Special Reports

AS WE gently tan our overworked bodies and calm our stressed minds on holiday, what will we be reading? Will we be taking another crack at Stephen Hawkings's A Brief History of Time, perusing one of the classics made even more popular by the BBC, wallowing in a Mills and Boon tale of love in a far-off place? Well, maybe; but most of us will opt for Patricia Cornwell or P. D. James.

"Murder," wrote the Scottish lawyer and criminologist William Roughead, "has a magic of its own." A hundred years later, this remains as true as ever. People's fascination with crime and criminals appears to be endless. And of all crime, it is murder that rules supreme. But murder has changed. We now accept more violence, and we follow the experts like a favourite football team.

Most crime novels have at least one murder—and with the advent of the serial killer genre, bodies are often strewn across every blood-soaked page. Like people craning their necks at some horrific road accident, our voyeuristic predilection for the macabre and frightening craves satisfaction. Perhaps by watching or reading about such events, whether true or fictitious, the darker sides of our personalities is appeased.

It was Charles Dickens who coined the phrase "detective police", and who later created the first professional detective with Inspector Bucket in Bleak House. Although the evolution of the genre was influenced by writers like Edgar Allan Poe, it was Conan Doyle, through his character Sherlock Holmes, who turned detection into a fine art and created a mass audience for the crime novel. Conan Doyle had the ability to set seemingly impossible puzzles, then set his character to solve them. It is a formula that almost every crime writer since has followed.

Detectives, official and consulting, long ago lost their perfect image, as writers examine the darker side of, not only the criminal's personality, but also the investigating officer's. By examining the protagonist's psychology and revealing its disturbing aspects, a writer can explore the narrow line between good and evil—and the influences which make us fall on one particular side.

In his highly original series Cracker, Jimmy Mcgovern explored this theme with a disturbing analytic power and insight into the minds of not just the criminals, but also those charged with tracking them down. For the first time I can remember, Mcgovern considers in depth the effects that this kind of work can have on police officers and their lives, leading ultimately and tragically to a detective committing a rape and then throwing himself off a building in a final act of despair.

We all know that murders are dealt with by a team, from the chief investigating officer at the top, to the detective constables and scene of crime officers at the bottom. So in a world where everything is done by the group, fictional detectives offer an individual viewpoint. In reality, the judicial system would not tolerate the single-minded approach of a Morse or Wexford. They would very quickly find themselves back in a funny hat pounding the beat. The idea of P. D. James's Inspector Dalgliesh coming up from London to teach some country bumpkin force the Scotland Yard way to do things is equally ridiculous. A barrister friend once remarked that in almost every celebrated case of the great fictional detectives, he would expect to have the accused acquitted, or during the appeal.

As the methods used to solve crimes become more sophisticated, science, especially forensic science, is becoming the new detective. Those of us old enough to remember the series The Expert, and later the American series Quincy, will realise that the new detective has been maturing for some time. No longer is it enough for Barlow and Watt to walk into the middle of a murder scene and ask, "Have the fingerprint boys been yet?" before turning the body over and pulling out the knife. Today's audience wants the nitty-gritty. They want to know, in ever-increasing detail, what the scene of crime looks like, who does what and where. But what are the procedures? How do you conduct a forensic postmortem? What does a pathologist discover? What are the readers being told?

Mostly the science is correct—well, almost. It may occasionally be complete rubbish: fingerprints are removed from impossible surfaces, and various interpretations are complete balderdash. But let's be honest, are we going to get up from our sunbed to find out if the paint from a 1963 Jaguar really was sprayed on in a particular sequence of layers? Of course we're not. As long as it seems reasonable, we're just going to read on. Almost every book I have ever read suffers from the "if it makes it work keep it in" syndrome. The only people likely to question you are the forensic scientists, who either don't know or don't care about your masterpiece.

But this could change, as writers pursue the scientists. In the search for stories, forensic science conferences seem to have stopped being an intellectual forum for scientists. They have been taken over by writers and producers, eager to find the next compelling case or interesting advance in forensic science. Science now falls off the agenda as the talk turns to tales of lunch with Patricia Cornwell or discussions with P. D. James or some other noted crime writer. Scientists vie with each other for the best name to drop.

Perhaps we can blame this on Cornwell. Through her character, Kay Scarpetta she has revived an interest in science among the general public, including the role it plays in a criminal investigation. She has also reminded us about the important role women now play in all fields of forensic science. Having enjoyed her first few books, her latest effort, Cause of Death (Putnam, $24.95, ISBN 0 399 14146 4, due out in Britain in October from Little, Brown), has left me somewhat cold, as I feel a desire for Scarpetta to do something other than track down serial killers. But given her popularity, the book will almost certainly enter the bestseller list. It doesn't stop me feeling, however, that this clearly talented writer could perhaps turn her attentions to something more interesting and less obvious.

And as the interest in the use of science increases, so does the number of books and programmes about it. ITV has plans to release a programme about a forensic pathologist which, if it's as bad as the pilot episode, shouldn't be worth a second look; great science, terrible story. There are also many books about real life pathologists, psychologists and even serial killers planned for next year. Writers, TV companies and films are already replacing good stories with as much blood and gore as they feel they can get away with, moving the crime novel into the realms of Stephen King and the Friday the Thirteenth films. If we go down that road, we will all have missed an important scientific trick.

Nigel McCrery is the creator of Silent Witness.