Real Detectives and Fictional Criminals

Abstract

This essay is an account of a small subgroup of texts in the hugely varied crime-book market: biographies and memoirs of pathologists.¹ Though this would seem to be unpromising material for best-seller status in the competitive field of popular publishing, such books have, in fact, achieved considerable currency. Take the example of Professor Keith Simpson’s Forty Years of Murder: this text was published in 1978, paperbacked in 1980 and went through no less than ten reprintings up to 1986. This history shows very clearly the appeal that such material can have to a broad reading public, as does the fact that the BBC have recently felt it worthwhile to repeat their series Indelible Evidence in which actors present dramatised reconstructions of crimes that were solved partly through the production of forensic evidence. I do not, however, intend to carry out a statistical survey of the currency of such books or to produce a sociological study of patterns of consumption and audience composition. Rather I intend to examine the appeal of these texts by showing how they place themselves squarely in the space, both economic and critical, usually occupied by crime fiction and how they consistently mimic the forms and ambience of purely fictional work. Indeed, there are direct links: Professor Simpson has published a number of crime stories under the pseudonym ‘Guy Bailey’, a name that, with its invocation of the court with which he is so familiar, drags his fictional work into the realm of ‘fact’. My contention is that the pathologist’s ‘history’ (a word which perhaps obscures the fact — fiction polarity) achieves its appeal precisely because it consistently conceals its own claims to the authoritative ground of documentary and thus can be read as offering the same pleasures as the most far-fetched romance of robbery and murder.