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FORENSICS AND FICTION
by D. P. Lyle
Thomas Dunne Books, August 2001
320 pages
$23.95
ISBN: 0312365519


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

There's an old cartoon that shows a little kid writing a thank-you note that reads something like "dear Grandma, thank you for the book about elephants. It told me more about elephants than I needed to know."

While I think Doug Lyle's FORENSICS AND FICTION is an awesomely useful book, I admit that at times it told me more about how to kill people than I needed to know. But I'm not a writer. Although yes, this book will, without a doubt, appeal to readers of mystery fiction, its true value is the wealth of information contained in it.

For quite a while, Doug Lyle has been the go-to guy for technical expertise in a number of areas. Lyle, a cardiologist by trade, is a mystery fan and has made himself available to countless authors. While his medical training is not in pathology or forensics or history, Lyle is an expert in all those areas. What he doesn't know, apparently, he learns. He researches so that you and I get the right information.

In FORENSICS AND FICTION, Lyle reproduces some of the requests he's received from authors on topics ranging from what a rattlesnake bite looks like to whether 'truth serum' really works. He explains what happens when someone is exposed to the vacuum of space and whether eye movements reveal that someone is lying. Lyle provides specifics on the effects of drugs, and how mental illnesses were treated in the past.

Unless you're a police officer, a pathologist, or the world's best private eye, you're probably going to need some expert's help with your mystery novel. We readers are picky sorts and if you use the wrong gun, we'll tell you. If you poison your victim with a fast-acting poison that actually takes months to accumulate in the body, someone might mention it in a review, or at your next signing. Or maybe in an email where we tell you how we loved your latest book but . . .

FORENSICS AND FICTION answers hundreds of questions. Some authors gave permission for their names to be used and you'll see inquiries from familiar folks like Jan Burke, Lee Goldberg, Carolyn Hart, Hallie Ephron, David Corbett and Cynthia Riggs. Lyle divides the book into large sub-headings so you see questions about medical issues, questions pertaining more to the law, crime labs, autopsies and the 'odd but interesting' bunch at the end.

This book taught me at least two things. One is that writers are amazingly inventive. I knew that, but seeing the numerous ways they come up with to kill people, to mess with investigations, to imagine, it's truly impressive. Some of these may never get into a published work, but the imagination shown reassures me, since there are days and sometimes weeks where I despair of finding something new and interesting in mystery fiction.

The second thing I learned, or rather confirmed, was that I probably will never be able to write a murder mystery. I'm simply too squeamish to read the detailed explanations that Lyle provided. Hearing all the fine points of what happens when you feed a person this, or you do that to someone made me cringe.

Every question was asked twice, and I can't see the point. Lyle summed up a question he was asked, then reprinted the specific inquiry, which was sometimes several lines long as it was setting the stage for the question: "my book is set in London in 1870" or "my character is supposedly blind". I didn't see the point of the restatement and it got irritating.

This is also not a book for the squeamish (um, hi) and I had trouble reading the detailed replies Lyle provided because they were, to use a highly technical word, icky. I recognize that this information is valuable and even necessary, but I don't really want to know.

So readers like me might find that a little goes a long way in FORENSICS AND FICTION. If however, I were writing crime novels, this book would be on the shelf next to the most useful reference materials I owned. It strikes me as, if not an essential reference book, one that would certainly provide ideas for writers stuck on a detail. And since it contains an index, it seems like a very handy all-in-one resource.

Reviewed by Andi Shechter, August 2007

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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