By Des Brady
If someone ever gained access to my browser history without context, I’d be in trouble.
Not the awkward ads kind of trouble. The call-a-lawyer kind.
Writing crime and psychological fiction has a way of turning perfectly law-abiding people into digital suspects. The questions you ask in the name of realism don’t look innocent when stripped of intent.
This is not a how-to guide. It’s a confession.
The Searches That Would Trigger a Red Flag
Let’s start with the obvious ones.
How to fake a death
What mushroom can kill you (very topical!)
How long does it take to drown?
Can hypothermia cause hallucinations?
How much blood loss is fatal?
These are not curiosity-driven Googles (or other engines). They’re precision questions, usually asked at odd hours, followed by a long pause where you stare at the screen and think: This is going to look bad.
The trick is specificity. Crime writing demands plausibility and believability, even the times you are asking your reader to suspend their disbelief. Vague answers don’t help.
You need to know what’s possible, what’s probable, and what’s dramatic but wrong.
Which is how you end up asking questions no sane person should type into a search bar. And, in the end, it help sharpen the writing.
The Rural Research Spiral As An Example
Writing stories set outside cities introduces its own flavour of concern.
Do pigs really eat everything?
Is the sky always a ‘brilliant shade of azure blue’ (spoiler: NO)?
How fast does a body decompose in water?
Floodwaters and hypothermia timeline
How long before a missing person is declared dead in Australia?
None of these searches exist in isolation. They arrive in clusters. Once you start researching one detail, the logic chain pulls you further in. What happens if the creek floods? What happens to a car? To a body? To evidence?
At some point you stop and think: If this computer ever gets seized, I’m cooked.
Psychology Makes It Worse
Psychological thrillers take you into even murkier territory and a very dark world of unspeakable things.
What does paranoid psychosis feel like?
Can trauma cause false memories?
How convincing are hallucinations?
Is ergot poisoning a real thing?
Do people know when they’re dissociating?
These aren’t just technical questions—they’re empathetic ones. You’re trying to understand the internal logic of a mind under stress. To write it honestly, you have to sit inside it for a while. And to write about people who have such disorders demands respect. No simply making them ‘mad.’
Which means your search history starts to look less like research and more like a cry for help.
The Unexpectedly Mundane Searches
The most suspicious thing isn’t the big questions—it’s the mundane ones taken out of context.
What does a Coroner do exactly?
What is a forensic psychologist?
What happens after a police Internal Affairs investigation?
How does chain of custody evidence procedure work
These searches don’t scream crime writer. They whisper personal experience, which somehow feels worse.
Research is often about boring details. The texture of reality. The things readers don’t consciously notice but instinctively feel when they’re wrong.
Online Rabbit Holes
Every crime writer has lost hours to Wikipedia (or Reddit, etc) in ways that would be impossible to explain to a non-writer.
You start with: How long does it take to drown?
Three hours later you’re reading:
Various state flood disasters
False confessions
Rural property inheritance law
The psychology of guilt
Agricultural fencing standards
This is how stories are built: not linearly, but laterally. Each fact bumps into another. Each answer creates two more questions.
Your browser history becomes a map of obsession.
Why This Matters (Beyond the Joke)
Here’s the less funny truth: good crime writing demands responsibility.
Research isn’t about glorifying violence or outsmarting law enforcement. It’s about respecting the reader’s intelligence. It’s about understanding consequences. It’s about not lying where it matters.
When you get something wrong—especially around trauma, mental illness, or violence—it shows. Readers feel it.
That’s why writers go deep. That’s why the searches get dark.
Do I Worry About Being On a List?
Honestly? Occasionally.
But I worry more about getting it wrong. About flattening complexity. About turning pain into spectacle.
If that means my search history looks unhinged, so be it. Context matters—even if Google doesn’t know it.
Final Thought
Every writer has a digital shadow. For crime writers, it’s just more incriminating.
So if my browser history ever comes back to haunt me, I’ll say this: none of it was about wanting to commit a crime. It was about wanting to understand one.
And if that still lands me on a watchlist?
At least I’ll know what questions to ask!
Happy writing
Des Brady
Aussie Crime and Thriller Writer
