forensic medicine
Psychological overload
I was intrigued to hear the bestselling crime writer Patricia Cornwall speaking about her new book, Unnatural Death, on BBC News recently. She published her first novel in 1990, and she’s been producing bestsellers for over thirty years. So why did my ears prick up? Because this time she reported a change in her modus operandi: she is much gentler with her readers nowadays, sparing them an excess of gory details. She even makes her victims baddies to lessen the stress! Why? Because, she feels, we are all more affected by the tsunami of bad news and real life horror that crashes over us almost daily these days. We don’t need oceans of fictional angst superimposed on reality.
This tallies with my own personal experience as a writer, not having the personal space nowadays to add unnecessarily to the real psychological stresses of life these days.
So it was with her words in my mind that I picked up The Restless Dead by another bestselling thriller writer, Simon Beckett. It was published back in 2017 and billed as The most chilling forensics thriller you’ll read this year. OK, that should test my metal! And sure enough it spares no detail. It opens with a macabre description of what happens to a body in water – the decomposition, degradation, disintegration. Gruesome, graphic stuff. And as the pages turn, bodies float to the surface or are discovered in various stages of this process. Oh yes, we can see them in all their grisliness!
David Hunter, GP turned forensic anthropologist, is called in when human remains are too badly decomposed or degraded for pathologists to deal with, and it’s his job to assess each cadaver and crime scene to piece together what actually happened and when.
I’d become intimate with death in all its gory excess, fluent in the languages of bone, putrefaction and decay.
And we look over his shoulder.
Curiously though, because this revolved around scientific analysis, the chemistry, I didn’t find the mounting death toll or the graphic detail overwhelming. So I was in a good place to suddenly find the story segued into my own much gentler field of interest – medical ethical issues. One of the characters is transgender! A timely and perfectly serendipitous development.
But thanks go to Patricia Cornwall for making me feel less of a wimp, by naming and explaining and somehow legitimating my reduced capacity for fictional stress!
Backstory
It’s probably fair to say that Patricia Cornwell is generally adjudged the undisputed mother and queen of forensic thriller writing.
It was her first novel, Postmortem, that kick-started this genre and spawned a fascination with the world of the dead. BBC series like Silent Witness, and Waking the Dead, which explore unexplained deaths, are aired at prime time. Just this week, Channel 5 has started showing a brand new 3-part documentary, Cause of Death, taking viewers inside a coroner‘s office as he and his team investigate unexplained deaths.
But way back in the 1980s, it was not instant hits all round. Initially Cornwell had to endure the usual run of rejections, and even when Postmortem was published, it took time before it was duly acclaimed. When she slipped out in her lunch break from the mortuary where she worked for her very first book signing, precisely no copies of the book were sold, and she fielded just one question: an elderly lady asking where she could find the cookbooks!
Since then, of course, she has achieved phenomenal success, won an impressive raft of literary prizes, and sold over 120 million books. Probably her most famous character is Chief Medical Officer Dr Kay Scarpetta, and next week her 26th book in the series comes out. 26!! But it’s Scarpetta’s backstory, and that of her niece Lucy, and policeman colleague Pete Marino, that help to drive the novels – a massive achievement in itself to sustain the suspense and time-lines across so many years, a backdrop to countless horrific crimes and painstaking investigations, each a compelling read in its own right.
Another powerful characteristic of her books which I am in awe of is the precision – whether it’s the minute records of exactly which bones were fractured in a frenzied attack, or the precise level of decomposition of a body, or the battery of tests needed to establish where a body has been, the scene is described in meticulous detail. She lists as her interests:
Forensics | Forensic Technologies | Ballistics | Weapons | Explosives | Pathology & Autopsies | Crime | Historical and Unsolved Criminal Cases | Jack The Ripper | Helicopter Piloting | Scuba Diving | Archaeological Excavation Experience |
It shows! And she’s famous for working tirelessly to stay up to speed as methods of detection and analysis evolve.
But until this week I was unaware of her own harrowing personal story. Interviews with her to mark the publication of Livid on 25th October, have revealed a grim start in life. She was just five years old when her father walked out on Christmas Day. Shortly afterwards she was molested by a local patrolman, and required to testify in court before a grand jury. Her mother suffered from psychotic depression and spent large swathes of her daughter’s early life in hospital, meaning Patricia was either responsible for caring for her at home or in foster care herself. Her foster mother verbally abused her, bullied and force-fed her (leading to subsequent anorexia). She also left Patricia’s beloved dog locked in the basement to die of neglect. The grown up Cornwell is still riddled with deep-down anxieties about families and responsibilities.
By her own admission, in Scarpetta she has created a character who would have rescued her from all this torment – someone who is unflagging in the pursuit of justice for the murder victims who end up on her autopsy table. But it doesn’t require a PhD in psychology to see the origins of her deep empathy with inner turmoil and the effects of suppressed emotion which are so evident in her fiction. She has used her own personal tragedy and her extraordinary literary talent to make sense of the world. In her own words: I think your pain becomes your poetry, your gift. What a gift!
Truth, fact and fiction
Sometimes fiction allows one to tell a truth that couldn’t be so readily conveyed factually because of all the complexities of real life: so said best-selling crime writer, Val McDermid, at a Blackwell’s Bookshop event on Thursday evening last week. How true.
She was appearing with her great friend Professor Sue Black, a renowned forensic anthropologist. I’ve heard them doing a double act before at the Edinburgh International Book Festival so I knew we were in for a real treat.
The flip side of the first aphorism is: fact can sometimes be so much stranger than fiction that a novelist can’t use it because no one would believe it. How far would your credulity stretch, I wonder? Would you believe that a pile of pupae on a kitchen table in Liverpool could be found to have cocaine in its DNA, which in turn would lead to the discovery of the murder of a drug dealer no one knew had been killed? It really happened! Were you aware that only certain species of insects can lay eggs through the zip of a suitcase? Val has met the scientists who’ve investigated this phenomenon in person and seen the actual suitcases they utilised. Did you know that the ink used in tattoos migrates to the lymph nodes, so that if a corpse has had the limbs severed, the lymph nodes in each quadrant can indicate where and what colour their tattoos were? Or if indeed they were added after death. Fascinating true facts.
The evening was full of such wisdom and knowledge. All delivered with great verve and wit. Both women are excellent orators with a lively sense of humour, and a tremendous breadth and depth of knowledge. They also have massive respect for each other and for their readers’ discernment, illustrating perfectly the enormous value for a writer in working alongside experts. Their own relationship goes back twenty years and one can readily understand that in their time they’ve emptied more than one hotel foyer and coffee shop with their ghoulish conversation and macabre sense of the ridiculous! Even at this event, in full view of a large audience, they chortled gleefully about subjects not normally broadcast before the watershed! But hey, did you know that a pubic scalp looks like a tuna steak with hair? (Val said it took her a good year before she could face a tuna steak after Sue shared this fact with her.) Or that PhDs are gained on the study of the backs of men’s hands and the configurations of the male genitalia in various stages of arousal? Such essential statistics are vital for forensic scientists tracking down paedophiles and murderers apparently; and equally valuable to a crime writer weaving an authentic and challenging plot.
Perhaps the clearest message that came across though, was that the best scientists are the ones who can make their subject readily understandable to other people. Sue Black does exactly that. And if anyone could sell a book on forensics, it’s these two. When Val was recently approached by the Wellcome Trust to write a non-fiction book on the history of crime for their forthcoming exhibition, she initially declined. All she did was ‘make it all up’, she protested. But of course, in truth she’s a mine of information, and has an impressive contact list of experts to boot. With the inquiring mind of a journalist, and the lateral and devious thinking of a crime writer, she tracked the changes in techniques and detection over the years and produced Forensics: The Anatomy of Crime, which was published last month. In her lively description she allowed us to share her fascination with the topic that grabbed her interest most: scavenging bugs and beetles, flies and maggots, and what they can teach about a crime.
All in all a most entertaining evening that reinforced for me the importance of meticulous research and true engagement with one’s readers/listeners.
(Footnote for those who are anxious about my current health problems: I was closely guarded by my son and daughter from door to door. I’m happy to report that in spite of the excitement and laughter my heart rose nobly to the occasion and I lived to write this report.)