Month: March 2025

Introduction to Mac Durridge, PI

Posted on by Tony McFadden

Back in, I don’t know when, while I was living on the Central Coast of NSW, we took the scenic route home along the beach through Budgewoi, and I spotted a cheap sign advertising “PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR” in white letters on black paint, with a mobile number listed below it.

I don’t remember which town. If I could find the place again, I’d take a picture of that sign and use it as a cover. Maybe all my covers for this series of books.

But I wondered—what the hell would a PI do for work in a small town of 3,000? Definitely nothing undercover. After a short time, he’d know all the town’s secrets, as well as those of the surrounding towns.

And thus was born Malcolm Durridge, a former NSW Police Senior Sergeant who left the force under mysterious circumstances. (Perhaps something for a future book. Perhaps.) He now operates a one-man PI shop above a TAB betting establishment in a small, fake town on Tuggerah Lake.

Mac’s cases vary from bank fraud and international conspiracies to a 13-year-old kid paying him $25 to find his stolen coin collection.

He got an old attorney friend whose help he frequently needs, an ex-wife (who is well on her way to becoming a doctor) and Barry (Baz), an indeterminately aged man who chooses to live homeless. Baz serves as his invisible (to the rest of society) source, keeping an eye on things when things need an eye or two.

E-books can be found on Amazon here, with more e-retailers coming soon.

Paperbacks (including Large Print) are on Barnes & Noble: Mac D | A Step Too Far | Hunter/Prey and other good and evil bookstores.

Subscribe (at the top right of this page) to be notified when the next in the series, Fast Track (18 July), is available for pre-order.

fingers typing on a keyboard, much like mine are now.

Why I Write What I Write

Posted on by Tony McFadden

I’m sure that if I ever visit a therapist (and we all should at least once in our lives), they’d root out some childhood experience that drives me to write what I write.

It’s not the obsession with writing itself but rather the obsession with crafting crime fiction, where the good guys risk everything to take down the bad guys. I’ve penned a few science fiction stories, too; one was wrapped up in a police procedural, while the other featured good-guy aliens fighting their own planet to save Earth.

Good guys serving up justice.

‘Guys’, of course, is gender-neutral. In my books, you’ll find plenty of female protagonists and female whatever the henchfolk of protagonists are called. Fierce, fighting and undistressed damsels.

But back to it.

After the first half dozen books, I realised what I enjoyed writing were tales of bad people trying something bad and the good people bringing them to justice. Morals were mostly black and white. The baddies rarely had good traits, but the good guys could be morally grey when the situation called for it.

Then, it is just a matter of finding new crimes, new situations where the bad guys could be identifiable as horrible and the good guys appropriately outraged.

Inevitably, when plotting, I’d make the crime incredibly complex with twists, double-crosses and missing heirs. But by the time the first draft is finished, it’s a meat-and-potatoes crime. The complexity comes from how the baddies try to hide it.

You’d think I’d learn, but it happens this way every time.

So, again, back to it.

Good and evil aside, I write crime fiction because I enjoy the problem-solving involved with setting up a crime, deriving a path for the heroes to discover the crime (while at the same time keeping the readers at least half a step behind), and the ultimate squashing of the bounders who had the temerity to violate societies norms.

And these days, it’s a soothing salve when that happens.

How *I* Write a Synopsis

Posted on by Tony McFadden

This isn’t how I think everybody should write a synopsis. It’s how *I* write one.

The requested word length will inform how much detail is required, but the structure doesn’t change.

A story naturally breaks into four parts:

  • Act One: Setting up the status quo, building the world and getting the protagonist into the story
  • The first half of Act Two: Into the meat of the story, where the protagonist is learning what they’ve gotten themselves into, up to the Midpoint Twist
  • The second half of Act Two: Revising the journey to fit with the change that comes about in the midpoint, up to the “oh, crap, we’re in the soup” all-is-lost moment
  • Act Three: The final piece of the puzzle is discovered, and the path to the conclusion is clear but riddled with ever-increasing battles until the big bad is overcome.

When a synopsis is requested, I write four paragraphs, mirroring the above list, with as much detail as the allowed word count permits. (I allocate 1/4 of the allowed word count to each paragraph). All major characters are introduced in the first paragraph. Major plot points happen at the end of the first paragraph, the middle and end of paragraphs two and three and at the beginning and end (if there’s a twist, and there should always be a twist) of paragraph four.

The synopsis doesn’t hide key parts of the story. It’s meant to let the reader know that 1) the story is completed (or at least thought through completely) and 2) you, the writer, know how to structure a story.

Now go forth and synopsis.