Unnatural Death
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!