Lee Weeks - On Research

When writing crime, it pays to do your homework

Lee Weeks

There are some stages in novel writing that are a teeny bit exasperating, frustrating, laborious even! But research isn’t one of them. It’s the fun part – maybe because most crime writers are nosy by default; we love getting deep down and dirty in the sediment of things. I was lucky enough to have a nose around one of the Murder squads operating today. I got a foot in the door because my dad was a copper. For most of my childhood he was a detective. He told me:

‘You have to be a good listener to be a good detective. You have to listen to the things people don’t say as well as the things they do.’

Inside MIT11, I was shown around each department and met the officers and civilian staff who worked in it.  I drew diagrams of the layout, jotted down anything that caught my eye and did a lot of listening.

It’s an extra challenge getting a police procedural right because Crime readers are experts on every aspect. You just have to keep up because if you don’t know how to use a smart phone, then you can’t give your cop one. Police work is always changing, adapting to modern crime. The intelligence department has now become a massive part of a murder enquiry team: facebook, mobile phone data, twitter and so on. The Cyber world is impregnated with a seemingly infinite amount of clues for a detective to sift through.

I still use reference books of course, I have several forensic and police procedural books to call on, as well as books on firearms, on serial killers and how to defend yourself against a man armed with a machete! I have a folder on my PC of useful articles I have downloaded from the Internet. I keep a lever arch file for each book I do. When I download an article I print it straight off and file it there. It’s still always better to have a hard copy to flick through now and again and make sure you haven’t missed anything.

Looking through the file now, at the end of writing Dead of Winter, it has become fat with articles on subjects as diverse as growing orchids to intensive care nursing of a coma patient.

Researching locations has become a breeze with programs like Google Earth. When I’m choosing locations, I do as much research online as I can before I actually go to an area to have a look for myself. Just make sure you choose a prime location that you know well. If I want to have my murderer dump a body in the Thames I’d better make sure I know tide times and ferry schedules and accessible slipways because one of my readers will definitely know all that information and more. The internet can give me those facts, but it can’t tell me if the slipway’s downwind from a fish market on certain days or who comes every day to feed the pigeons. There’s no substitute for going there.

I don’t know anyone who can do without the internet now.  It’s an invaluable time-saving tool and has transformed reader and writer alike into instant experts. In the end, meticulous research is always worth it because then you don’t have to waste your imagination on the factual stuff, you can let it loose on the rest. Apply the Iceberg theory and know that for every piece of information visible above the surface, seven-eighths of the story is still below the surface.

Never be afraid to ask an expert but find out as much as you can by yourself before you do so, so that you don’t waste their time. Meet them armed with as much basic knowledge of their job as possible and so free them up to be able to talk past the humdrum and get to the nitty-gritty. People will nearly always be really happy to help you. They like to be thanked in the acknowledgements and to know they had a small hand in making your book great.

See how Lee’s research is brought to life in the gritty new crime thriller, Dead of Winter

Where science ends and fiction begins

Where science ends and fiction begins.

Dean Crawford

As a reader, I always find stories that blend within their fictitious pages a liberal dose of real-life revelations far more satisfying than those that spring to life entirely from the imaginations of the author. Novels like Jurassic Park and Contact expertly weaved the possible with the impossible to create something that the reader could hold on to long after the stories ended: the thought that “this could actually happen.”

It used to be easier for authors to blend science fact with fiction, because technology was often developed inside military-industrial laboratories far from the prying eyes of the media and public. Left with a broad canvass of artistic license, authors could let their imaginations run riot. But today things are changing fast and directly in the public eye. Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are giving shots without a needle, as aboard the Starship Enterprise, using “Lorentz-force actuators” to push a vapour through human skin without breaking it. Teleportation is possible, albeit at a quantum level, by adjusting the spin of individual protons separated by up to 16km – information passes from one to another instantaneously. The video calls of 1980s TV shows are now a reality, as are Star Trek style touch-screens and “communicators” – our mobile phones. Key-hole surgery, the mapping of the entire human genome, contact lenses with light-emitting diodes that allow the blind to see and non-invasive prosthetic limbs that allow full use of arm, hands and fingers are all fully operational. So how can an author stay ahead of such vibrant technological achievements and continue to produce something that is considered new?

For me, the process is not always one of trying to create bizarre new technology but rather applying current knowledge to age-old mysteries. We are a supremely advanced species but there is an incredible amount that we do not know about our own planet, let alone our own universe. I get a real kick when I read about an unsolved mystery of science because I can instantly tell there’s a good story in there somewhere; how did human civilisation rise so quickly from hunter gatherer communities? How far can we extend human lifetimes? Is it possible to see through time? Are there really monsters lurking in deep oceans or in vast tracts of untamed wilderness? Whenever I see such articles I immediately begin researching how far science has come within relevant disciplines before starting the process of weaving what is fact with what is fiction. Usually it is only plot and sub-plot that is entirely fictitious, with the science as much as possible grounded in fact. When I then choose to write a scene that really stretches the limits of what’s feasible, there are as few questions as possible in the reader’s mind.

If an author can do it well enough, then just like Gene Roddenberry, in time their fiction becomes indistinguishable from fact.

Dean Crawford is author of high-concept, high-octane thrillers Covenant, Immortal and Apocalypse, which is out now.

Jack Steel

Jack the Ripper – the Perpetual Mystery

The Metropolitan Police never caught the man known as Jack the Ripper, but I wonder if, in a modern world, police would have caught up with the infamous murderer.

Victorian detective work was different to modern police methods, and this is particularly apparent when considering the way that murders were investigated. In the dark, smog-laden and gas-lit streets of 19^th century London, the best method of apprehending a murderer was to catch him in the act with the blood of his victim still on his hands – in short, to catch the killer literally red-handed.

The only other viable method was to find an eyewitness who could positively identify the perpetrator, but, of course, the recollection of eyewitnesses is notoriously unreliable. In the Ripper case, there was neither a red-handed suspect nor witnesses, so whatever evidence the unidentified killer did leave behind him was essentially ignored.

           

Three Victorian similarities with current practice were comprehensive autopsies to determine the cause of death; the taking of witness statements; and house-to-house enquiries. But what is undeniably the commonest technique in the armoury of the police – fingerprint analysis – wasn’t even considered.

The use of fingerprints has a very long history.  Documents tell us that in both ancient Babylon (c. 1760 B.C.) and China in the Qin Dynasty (221 – 205 B.C.) officials recorded fingerprints from crime scenes, but it wasn’t until late in the 18^th century that German anatomist Johann Mayer realised that fingerprints are unique to each individual.

We owe modern fingerprint analysis methods to two Indians, Azizul Haque and Hem Chandra Bose who did the initial work on the classification system that eventually came to be named after their supervisor, Sir Edward Richard Henry. The Henry Classification System was first used in Scotland Yard in 1901.

But the use of fingerprints to apprehend criminals was well-established some time before that, at least in fiction. Life on the Mississippi, by Mark Twain, contains a story of a murderer being identified by his thumbprint. And Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s fictional sleuth Sherlock Holmes, who in a very real sense introduced the idea of a detective who actually detected, rather than relying on informers or catching a criminal in the act, also used fingerprints.

             

The advances in forensic science over the last century or so make it unlikely that, had the Ripper been perpetrating his crimes today, he would remain at large for long, but in 19^th-century London no amount of fingerprint evidence would have helped, simply because the police never identified a believable perpetrator. After the events, a number of police officers produced their own pet theories about the identity of the murderer, and over the last twenty years or so non-fiction authors and investigators have added to the multitude of theories.  

But the reality is that we are no closer today to determining the identity of the world’s most notorious serial killer than were the Police of the Metropolis under the leadership of Sir Charles Warren while the murders were being carried out. And at this remove, it is virtually impossible that a definitive answer to the mystery will ever be found.

Jack Steel puts forward his theory on the identity of Jack the Ripper in his gripping new conspiracy thriller, The Ripper Secret.

Joan Brady

Why a Murderer as Hero?

By Joan Brady

I’ve been afraid all my life. Death, things that go thump in the night: that’s not even scratching the surface. You name it, I’m scared of it. People like me learn to keep this shameful secret hidden. So when the Chief Enforcement Officer of Devon’s South Hams District Council started in on the police caution  – ‘You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence…’ – he was annoyed at how calm I seemed.

My crime doesn’t matter. What does matter is that in the next year and a half, the bastards summoned me to court 15 times. Fifteen times! At my first appearance I was a neat, tidy lady with faith in the system. My impression of my ill-clad fellow felons? ‘Well, they’re all guilty, look at them, slouching against the walls and glowering.’ Then I presented myself to the court.

And then I understood.

Courts are ritual humiliation. Forget the comfy guff you’ve heard since you were little. You’re guilty until proven innocent; five minutes as a defendant and you know it’s true. By the time I got home, all I wanted to do was kill people.

But there was something else, something crucial that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. I started writing a thriller mainly to slake my anger but also to figure out what the something was. My hero? A glowering felon full of hate, but big, strong, young, male: all the things I’m not. Here was somebody who could do some killing for me. I called him David Marion – my David – and I sent him against my Goliaths, the courts, the town worthies, the local politicians, anybody in power. The way I figure it, politics is the school playground all over again. The big kids beat up the little kids. The skinny kids torment the fat kids. The most popular kid gets to run the show. The only immune one is the tough kid, who slouches against the wall and can beat the shit out of any of them.

The pity of this scenario is that when kids grow up, the tough kid usually lands in prison. David Marion spent nearly 2 decades there. In America – in the UK now too – many prisons are cash machines for multinational big businesses.  (The London Olympics owes its private security cock-up to one such.) The state pays a private operator a fee per prisoner for board, lodging and maintenance; profit begins with paring outlay to the bone. Minimal food. Minimal upkeep.  Minimal medical care. Minimal everything that can be made minimal. Lots of money left over. And then just think, you have all these functional men and women: why waste the labour? Get government contracts to build more prisons, and use the prisoners to build them. Don’t stop there. Lease inmates to private enterprise at Asian sweat shop rates: shoes, jeans, computer parts, telemarketing. Learning skills for when they get out? Forget it. Beyond prison walls, these jobs go to immigrant women. If people refuse to work, increase their sentences, put them in solitary, deny canteen privileges. Profit upon profit, this time from old-fashioned slavery.

So in The Blue Death, prison labour builds a vast canal to line corporate pockets by shipping water thousands of miles from Canada’s Hudson Bay to America’s middle west.

Exploitation like this is the logical final step in the humiliation so painfully obvious to a defendant on a first appearance in court. The veil of sanctimony and self-righteousness is clear at once too. But the human element in the ritual is what took me a while. Towards the end of my appearances, I could literally see – as well as sense – the Hogarthian debauchery, the lip-smacking, delighted sadism of my accusers as they pleasured themselves with their power to inflict their damnedest on me.

I made my hero a murderer to wipe that expression off as many faces as I could.

Joan is the author of The Blue Death, out on 13^th September.