, in recent years she has become a leading exponent of the Sherlock Holmes story, while continuing to take care to integrate people, place, and plot.