William WC Ryan (Matthew MR Hall) Books in Order

This page points to a different kind of project. Instead of a novel sequence, it brings together the work Matthew Hall and William Ryan did on Writing Crime Fiction, a short, practical guide built from their experience as working crime writers and teachers. If you are expecting a detective, a body, and a final reveal, this is not that. It is the behind-the-scenes version.

This page is about craft, not canon.

Hall and Ryan come to the subject from useful angles. Hall wrote legal and crime drama for television before building the Jenny Cooper novels. Ryan is known for historical crime and suspense, especially the Captain Korolev books and later historical mysteries. Put together, they offer a grounded look at how crime fiction is assembled, from the first idea to the final shape on the page.

The guide is compact, but it covers a lot. It looks at plot, character, setting, theme, point of view, research, structure, and the practical question of what makes a crime novel keep moving. Because both writers know the genre from the inside, the advice tends to stay close to the real problems writers hit: where the mystery begins, how much information to hold back, how to build tension fairly, and how to make the investigation feel like it matters to actual people.

It's slim, but not slight.

One useful thing about this collaboration is that it does not treat crime fiction as one narrow formula. Hall and Ryan both write books where institutions matter, where the setting does real work, and where the central puzzle has emotional consequences. That carries over here. The emphasis is not only on clues and tricks. It is also on dramatic pressure, believable motives, and the wider world around the crime. In other words, they are interested in why a story grips, not just how to hide the culprit.

Readers coming to this page should expect a practical tone rather than a grand theory of literature. The appeal is that the advice is direct, experienced, and genre-specific. New writers can use it as a first map. More experienced writers may find it a good reset when a draft has gone flat or a plot has turned into a tangle.

So while this is not a fictional series in the usual sense, it still fits neatly alongside Hall's and Ryan's other work. Both men build stories around pressure, secrecy, and consequence. Writing Crime Fiction simply turns that knowledge outward and shows how the machinery works. If you want a clear introduction to how crime novels are planned and paced, that is what this collaboration is here to offer.