Forensic Fiction Transcript

Music

Caroline: As fans of the golden age of detective fiction, we're used to reading books where the science is now part of history. Which is fascinating, of course — there have been several titles I've featured on the show in the past couple of years, like The Missing Moneylender by W. Stanley Sykes or The Documents in the Case by Dorothy L. Sayers and Robert Eustace, that have illuminated my understanding of medicine and chemistry a century ago. As the field of forensics has advanced, though, the question of how to bring this complex, nuanced specialty into the world of crime fiction in a way that entertains as well as informs has only become more involved for writers. It's something that I've long thought about for years as a crime fiction reader and a viewer — how do you make crime fiction believable and enjoyable, without people feeling like they're in a science lecture? Writers today grapple with this, just as the greats of the golden age did.

And that's why I'm thrilled to have today's guest with me, because there is nobody better to illuminate this question. Kathy Reichs is both a certified forensic anthropologist and a multi-million bestseller of crime novels. The TV series Bones, which ran for over 200 episodes, was based on her life and work. She has been writing her book series about forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan since 1997, and the twenty-fourth novel, Evil Bones, is about to be published in paperback.

Welcome to Shedunnit. I'm Caroline Crampton.

Music

Kathy, maybe if you could just start by giving us the very basics and telling us all what is a forensic anthropologist anthrop?

Kathy: Well, let's go all the way back to the beginning. Anthropology has four subfields cultural, which is like Margaret Mead archaeology. Linguistic studying languages, and then biological anthropology.

Forensic anthropology is a subspecialty within biological anthropology. 'cause that's broad. Also, it could be people like Jane Goodall who study primates, or it could be people like Mary Leaky who dig up early hominids and study human evolution. Forensic anthropology is your specialty area, is the human skeleton.

It's bones, but we work with modern remains largely. Occasionally we'll get a case that's very old, but we work with modern remains and we work for medical examiners and coroners and law enforcement and the courts, maybe the military. Two primary questions. One is, well, who is it identification? Can we help with that?

And the second is, well, what happened to this person? What was the manner or the cause of death? Sometimes it's time since death. How long has the person been dead? But we're working with human remains that are compromised in some way, such that a pathologist, which is what most coroners and medical examiners are, a pathologist, can't answer the questions because the body is burned.

Mutilated, mummified, decomposed, dismembered, or maybe just bones.

Caroline: And what drew you personally to that field? Originally

Kathy: nothing. I trained to do bio archaeology. To analyse remains recovered in archaeological situations, historic or prehistoric human remains. But because in those days there was no formal designation of forensic anthropology, there were no training programmes in universities or elsewhere for forensic anthropology.

So when cops would, or whoever would find. Skeletal remains. Well, what do, what do we do here? Well, let's take 'em to that Bones lady out at the university. So even though I was planning to spend my career, and this is exactly how Tempe starts out, there's a book of short stories called The Bone Collection, and she's sitting in her office and she's working on archaeological material and cops show up, I think it's S Slidel and, and his partner.

And you know, they, they have found a skeleton and they don't know who to go to for expertise, so they go to her. So that's how I started out. As cops just started bringing me cases. Now it's quite different and there's a formal process of education. Are there any number of universities where you can go study forensic anthropology and then you sit for a big ass test, you sit for an exam and you become board certified.

So it's a way of regulating. When forensic anthropology became popular, and for years nobody had ever heard of us. We worked in our labs and you know, nobody ever heard of forensic anthropology, but then all of a sudden it became hot. So a lot of people who had degrees in anthropology or even physical anthropology started calling themselves, well, I'm forensic.

You know, I can do this. I can go to court. This is sexy. You know, so how do we sort out who's a legitimate. Expert and who's not. So we have a process of board certification for any listeners who are looking for a real forensic anthropology, at least in the us. You look for that A, B, F, A, American Board of Forensic Anthropology.

That means they've been certified because of a number of parameters, and also by sitting for this rigorous examination,

Caroline: and that then qualifies you to practise in this field. What does that work involve? What, what would a, a sort of a week in the life be like?

Kathy: It qualifies as to practise in this field and also to testify in court.

We're probably the only specialty in anthropology where we do frequently end up testifying in court. So it's important to be able to determine the judge, the jurors who, who is a legitimate expert. Second part of your question was, what exactly do we do? We help with, well, two broad questions.

Identification, if remains are found, could be one of two situations. One is they have no idea there's a skeleton that washed as shore from the river. They have no idea who this is. And the second could be a skeleton was found in the woods. We think it's John Doe. We think it's the old guy who wandered off from the, you know, the nursing home and died in the woods.

So presumptive id or completely unknown. So we look at what we call the biological profile. From the bones. We determine the age, the gender, the sex, the race, the height, any medical history. You know, this person broke their arm when they were nine years old, something like that. We put together this profile and then you can look to see if that profile matches who you think you might have or if it matches any list of missing persons so you can figure out who it is.

Caroline: And then once you've. Provided that information, you might later be called back to sort of swear to it in court. Is that the way it works?

Kathy: That's correct. And not every case we work on is a criminal case, although it could also be a civil case, you know, a wrongful death case, that, that sort of thing. But yes, we are occasionally, I wouldn't say frequently, but we are occasionally called upon, especially those of us who work for medical examiners and coroners.

We might, and not all of us do. We might be called upon to testify in court.

Caroline: So would it be right to say that before you had your interest in writing crime fiction, you already had quite a good knowledge of crime in the criminal justice process?

Kathy: Yes. Not as a participant in the crime, but I'm a member of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, and that's made up of different sections, which is for members that have the different specialties.

Could be. Fire and arson. It could be pathology, it could be forensic dentistry, it could be chemistry, you know, it was all these different specialty areas. So I go to the meetings every year and I rub elbows with these people, and I attend the different presentations. So I'm constantly absorbing.

Information from all the different forensic specialty areas, and I try to incorporate a different one in each of my novels.

Caroline: And so going back to when you first started writing crime fiction, was there a particular moment or scenario that inspired you to take your lived experience and put it in fiction?

Kathy: A number of things came together. I think it was 1994, I had just made full professor. At the university, so I was free to do whatever I wanted to do. I had just finished working on a serial murder case in Montreal that involved a dismemberment, and my testimony involved the type of saw that was used in the dismemberment and tying a saw that was found at the suspect's home with Saul Marks that had been left behind on the dismembered victim.

So that was fresh in my mind, so I had the freedom to try. Whatever I wanted to because I was tenured and promoted to full professor already, and I had a good nugget, an idea for a story. So those things came together in 94 and I decided I'd give it a try. Took two years to write it because I was working full-time.

I was teaching university full-time, so I would write at like five in the morning and on weekends and summer vacations and yeah, so it took a couple years to finish the first book.

Caroline: And I think you've said in the past that there are some aspects of your own career and experience in Tempe Brennan, but not all, could you give us a sense of what did crossover?

Kathy: Oh, when friends read the books, they tell me that Tempe Brennan's sense of humour, which can, you know, she's a bit sarcastic, she's a bit of a smart ass, let's be frank. They say they can hear her saying things exactly the same that I would say. So I think her sense of humour. Comes directly from me, certainly her expertise in the lab, and she's really good.

I mean, she solves every single case, which I certainly did not in my career, but she's also her own person. I didn't want the character to be perfect. I wanted her to be approachable, so I gave her flaws. It's not a major thing in the books, but we know that in her past, she had a, an unhealthy, let's say, relationship with alcohol.

So she's a non-drinker, but you know, every now and then she grapples with that issue. So I think she's a complex and that's all her I definitely drink. So yeah, so we share some traits. Uh, she's younger than I.

Caroline: You've said in interviews in the past that getting the science right is really important for you, and I wonder how you go about doing that for the character.

Kathy: Getting the science right is important to me, getting it accurate, but also when you're writing a novel, you have to keep it brief. You're not writing a textbook. People who pick up a, a thriller, a forensic novel, it's a murder mystery, but the solution is driven by forensic clues, forensic science. So you have to keep it brief.

You have to keep it jargon free. You can't rely on all this terminology we use amongst ourselves as experts. And you have to keep it entertaining, which is not a prerequisite when you're writing a textbook. So I keep those three things in mind, but it is, it's a challenge to put the science in, to keep the science accurate, but to keep it brief and to keep the reader's attention.

And I, I think the readers of my books like them because they learn something. So I do try to put some aspect of forensics in and a different one in each book because I don't wanna just use forensic anthropology all the time. So I put, try to put a different field of expertise in each of the books.

Caroline: This might be a chicken and egg situation, but do you come across the science first or does the story come first?

Kathy: There's all different ways. Sometimes it's a case I've worked on. Sometimes it's a case a colleague has worked on. 'cause I, I do go to the American Academy of Forensic Science meetings and I do talk to colleagues and we discuss our different cases. So some things, one of them will have worked on something that was very intriguing or unusual and sometimes it's what we used to call in the Bones Writer's room ripped from the headlines where I'll see something in the media, you know, whether I hear it on.

Radio, NPR probably, or whether I hear it on, you know, see something on TV or read it in the newspaper or whatever. I'll say, whoa, I'll take the nugget, the core, just that central idea of specific types of saw marks in bone or whatever it happens to be, or mitochondrial DNA, which is found in cat hair. The victim or something like that.

And I'll spin that. Then I ask myself, okay, well then what if this, what if that? What if that? And then spin it off into, into fiction.

Caroline: Are there things that people who read your books and enjoy the TV show, and are there things like it, are there things that they assume forensics can do that they can't?

Kathy: Well, I think the big myth of television shows like Bones or CSI or whatever they happen to be. Novels like my own. The myth is that every case gets solved, and that's, that's not true. Every case does not get solved. Every set of remains does not get identified in my lab, I'm pretty much retired. I am retired now, but you know, on, I had shelving and boxes and each one with a case number, and many of those had been there for years.

They were remains that were completely, uh, anonymous, unknown, and they had not been identified. Now, DNA. May have changed a lot of that, but you really can't use it in, in a vacuum. You can take a set of unidentified remains. You can extract DNA from them, but you can't really, as I said, use it in a vacuum.

What do you do then if you don't have something to which to compare it? We think this is Jane Doe. We got a family sample from Jane Doe's family. Yes, it is her. No, it is not her. There are limitations. That's kind of a myth that is perpetrated by popular media is that DNA will solve everything. You don't always get DNA for one thing.

Your remains. Maybe it may be too degraded to even be able to sequence DNA, and then even if you do, you may have nothing to which to compare it. Some.

Caroline: I think that sense of closure and a case neatly resolving that we get from your books and you get at the end of every episode of every show. That's a big part of why me included, everybody likes this genre of fiction.

Kathy: Sure.

Caroline: It's just so interesting that it's, it's so different to what the real life of working in this field would be like, which, as you say, full of dead ends. Unresolved cases. No pun intended. No pun intended. But I like it now that I've done it. So you mentioned DNA there. I'd be interested to know what have been the big advances that you've seen in the science over the time you've been part of this world?

Kathy: Well, certainly DNA when I started DNA was not a commonplace thing. We would always take a sample. I think, you know, looking back, 'cause that was in the, like in the eighties. We would always take a bone plug and keep a sample from every unidentified case, and that maybe we did it for the potential of DNA in the future, but.

Whatever that is proven to be useful in identifying cases that had pre DNA been unidentifiable. So DNA is a big advance in the field, but it doesn't solve everything.

Caroline: Have there been other things like that sort of practises that have changed over time?

Kathy: Technology always gets better. The x-rays get better.

The microscopes under through which you view things get better. The, the saws with which you cut things get better. But anthropology isn't really high tech. We do use x-rays. We do use biochemical testing, but the skeleton is the skeleton and it's pretty stable as your main data source.

Caroline: That's really interesting to me because I do work a lot on these books from a hundred, 110 plus years ago where you'll sometimes get even a long passage in a book explaining the concept of fingerprints because in 1910 it's not a given that the reader would know about that.

And so it's interesting then to look at, you know, your careers span several decades in fiction writing that actually maybe your, your books are not gonna sort of go out of date scientifically in that same way.

Kathy: Well. We'll see.

Caroline: Well, yes. I suppose if you say, you know, bones are bones and the way that you look at them is not that changed, then perhaps they stay, they stay relevant.

Kathy: Science is evolving and maybe we'll get to a point where you can take a very small sample of DNA and get a complete profile right down to like a facial imaging kind of thing.

Caroline: When you are working on a new book, do you have a, a sort of a sense of what readers want from you, particular tropes they like or directions they want, or is that that not important to you?

Kathy: Well, it's important. I do want my readers to be pleased with what they get. I know they want the case to be resolved. I think there was one book, way, way back, number seven or number 10, where the villain gets away at the end and then 10 books later we. Finally reel the villain in. But yeah, I mean they, I write murder mysteries and, and there's a bit of a formula to that.

Somebody gets killed and then somebody gets caught. So I think they like that formula to mysteries of any kind. And the difference with mine is that the solution is driven by forensics. It's driven partly by detective work and gut instinct. And that, you know, there's always that interplay between. Slide L and Tempe, and one wants to go on logic and one wants to go just on gut instinct.

It was very strong in the TV show where you had that difference between Sealy booth and Temperance Brennan, gut instinct versus logic and hypothesis formation and deduction, et cetera, et cetera. The solutions are driven by hypothesis, if not explicitly, at least by a scientific method in how Tempe thinks and how she pursues her case.

Caroline: Do you have a sense for. Why people enjoy this kind of stuff. I don't think it relates quite so much to crime fiction, but there's a lot of talk these days about why people, women particular so keen on true crime, why we like details of these kind of stories. Is that something that you have a thoughts on?

Kathy: Yeah. I don't know about True Crime, but I think they like thrillers, murder mysteries because they are kind of a participant and part of the game is you figure out the solution. Before the author tells you who the bad guy or the bad girl is, and I know when I'm reading one, if I figure it out before the end, before the author reveals, I'm a little disappointed in the author because I do like the big twist.

I do like the surprise at the end, especially if you can see it. And go, oh yeah, I see where the clues were. I missed that. And good for the author for fooling me. That's the fun of it I think. I think that, getting back to your question, that's why people like to read murder mysteries or thrillers, is they try to figure it out, who done it, as it were,

Caroline: but it's a game that we want to lose.

In that sense. We want to be surprised.

Kathy: Yes, I do. Anyway.

Caroline: Does that happen to you as a, as a professional in this world? Does that, does that still happen to you? Are you still surprised?

Kathy: Well, I'm pretty much retired now. Did that, was I ever surprised, uh, I was only one of a team that would work on a case. You know, I would work on the victim, him or herself.

I would work on the remains, whether they were burned or decomposed or gal or dismembered or whatever. And I would give my report id, it's a male, they were 35 to 50 at the time of death. They were this tall, they were this racial background, that kind of thing. I would submit my report and then that's it.

That was the end of my involvement until maybe testimony at trial, if it was a criminal case and everything I worked on was certainly not, not a criminal case. So I was one aspect of it. I did my input, I was a team member, and then I would work with. The forensic dentist or the forensic pathologist or the, the detective, the fire and arson specialist, whatever the case happened to be.

Caroline: What I meant actually was when you are reading crime fiction,

Kathy: ah,

Caroline: how often are you surprised as someone who constructs these puzzles yourself? I'm curious to know

Kathy: how often am I surprised? Oh, I don't know. I couldn't give you a percentage, but I know I'm pleased when that happens, when I don't figure it out.

I'm pleased with the author. I'm displeased with myself.

Caroline: Yes, I know. I basically, these days, a professional reader of crime fiction. I feel the same that I'm especially, especially pleased when someone doesn't do what I think they're going to do. So another thing that I wondered about is, because you've written a long series of of books now, how do you keep track of everything that's happened in your character's backstory?

Because she's had a very eventful life at this point.

Kathy: Yes. Said 24 books over almost 30 years, I guess. Yeah. I don't, so well, and I do have an assistant and I often have to, I, I keep saying we should write a Bible, which is a term we would use in television writing. We should have a bible of, of everything that happened and all the, what have we done so far, so we don't do it again?

Or what in the books, like what colour were Claude L's eyes so they're not blue in this book, and then green in the next book. I do often have my assistant go back and, and research questions like, where was Tempe living at the time that she, you know, that kind of thing. Or how many girls were trapped in the basement and book seven or whatever book it was

Caroline: The perils of a long and successful career, I imagine.

Kathy: Yes, and readers are very astute if you get it wrong, if you have. Andrew Ryan has green eyes in an early book and a blue eyes and a later book. You will hear about it.

Caroline: I know there's Scottish crime writer. Ian Rankin once said to me that

Kathy: Ian's a good friend.

Caroline: He, he really regretted giving Rebus a dog because then books afterwards, readers kept writing to be like, how's the dog?

You didn't mention the dog. What? What's going on with the dog?

Kathy: What, what dog?

Caroline: He really regretted that, and I can see why, you know, it's a, I imagine a lovely problem to have when you've got readers who care so much.

Kathy: And it's so much easier now, I'm sure, because we have computers and I write on a computer, but what did you do back in the day when you wrote, I don't know, Sue Grafton or something?

Maybe she wrote on it. I don't know. But when you have to go back and research and find the answer to book three out of a series. I can't imagine doing that without having it all on the computer.

Caroline: Going back even further, I know I've looked into this when I've done episodes about Agatha Christie, for instance, and I think the answer is that she just didn't really care very much.

Kathy: Okay. Fair enough.

Caroline: Recurring characters do change name and appearance and backstory a little bit, and I think she just chose not to worry about it too much.

Kathy: Good for her

Caroline: because you can't be reading your longhand manuscripts or whatever.

Kathy: I can't imagine that

Caroline: sometimes when you get into the techniques that people were using in the past, like dictating into a a cylinder for someone else to type and all of this kind of stuff.

Kathy: I remember doing an event with PD James Phyllis James. Someone asked her how she wrote and she said, did I just type it out? And a young man puts it on something called a disc.

Caroline: Well, I think that's everything I wanted to ask you, unless there's anything you particularly wanted to get in.

Kathy: No, I think that's good.

Just mention evil bones. I hope people buy it. Read it and like it.

Caroline: Wonderful. Well, thank you very much for your time. It's been wonderful to talk to you and, uh, enjoy the rest of your day.

Kathy: Thank you. Same to you. Bye-bye.

Caroline: Bye-bye.

Music

This episode of Shedunnit was produced and hosted by me, Caroline Crampton. Many thanks to my guest, Kathy Reichs. The paperback of Evil Bones is published on 30th July in the UK. You can find out more about Kathy and her work at her website kathyreichs.com.

For information about this episode, visit shedunnitshow.com/forensicfiction. I also publish transcripts of every episode including this one; find them all at shedunnitshow.com/transcripts.

Shedunnit is edited by Euan McAleece and production assistance came from Leandra Griffith.