Do You Think Like a Criminal?

by
John McFetridge

The opening voice-over on the show Castle says, "There are two kinds of folks who sit around thinking about how to kill people, psychopaths and mystery writers," but there are a lot more crimes than murder in crime fiction and we writers have to think about those, too.

A while ago I came across a story about some drug dealers who were tipped to the police because the money counting machines in their apartment were so loud they kept the neighbours up all night.

So, as I was researching money counters (which, by the way, now say how quiet and fast they are on their webpages) I came across this video clip on YouTube explaining how the money counting app for iPhones works:



Makes perfect sense to me, this is an app for drug dealers (or hookers) making a lot of cash deals and then making payments to their, um, "bosses," in parked cars and nightclub bathrooms and alleys - in a hurry so they aren't seen together by the cops or even by other criminals.

And then I read the comments and noticed that other people don't think like criminals. They commented that the counting app was off by two bills and that it couldn't differenciate between bills.

I quickly wrote a scene into the novel I'm working on that shows the money counting app in action, but then I wondered, is it good to think like a criminal all the time?

Castle fnishes his voice over with, "I'm the kind that pays better," and that may be true between psycopaths and mystery writers, but when it comes to writers of other kinds of crimes, that's not usually true.

I'm never going to need the money counting app for my iPhone