Writing Detective & Noir Fiction
12-Week Course
Start with Week 1 below.
Week 1
The Two Contracts
Solvability and consequence: define the detective and noir contracts, then build your case bible foundation.
Week 2
Hard-Boiled Scene Craft
Clean prose, sharp dialogue, and visible behavior to produce scenes that force investigative state change.
Week 3
Fair-Play Engineering and the Unreliable Narrator
Design fair-play clue architecture, stress-test reveal logic, and differentiate puzzle omission from noir self-deception.
Week 4
Noir Desire and Moral Collapse
Build threshold writing, confession voice, and the moral ledger to track stepwise ethical decay through a full Phase 1 gate package.
Week 5
Nordic Noir
Begin Phase 2 with systems noir: build social-archaeology cold cases, map institutional leverage points, and treat AI as a cultural research partner.
Week 6
Icelandic Suspense Engineering
Shift from systems to social networks: build a network dossier, write closed-network suspense, and use geography as a plot constraint.
Week 7
Japanese Puzzle/Noir Hybrid
Build an inverted mystery (howcatchem) with three-layer plotting, intellectual rivalry, and moral cost.
Week 8
Latin American Noir I
Enter the neopoliciaco tradition: build impossible investigations where the state is complicit and persistence replaces resolution.
Week 9
Latin American Noir II
Begin Phase 3 with domestic noir: build crime-as-accident structures and map distributed complicity without a professional detective.
Week 11
Next-Generation Noir
Engineer eco-noir and techno-noir variants, audit fairness with non-traditional clues, and complete a final revision pass across all portfolio systems.
Week 12
Revision, Portfolio, and Your Noir Future
Complete the final five-audit revision workflow, submit your full portfolio package, and map your post-course noir project trajectory.