Am I the next American Psycho? Forensics: The Anatomy of Crime - Val McDermid
Image Credit: BBC (Silent Witness)
Some people find comfort in the strangest of places; camping, IKEA, Love Island. I like dingy cobblestoned alleyways, with officers that are busy, arrogant and a bit self-righteous who spend most of their working life in some kind of transit. They walk and talk, drive fast, drink bad coffee. It’s often raining.
Why is this grisly murder mystery setting a comforting paradise for me? While I’m hoping that the word ‘mystery’ saves me from being considered for the protagonist in the next Brett Easton Ellis novel, I’m nevertheless concerned about the comfort that I derive from watching these morbid tales.
Since I was 12 years old, I have wanted to be Dr Nikki Alexander. She is the forensic pathologist, forensic anthropologist and humanity defending English rose from the crime series Silent Witness. Nikki, at 27, is an articulate (usually) blonde and blushingly beautiful doctor with more letters after her name than a King of France. Like Nikki I am 27 and the similarities cease there. Unlike Nikki, I’m a brunette with an unreliable Melburnian accent (that often creeps back to its slurry country roots), and I’m the proud owner of one Bachelor of Arts Degree. The only letters that come after my name are ‘xoxo’ when a wave of millennial indecision washes over me and I just cannot choose the right emoji to finish a text.
Despite the lack of parallels between Nikki and I, I’m not disheartened. Silent Witness is my cure to a hangover, a break-up, and also my ideal way to celebrate the end of the workday. I know what to expect from it. Jack gives a sarcastic commentary of the crime scene, Clarissa hacks every piece of tech in sight, Thomas brings a sense of English gentlemanly authority, while Nikki fights for the underdog. Tarred and feathered, stabbed, shot or mutilated, only to end up being respectfully sliced up in the cutting room. I feel at home amongst these people meeting their gory ends.
My viewing habits have seeped into my other hobbies. After watching an episode where Nikki reconstructs the face of a horrifically burnt victim, I picked up my book to give my crime mind a little break. Yet my book is the engagingly written Forensics: The Anatomy of Crime by crime writer Val McDermid. A digestible (though it might affect your appetite) breakdown of complex forensic techniques, littered with case studies that will keep any forensic wannabes reading into the wee hours of the morning. I was up to the chapter on Facial Reconstruction.
Evidently, my quest to become Nikki has become ingrained into my subconscious. Ought I to be worried by the warm and fuzzy feeling I got as I gained the knowledge that blowfly maggots can consume 60% of a human corpse in a week?
My concern was slightly alleviated when I discovered that my childhood friend also has a similar Silent Witness obsession. She used to pitch a tent on her farm and set up archaeological digs as though she, just like Nikki, may at any moment discover a bone and probably save the world. Her mother ended up with a garage full of expertly knolled containers of broken glass and delicately brushed rocks.
So, what can it be about murder mysteries and death that brings about this disconcerting solace and curiosity? These psychological tendencies, they’re usually something to do with childhood, right? Perhaps this is too. But not in the way you think.
My childhood was trauma free. However, as a child I was allowed to sit up late with my mother to watch a mystery. This was back in the days when there was someone still alive in Midsomer.
It might sound a bit young for death, but you’re also talking to the girl who preferred Fiddler on the Roof to cartoons during infancy. However, at 5 years old I potentially didn’t grasp the larger issues that Fiddler addresses like religious persecution and arranged marriage, rather I just liked that the girls had really long glossy hair and could sing.
Agatha Christie’s Poirot gave me a taste for glamorous murder by design and fortunately involved fairly sanitised murders, suitable for a younger me. Mum and I would place our bets on ‘who done it’ halfway through, and with that murder mysteries became our ritual.
Although Silent Witness has been a constant, we would intermittently meander through the investigations of posh inspector DI Lynley to the rugged cliffs of Shetland with DI Jimmy Perez to the lateral thinking Vera and if we felt like a slow burn on a Sunday, we’d spend time with Inspector George Gently on the Tyne river. We had a murder mystery to suit every mood.
Why does this sustained viewing of murder mysteries fill us with enjoyment rather than a fear for our lives? There’s one element of murder mysteries that brings a sense of reassurance and security, even more perhaps than the warmth of mother and daughter rituals - Motive!
As Poirot says to Linnet Ridgeway in Death on the Nile “The psychology is the most important thing in a case.” I believe it’s also the most important thing for someone watching a murder mystery. When considering the number of people who are murdered in the world, it’s far more reassuring to think that (even if perverted or misguided) the murderer had a reason for their action. A reason, or logic, indicates something that we can begin to control or at least understand. We are safer from killers we understand, even sympathise with, than those who kill for no reason.
In my opinion, this principle extends to juries. I have worked with juries and have witnessed the moment when it dawns on them that their jury service is no longer something annoyingly administrative, but that they are about to make a decision that changes someone’s life forever. In her book Val McDermid notes that ‘juries like motives because it helps them make sense of events that are far beyond their experience of the world’.
We watch the Dr. Nikki Alexanders of the world pull impressive forensic tricks out of the bag. But in the real world, the forensics techniques used in a case is dependent on budget. What a thing to consider! Some of us work in events or undertake administrative projects where we also work to a budget. However, somewhere out there a DCI is weighing up whether how a person died is worth the cost of conducting complex testing, like facial reconstruction. Further shattering the dramatic illusion we see onscreen, in McDermid’s book she interviews Crime Scene Investigator Peter Arnold who comments that “the public thinks we have more tricks than we do, and when CSIs say [it’s not possible to] examine something they’re sometimes not believed.”
I know Silent Witness and the murders I watch on screen are fiction. Yet I still experience the same shivery feeling that I used to get as a child at night after watching an immersive mystery. As I lean down to spit out my toothpaste, I feel utterly certain that I will look up to find the face of a silent intruder and their knife in my mirror.
From my research I believe that it’s too soon to diagnose myself as the next American Psycho. Rather, it seems my obsession has endured due to something far less scary - nostalgia and an interest in the dead as a bid to better understand the living.
Anyone who has found themselves similarly unsettled by their love of a murder mystery will appreciate McDermid’s unravelling of the facts behind the tasks that we see our favourite, and we must remind ourselves, fictional characters perform onscreen. McDermid speaks to the real-life pathologists in cutting rooms around the world and highlights their dedication and willingness to put their reputation on the line, in a courtroom in the name of justice. While they may not receive the widespread public admiration that Dr Nikki Alexander does, after reading this book, there’s no doubting that they deserve it.