Customer Reviews

Howdunit: How Crimes Are Committed and Solved

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Does your novel contain a crime? Surveillance? Child molesters? From terrorists to street gangs, "Howdunit: How Crimes Are Committed and Solved" has complete, accurate police techniques and procedures for writers of every genre.

This guide is a master compilation of the Howdunit crime reference series. You'll find 29 chapters, 20 from 14 volumes and nine brand new chapters.

Begin your own fictional investigation into these sample chapters:

* An Overview of Murder

* How the Body is Handled

* The Autopsy

* Crime Tools Guide

* Crime Scene Search

* Interviews and Interrogations

* Profiling the Criminal

* Prostitution

* Tailing

Instead of spending all of your time interviewing police officials, simply add this book to your reference library. Everything you need to add realism to your novel is contained in one volume.

Passing on this book would simply be a crime.

Howdonit is one of a series of books for the serious mystery writer. The book outlines mayhem, police investigation procedures, and anything a budding - or experienced - mystery writer may need to know to make a story authentic. There is nothing worse than reading, or worse yet, writing, a story which has a clever plot, good characterization, but is faulty as far as procedure goes. With this book as a guide your stories will do justice to your writing abilities and your ability to research your topic.
Barbara E. Pugh, Ph.D.

"Howdunit" is an exceptional tool for the mystery and suspense writer. The information on investigative procedure, profiling, forensic psychology and so on, will assist the fiction writer with the reference material needed to make his or her story factual. It is imperative for the screenwriter or novelist not to just brilliantly structure a story but to add "realism" in his or her craft. Howdunit has helped me to affix genuineness to my storytelling by presenting the pure facts about crime, law enforcement techniques and the criminal justice system. I personally enjoyed the segment on the con. Howdunit provides a concise glimpse of the con's master art. This makes for good drama within the novel and screenplay. (It will also help you to spot one in real life!) I firmly recommend "Howdunit" and the complete "Howdunit" series for the writer who is serious about producing quality material. Excellent choice of books. Kudos!!

I have been purchasing the entire HowDunnit Series from Writer's Digest. I have been for the mostpart, impressed with how in depth each book is. This a good synposis of the series in one volume. My disappointment came mainly from the section on Autopsies. I wanted there to be more from the book it was exerpted from. Also, I would love to see the book "Police Procedural" come back into print. I would recommend it to anyone who is writing fiction about cops, detectives and forensic professionals.

This is a good book for writers. It's interesting to read and covers a wide range of subjects. However, because it covers such a wide range of subjects, it doesn't give a lot of detail about each one. So if you need to know a great deal of information about one particular thing then you'd need another book devoted only to the subject you need to know about. But if you only need to know a little bit about a lot of different subjects, then this is the book you should buy.

Howdunit is a concise resource for the crime fiction writer. No matter what information you're looking for, it's in here. I've found it to be a great resource for non-fiction, as well. I utilized this book for a speech on forensics, and I received an A.

Oddly enough, this book gives great hints for the would-be criminal. I don't think that's a good thing, but hey, we need the resource.

I recently wrote a story involving a police detective, and got numerous comments from my writer's group that there were factual errors about how he went about solving the case. Having read this book, I found almost all of those problems and was able to make the story much more realistic. The chapters on Forensice Psychology, Criminal Profiling, and "Bizarre Murders" provide much more than the "just the facts" approach I was expecting from the book. I highly recommend it to anyone who considers having a crime, a criminal, or a cop in one of their stories.

'Howdunit' is the consumate crime writers dictionary.
It is incredibly usefull whether you write from your criminals point of view, or the view of law enforcement.
Gives all but the story and dialogue. Chock full of ways to committ and, or solve.

While Howdunit provides good, accurate information on police procedure, including chapters on forensics, weapons and the tangled legal system, its information is, at the best, very basic. As an avid reader of mysteries and thrillers, as well as an occasional writer, I found that I was already familiar with the vast majority of entries. I would recommend this title for the first-time writer of crime fiction, especially those whose reading tastes runs to different genres, but if you've already cut your teeth on authors like Michael Connelly, Jeffery Deaver, Dennis Lehane or others, save your money.