How To Watch Double Indemnity as a Crime Fiction Writer

Every noir, neo-noir, mystery novel, true-crime documentary, and thriller offers lessons in craft. The task is to resist immersion and instead keep the work at arm’s length: to examine it clinically, forensically, like a body on a slab. That may sound hyperbolic, but studying what works makes it easier to replicate those effects in our own writing—not by copying plots, but by absorbing underlying principles.