Video: Telegraph Harvill Secker Crime Writing Competition masterclass: settings and atmosphere Many of these associations, of course, are being made inside the reader's head (in this case mine; you may be drawn to think of other things). Which brings us to the main point about atmosphere: it cannot be implanted or imposed; has to be invoked. When it comes to the mood of a book, engagement with the reader's own imagination is essential. Which means enough information has to be put across to trigger it into action, but not so much that it gets swamped (or the pace of the novel suffers). In the end, it's about using the right words - and only a writer's own judgement and intuition can say what those are. The key here is creating resonance. You want readers to come away with a feeling - one which is alive as much in their own minds as it is on the actual page. To achieve this, lightness of touch is essential, but the details scattered through the text have to be the right ones - they have to have the power to engage with the imagination. Often atmosphere is being evoked within the readers" own mind - subconsciously - almost from the very first sentences of the story. If a book grabs us from the off, our imagination is set to work engaging with the new world being presented and recreating it in our minds before a single phrase dedicated to setting or atmosphere has even been reached. Samuel Spade's jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth. His nostrils curved back to make another, smaller v. His yellow-grey eyes were horizontal. The v motif was picked up again by the thickish brows rising outward from twin creases above a hooked nose, and his pale brown hair grew down - from high flat temples - in a point on his forehead. He looked rather pleasantly like a blond satan. This opening passage from Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon is to all intents and purposes an example of characterisation. And indeed it it is, but listen to what's going on inside your own imagination as you read it and you'll notice that an atmosphere is also being created: the details of Spade's face, the repetition of the unusual v motif, the use of words like "bony" and "satan." Already we are in a hard, menacing world where the tiniest things - things that others might ignore - can have great importance. Watch out, we are being told. This is no everyday place we are entering and we need to be on our guard. A series of reactions and connections has already been sparked off within our own minds, so much so that at some level a picture of where we are is already forming, without a single line having been dedicated to setting. Atmosphere is paramount, it has grabbed us from the first paragraph, and we are there, with Spade and his assistant in their office. By the time a passage of description comes along, over a page further on, it serves to confirm the imagery that has already been forming within us over the previous few lines: The tappity-tap-tap and the thin bell and muffled whir of Effie Perrine's typewriting came through the closed door. Somewhere in a neighboring office a power driven machine vibrated dully. On Spade's desk a limp cigarette smouldered in a brass tray filled with the remnants of limp cigarettes. Ragged grey flakes of cigarette-ash dotted the yellow top of the desk and the green blotter and the papers that were there. A buff-curtained window, eight or ten inches open, let in from the court a current of air faintly scented with ammonia. The ashes on the desk twitched and crawled in the current. Yes, we think as we read the passage. It's not as if we already knew this, but almost. The setting for the scene - Spade's slightly shoddy office - fits perfectly with the atmosphere already invoked from the first page. And it has all been done with great economy - not too much, not too little; just enough to draw us in. The sounds ("tappity-tap-tap"), sights ("limp cigarettes," "brass tray") and smells ("ammonia") have all been covered. To them, Hammett adds a fourth, no less important: a sense of impending danger and death, deftly elicited by the twitching, crawling ashes on the desk. He doesn't tell us straight, but we know: something horrible is about to happen. I've mentioned these two books because they both illustrate an important point about atmosphere and setting: they have to be there from the beginning. In fact, the first few pages are where atmosphere especially has to be established. After that it will largely continue under its own momentum, aided by the occasional nudge, or perhaps nuanced or changed at various points as the needs of the story dictate. And how do you go about establishing atmosphere? I don't think there's any easy step-by-step guide here: do this, that and the other, etc. The atmosphere has to be alive within the author; the mood is part of what the writer is experiencing as the words are written down. We're not talking about "mood" in its shallower sense of "feeling a bit annoyed," of course. Simenon's phrase about a "poetic line" is probably cleaner and more helpful here. Once that's there, once it fills you and becomes one of the motors for writing itself, the atmosphere as passed on to the reader will probably take care of itself: it can't help but be expressed in some form. But I come back to the point about "lightness of touch": it's important not to overdo it. Not that you should worry about this too much during the process of actual writing: anything that's heavy-handed can be taken out during the editing process (top tip: write a whole first draft before re-reading or editing a single word of the text). Here, another of Elmore Leonard's rules is particularly useful: if it sounds like writing, rewrite it. If, when you're reading, you think, "Oh, here's the bit establishing atmosphere," it almost certainly needs cutting out. Atmosphere and setting are of course related, which is why we're discussing them together in this essay, but they're not the same. I've spoken mostly about the first; we should have a think about the second. It's become a bit of a cliché in crime writing now to talk about the setting and location - let's take Edinburgh as a totally random example - as being "a character" in its own right. There's a truth behind the cliché, however: the location where the action occurs will have a powerful effect on the novel, and subsequent series if it turns into that. The prevailing weather, type of architecture, the customs, language, mannerisms: all these are going to feed into the general tone - or atmosphere, again - of the book. Of course you may move things around a bit, in which case you may want to think about how each setting fits with the section of the book in which it appears. Not just in terms of the mechanics of the plotting, but in terms of its mood. Istanbul, for example, has a certain melancholy about it; Venice can be suffocating; Lisbon feels like the end of the world while New York can feel like the beginning of one. How does the section you're writing work with the overriding sense of the place where events are happening? Also - how much can you assume the reader knows about the particular location? Just writing the word "Paris," for example, can be enough in itself to elicit a whole range of quite powerful associations. Is that good or bad, though? Do you want to set your novel in a place that most readers feel they know quite well? Some of those associations might make your job easier, but others might get in the way. It's worth giving some thought to. My own crime novels are set mostly in Valencia - a city people have generally heard of but usually know little about as traditionally it hasn't featured on the Spanish cultural trail. That, for me, was a good thing: I felt as though I had a clean sheet on which to work. No assumptions or biases to take into account. The reader, I felt, would take whatever I said about the city as Gospel (ha-ha, the sense of power!). The "down-side," however, was that I felt I had a lot of explaining to do - introducing the city, establishing a sense of place. I couldn't rely on people's previous ideas about Valencia. In the end, for the first novel at least, that was a complicated balance to achieve while keeping the story going. And how is it done? Straight passages of description are fine (as the Hammett quote demonstrates), but should be kept to a minimum unless you deliberately intend to slow the pace down at specific moments in the story. Otherwise small details can be scattered lightly through the text to keep the sense of setting alive - perhaps the kinds of cigarettes people smoke, the food they eat (or the time of day that they eat it), or the quality of the light. Almost any local detail can work if used in the right way. The orthodoxy says you should write about what you know, and when it comes to setting there's an obvious advantage there. But it's worth bearing in mind that you may know a place too well, that over-familiarity may render you incapable of portraying it effectively to those who have never been there. Can you get some perspective on your setting? Are you good at describing it to people who don't know it? If not, you might want to change. Setting is hugely important if you're thinking about a series of novels. It has to be a place that you're happy going back to time and again. Are you going to get bored by it? Will you run out of things to say about it after the first novel? Another thing to think about is this: today, with so much information at our finger-tips, it's not beyond the realms of possibility to write about a place you've never even travelled to. Why not? Give it a go. It might be a liberating experience. It's only apt that in an essay about crime writing there should be some "bullet" points. So here we are, summing up a little: In terms of atmosphere, keep it light: less is more. The mood of the book should be instinctive and organic. If you're thinking about it too much something is possibly going wrong. Try to establish it on the first page (s) - but again, don't worry too much about it while you're writing: everything and anything can be changed during the editing process. Setting is important: how much do you know about the place? How much can you assume readers know? Is it only for one book, or a series? How does the overall atmosphere of the place work with the action you're setting there? Lack of first-hand knowledge of a city needn't be a reason for not writing about it. Lastly, atmosphere is sometimes more than just a matter of an overall mood: it can hint at something more, be an approximation of a greater truth - often the essence of what you are trying to write. It may be clear in your mind when you start, or the writing itself may become the process by which it makes itself clear to you. Whatever your experience, listen out for it: it may turn out to be the engine for this and all your subsequent writing. Jason Webster lives and works in Spain and his crime series is set Valencia. His first Detective Max Cámara crime novel, Or the Bull Kills You, was longlisted for the CWA John Creasey New Blood Dagger in 2011, and the third novel in the series, The Anarchist Detective, is out now.