Lucie Whitehouse: 'The best way to create complex characters is to give them conflicting desires'
BY Maya Fernandes
20th Aug 2026
In this interview, bestselling crime author and tutor of our Writing Crime & Thrillers – Advanced course, shares her advice for budding writers.
'If you are writing about a real place, it’s important to get the details right – readers will let you know if you slip up. And whether your location is real or imagined, economy and specificity are key.'
We spoke to Lucie about her love for crime fiction, her approach to building an authentic setting and what she enjoys most about working with budding writers.
What first interested you in writing crime fiction? Can you tell us about the process of writing your first novel?
Honestly, when I started, I didn’t know a lot about genre and I didn’t set out to write crime; I just wanted to write the sort of story I enjoyed. I’d always loved suspense and I wanted to write something full of atmosphere and foreboding with juicy characters and psychology and lots of momentum. The books that inspired me then were Barbara Vine’s A Fatal Inversion and Donna Tartt’s The Secret History but I’d also just finished a classics degree during which I’d studied as much Greek tragedy as possible.
I began working on what became my first novel when I was twenty-four and it took six years. I’d been starting things and then getting frustrated when they fell short of what I was hoping to achieve so one night, I went out in the garden with some paper and a Bic biro and told myself I couldn’t go back in until I had three pages. I then made a decision that I wouldn’t get despondent and throw away what I had when it (inevitably) disappointed me but instead I’d keep working on that one piece of writing and let it evolve as I improved. It meant a ton of re-writing but that was the key.
At the time, I had a full-time job and waitressed three nights a week, too, so time was limited but I kept adding to the Word file. A turning point came when I joined a writing group that a friend of mine had formed with people with whom she’d done a creative writing MA. The group was serious – the other members were in their forties and fifties – and met every three weeks to discuss each other’s work in a kind but honest way. That accountability was key and I learned so much about craft. I’ll always be extremely grateful to them.
By my fifth novel, I wanted to do something different and by then, I had a much clearer sense of genre and of what crime fiction can do which, essentially, is everything. The only non-negotiable is a compelling mystery that is set up at the beginning, developed in the middle and solved by the end. The mystery is the engine of the plot and provides the framework and momentum but after that, the options really are limitless. Contemporary, historical, comic, hard-boiled, cosy, character studies or a cool-eyed look at modern society – crime can do it all.
You’re the author of eight novels, including the Birmingham-set Robin Lyons crime series. Setting plays a particularly important role in crime fiction – how has Birmingham shaped this series, and what’s your approach to building the setting of a novel?
The importance of setting is yet another reason to love crime. I love writing place, and with all but one of my novels I’ve had a setting before I’ve had a plot or the main character. Setting is vital because it shapes the story you can tell – what are the issues your location presents? Is the natural environment benign or hostile? (Jane Harper, for example, uses the harsh Australian outback brilliantly). Is it isolated or urban? Are you in a wealthy part of town or is life more precarious here?
Your setting affects your characters, especially your main character. My initial reason for setting the Robin Lyons series in Birmingham was quite personal. I grew up about twenty miles away and my father’s family had been there for generations but my childhood coincided with a rough time for the city – the demise of car-making at Longbridge, the Handsworth riots – and because we didn’t have any reason to go, we didn’t. My dad always spoke proudly about Birmingham’s history and role in innovation and manufacturing, however, and when he died in 2014 and I lost that connection to our family history, I went looking for it myself.
Birmingham is perfect for Robin because it’s a city that has been quite maligned (not least by her) but which she can learn to understand and love (obviously echoing my own need to know it better). She grew up there but only returns in her thirties under duress. Her appreciation for the city grows in parallel with her development as a human being – as she faces her demons and has some major learning experiences, she comes to know Birmingham properly and start to love it and belong to it. And more generally speaking, it’s hard to imagine a better setting for a contemporary British crime series. It’s a really vibrant, multicultural city with major universities, big wealth and great deprivation, new building and urban decay, a burgeoning crime rate and a police force so underfunded that the Commissioner has publicly begged for more money. It’s really fertile territory.
If you are writing about a real place, it’s important to get the details right – readers will let you know if you slip up. And whether your location is real or imagined, economy and specificity are key. You want to find the few well-chosen, precise details that capture the essence of the place for your reader rather than getting down everything you know. I can bore the hind legs off people about Birmingham these days but I really don’t want to bore my readers so I choose a few details that I hope will paint the whole picture.
Your upcoming novel Claim Your Dead is the fourth instalment in the DCI Lyons series. What’s your process for creating a lead character strong enough to carry a reader across an entire series, and what advice would you give writers developing their own series detective?
For me, one of the keys is giving a character real challenges, both internal and external. It’s not about collecting an interesting group of characteristics and putting them together in a person; it’s about getting inside a person and seeing how they see the world and how their circumstances and psychology interact with what the story throws at them. We know people by what they do and say, not by what we are told about them. When a complex, conflicted character faces big problems, you will have an exciting story.
Increasingly, I think the best way to create complex characters is to give them conflicting desires. Apart from self-medication, there’s a reason addiction issues are common among fictional cops: the detective wants to solve the case and yet he self-sabotages because he can’t resist drinking. When drunk, a character can be compromised, make bad decisions, miss something critical, and that’s drama.
There are many, many other ways to create that tension, however. My character Robin is a single mother who loves her daughter more than anything but her self-esteem depends on her professional success; her workaholism and parenting are at odds and that leads to big problems. She wants love but doesn’t really believe she’s worthy of it. She makes bad decisions but also has a strong moral compass.
And again, so much character work is done by specific detail. In real life, we form ideas of people based on how they carry themselves, what they wear, how they speak, how they deal with other people. It probably says a lot about me that I always remember what characters eat. Rebus’ diet of bacon and rolls and the occasional curry is pure characterisation, and I’ve never forgotten the steak sandwiches in Tana French’s In The Woods or the mustard collection in The Likeness. Food tells you so much about someone’s life.
When you’re working on a new novel idea, what comes first? The crime or mystery at its heart, the characters, or something else?
As I mentioned, almost all my novels have started with setting but the character and the broad brushstrokes of the mystery usually come very soon afterwards because they’re so closely intertwined. For me, setting is about atmosphere as much as location, and the atmosphere seems to lead me to the kind of problem that a character might have and then to the kind of character who might have that problem and then the mystery develops from there.
Which crime novel do you wish you’d written?
Mystic River by Dennis Lehane. It’s brilliant on story, character, place, psychology – it has it all. I am also a huge fan of Brighton Rock by Graham Greene which is a crime novel even if it’s also literary fiction.
We’re so excited to have you on board as the tutor of our Writing Crime and Thrillers – Advanced course. What do you find most rewarding about working with budding writers?
I love working with new writers! I love talking about craft – it’s one of my major preoccupations and it’s a huge privilege to share what I’ve learned over the years and help other people along their way. There’s really not much I enjoy more than talking stories and how to develop them with people who share the same passion. And as a writer, the learning never stops. I find teaching teaches me and the enthusiasm new writers bring is infectious.
Finally, could you share your top three tips for writers who are at the beginning of their writing journey?
- I would highly recommend committing to finishing a sustained piece of writing, however flawed, rather than starting lots of different ones then jettisoning them. I don’t know if I would ever have finished a novel if I hadn’t committed to one idea that became such an investment that it would have been too painful to throw away. Nothing is brilliant straight away, whoever you are – writing is a process of drafting and redrafting and refining until you get to what you’re trying to achieve. If you want to write a novel, finishing something novel-length will teach you more than any number of false starts.
- If you get stuck, I am a big believer in the power of writing by hand. Neuroscience speaks to the power of the connection between mental flow and the movement of the hand across paper and it absolutely works for me. If you need to, start by writing rubbish – literally ‘rubbish, rubbish, rubbish’, if necessary – until that connection between hand and brain kicks in. You’ll be amazed by how quickly it happens.
- My third tip is to find a community of other writers. It can be online or in person but having people to talk to about writing is incredibly useful, even more so if you can offer each other kind but constructive feedback. One of the things I have enjoyed most about the Curtis Brown Creative work I’ve done so far is watching communities form among people on courses together. They’re so supportive of one another and many stay in touch. I’ve met one group who still travel internationally to meet up even though their course finished some years ago. The writer friends I made at the beginning of my career are still my friends now and they’ve been vital. Book people are great people – find yours!
Lucie Whitehouse is the author of eight novels, including the Richard and Judy Book Club pick Before We Met and the Channel 4 Summer Book Club selection The Bed I Made. In 2019 she swapped psychological suspense for crime and published the first in the Birmingham-set Robin Lyons series, Critical Incidents, the second of which, Risk of Harm, was a Sunday Times Crime Novel of the Month. The series has been optioned for TV by Three Tables/BBC.
We're delighted to welcome Lucie as the tutor of our Writing Crime & Thrillers – Advanced course.
Lucie's upcoming thriller Claim Your Dead is out 3 September with Orion (Hachette).
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