Making A Killing: Cosy Crime Screenwriting with Bob Schultz

One day. Online. Everything you need to write a murder mystery audiences want to curl up with.

Cosy crime is one of the most reliable genres on television. Audiences love it, broadcasters keep ordering it, and it travels around the world. But as cosy as this crime may be, that does not mean easy to write.

Underneath the charm sits a precise piece of engineering: a sleuth we adore, a world we want to revisit, and a mystery we solve in real time with our sleuth.

In this one day seminar, Bob Schultz takes the genre apart and shows you how to write your own crime show that could be the next hit.

By the end of the day you will

• Understand the promise a cosy crime makes to its audience, and how to keep the mystery deliciously enticing
• Have a compelling sleuth we adore, representing us, the audience
• Know how to build a puzzle with clues, suspects and red herrings that all make satisfying sense in the final reveal
• Have a story engine that can deliver a new and delightfully dark case every in episode
• Leave with a one page outline for your own cosy crime pilot

Part 1: The World Of Our Cosy Crime (The Rules)

What makes a crime story cosy, and why audiences return to it for comfort. Tone, warmth, humour, and what stays off screen.

• Outcome: a clear grasp of the genre's conventions, and where you can bend them

Part 2: Your Sleuth and Their World (Meet Your Protagonist)

The flawed and compelling detective, the sidekick, and the community that keeps producing bodies. Why the setting is a character in its own right.

• Outcome: a sleuth and a world built to sustain a returning series

Part 3: The Murder (Building the Puzzle)

Victim, suspects, motives, clues and red herrings. How to work backwards from the solution and plants everything in plain sight.

• Outcome: a working method for plotting a fair mystery with a satisfying reveal

Part 4: Whodunnit? From Idea to Pilot

Turning your concept into a pilot and a series. Episode shape, the returning cast, and what makes a cosy crime pitch stand out.

• Outcome: a one page pilot outline and a pitch for your series

Bonus sessions from the London Screenwriters' Festival

To help you on your journey into cosy crime, we are sharing three sessions from this last festival. All dedicated to cosy crime (three hours)

Bonus 1: Creating a Crime Series, with Daragh Carville (The Bay)

Daragh traces his route from Northern Irish theatre to co-creating and showrunning ITV's The Bay, including the years of unmade pilots that came first.

• How UK TV development really works, and how long it takes
• Why genre is central to getting commissioned
• How to build a story engine that generates new stories every series
• How research and an ingenue character can open up your world

Bonus 2: From Idea to Screen in Nine Months, with Ash Ditta and Andy deEmmony (The Feud)

How a real row with a neighbour over a party wall became a six part Channel 5 thriller, green lit on a Zoom call.

• How to let characters generate plot, not the other way round
• How to write to ad breaks, where six hours is really 24 acts
• Why writing a part a well known actor wants to play gets shows made
• How to write for a tight budget, where every character earns their place

Bonus 3: Breaking In and Writing for Returning Shows, with Andy Baylis and Rebecca Wojciechowski (Father Brown, Silent Witness)

Two working writers on their routes in, from temping and script reading to continuing drama and on to primetime crime.

• The entry points into TV writing right now
• How to pitch an episode for an existing show
• What an hour of TV pays, and how the fee is staged
• How to survive rewrites when a script is torn up