CSI Don't See It

by Sheila Connolly


I watch CSI—the original consistently, and the off-shoots occasionally. I know they represent a non-professional’s fantasy of what forensic science is all about, and in the real world DNA analysis takes six months, not six minutes. But as long as I treat the episodes as fiction I’m fine.


But there was one thing about a recent episode that bothered me as a writer. In this episode, the victim was found draped over a barbed wire fence (I might question whether that particular fence was strong enough to support the dead weight of a body, but I could overlook that), and his head had been hacked off and was jammed on a nearby pole. All appropriately gory, blood duly spattered and dripping. Ray Langston (the character played by Laurence Fishburne) waxed a wee bit over-poetic when he said he could see the horror in the dead man’s eyes, which of course were open and staring.


And then Langston examined the head more closely, and lo and behold, a large insect climbed out of the victim’s mouth—an insect that I immediately identified as a long-horn beetle.


Let me say that my husband is a professional entomologist (although his job isn’t anywhere near as interesting as Gil Grissom’s was), so I’m attuned to insects. I suppose the average viewer wouldn’t know how many things are wrong with this scenario. Fact one: there was no earthly reason for that beetle to be inside anyone’s mouth, dead or alive (the victim or the beetle—take your pick). These are vegetarian beetles, if you will—they eat trees. No interest in flesh. Fact two: the victim had been dead only a few hours, and was killed late at night. This kind of beetle is active during the day. That beetle should not have been where it was—unless the writers were going for the “ick” factor. Lots of people go “eeew” when they see any bug, much less one crawling out of a corpse’s mouth.


I will concede that it was a very photogenic beetle—that variety is big (close to two inches) and has attractive variegated antennae that are longer than the insect’s body. They also move slowly, so they’re easy to film. They aren’t particularly dangerous to humans (they have pincers, but they can’t even pierce human skin), so Nick Stokes could pick it up easily (but why didn’t he bag it as evidence?).


It appears that the sole function of this vagrant beetle was to give Ray a chance to say “where’s the Bug Man when you need him?”—an oblique reference to the absent Grissom. Insider joke. Cute.


But that was the problem. This beetle was introduced up front, with plenty of face time. He was even given a name: Longhorn Beetle. And then he was never seen again.


It’s the Chekhov’s gun problem. Chekhov wrote "One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it." Mr. Beetle is the loaded rifle in this case: since we met him in Act One, we expect him to show up again later, complete with an explanation (he bit the killer and provided DNA evidence? He is found only in the remote reaches of Borneo, and only one suspect had been to Borneo recently?). Around the penultimate commercial break, I turned to my daughter and said, “They haven’t explained the beetle yet.” I was waiting—and it never happened.


For shame, CSI: you have violated a fundamental principle of good writing. Explain your beetles!

Reality: What a Concept!

Sandra Parshall

In a column in the July 13 issue of Publishers Weekly, children’s book author Peter Mandel deplores the current emphasis on getting the facts correct in fiction. He doesn’t understand why anyone cares whether the hair styles, clothing, and settings in the John Adams miniseries or in Mad Men accurately reflect the eras in which the dramas are set. He has personally received complaints that his new children’s picture book “wasn’t fully researched” and that one character was unfairly portrayed.

Oh, Mr. Mandel, you should come on over to the world of crime fiction if you want to witness a true mania for getting the details right. An entire branch of reference book publishing is devoted to guides for writers of mysteries, suspense, and thrillers. Behind me as I type this are bookshelves loaded down with such titles as The Crime Writer’s Reference Guide, How to Try a Murder, Cause of Death, Bones, The Crime Writer’s Reference Guide, Hidden Evidence, Corpse, Crime Scene, Death Investigator’s Handbook, Howdunit, Deadly Doses, Crime Classification Manual, The Criminal Law Handbook... Well, you get the point. I have at least 100 books covering various aspects of crime, police work, criminal thinking and behavior, and the workings of the US legal system, and I still have to go online sometimes to find answers to vexing questions.

Online sources of information are even more numerous than the books on my shelves. The Crime Scene Writers list on Yahoo and Dr. Doug Lyle’s blog and website are among the most popular internet sources for those of us who dream up ways to commit murder and get away with it for 300 pages or so. The national Sisters in Crime listserv has a feature called Mentor Monday that allows members all-day access to experts in various fields.

Why do we bother, if as Mr. Mandel contends in PW, the purpose of fiction is to divert and entertain us, to take us to an alternate reality, not to painstakingly recreate reality itself? Why are so many readers unable to enjoy a mystery if it gets a single fact wrong, and why do writers themselves jeer at CSI and Without a Trace for being more fantasy than reality? (Five-minute DNA tests? Don’t we wish! Thirty-second fingerprint matching done entirely by computer? Ha! We all know it takes hours, days, even a week, and a human, not a machine, must make the final match. The FBI rushing to launch a search when some guy doesn’t come home for dinner? Give me a break!)

The blame for our make-it-real mania may rest with the medium through which you are reading these words. Anybody with a computer and an internet connection can find out almost anything these days, verify any statement or prove it false. Readers who spotted bloopers have never hesitated to point them out to the authors, but those knowledgeable readers were once far fewer – and they sent their complaints on paper through the mail.

I don’t think our educational system is such a grand success these days that every student emerges with encyclopedic knowledge of the world – quite the contrary, unfortunately. And I don’t think television has enlightened anyone. After all, TV is what gives us those ridiculous scenarios on CSI and Without a Trace. Newspapers are teetering on the brink of extinction. So where are ordinary people picking up knowledge about crime and crime-solving? The same place I go for it, apparently – the internet. And once in possession of proof that an author has erred, the reader (chortling with vengeful delight, I’m sure) immediately taps out a withering digital letter to the writer and hits Send.

But am I complaining? No. I am one of those readers who demand accuracy. I don’t point out mistakes to authors because I’m a crime fiction writer too and the last thing I want to do is embarrass another of my species. I take notice, though, and I remember. And I remind myself yet again to check my facts when I’m writing.

To get back to Mr. Mandel’s “So what?” question about the effect of inaccuracies in fiction, I can only answer for myself, but I suspect my attitude is shared by many. I don’t choose accuracy over good writing and entertainment. I want accuracy and good writing and an entertaining story. I can find CSI entertaining as is, but I believe it would be more enjoyable if I weren’t rolling my eyes in disbelief every few minutes. I won’t throw a mystery novel against a wall if the author gets a fact wrong, and I can suspend disbelief and enjoy an amateur sleuth story, but the more realistic the novel is, the more I enjoy it. This is probably why I prefer the darker stuff. Murder is evil. Don’t try to make me believe it isn’t.

I’m also put off by inaccuracy in science fiction. I love Star Trek, and because it’s set in the future, I can accept whatever is presented. Who am I to say whether this or that amazing feat will or won’t be possible in a couple hundred years? Did Ben Franklin ever imagine such a thing as a computer, let alone the internet? The distant future no doubt holds technological wonders we can’t even dream of now. But SF stories set in the near future, in a universe that looks pretty much like the current one, have to be plausible or I’ll lose interest. (Egregious example: the new movie Moon. Don’t get me started.)

Returning to crime fiction, the genre in which I read most often, accurate facts don’t intrude on my reading experience or distract me from the story. They provide a solid foundation for the story, they make me trust the author. So my message to other writers is simply this: Get the facts straight while telling me a good story and I will happily follow you deep into your book’s fictional world.

How do you feel about factual errors in novels? Do you think the demand for accuracy is a good thing or a bad thing?

Cops with Cleavage

Sandra Parshall

What is your mental image of a female cop or crime scene investigator? If it includes five-inch heels, hair flowing halfway to the waist, and skin-tight tops that expose a generous amount of cleavage, you’ve been watching too much TV.

The people who produce shows about law enforcement are willing to give women equality in the workplace, but only if they go to work looking like prostitutes trolling the streets for johns. Every time I watch CSI or Without a Trace, I am amused by the absurdities of the action – crime scene techs questioning suspects and ordering cops to make arrests, the FBI launching a widespread search because some guy didn’t come home for dinner, instant DNA analysis – but I accept them if the story is entertaining. What I can’t accept is the way the women dress.

I first noticed it on NYPD Blue, a show I loved. I kept wondering how any female detective could deal successfully with street punks or hardened criminals when she was leaning over them with half of her breasts exposed. And if she ever had to chase a suspect, wouldn’t high heels slow her down a little?

The CSI shows are often shot in near-total darkness, but the women’s cleavage is always visible. I don’t suppose a crime scene investigator’s manner of dress matters much, since a CSI’s work is done mostly behind the scenes and in labs. Even so, it’s hard to suspend disbelief and accept someone as a professional when she is so obviously an actress decked out in sexy clothes by the wardrobe department.

The women who really show us all they’ve got are Poppy Montgomery and Roselyn Sanchez, playing FBI agents on Without a Trace. Both expose ample cleavage in every show, and they almost always wear their very long hair hanging loose over their shoulders and down their backs. When the two of them work together, and they whip out their badges and announce ominously, “We’re from the FBI,” I always expect the person they’ve confronted to burst out laughing.

Since the majority of viewers for these shows are women, I don’t know who this in-your-face sexuality is aimed at. Maybe the producers are trying to attract more male viewers? An interviewer once asked an actress on one program why all the women wear such revealing clothes, and she replied, “You don’t think we dress ourselves, do you? We wear what we’re told to wear.” Somebody higher up, probably a male somebody, is making the decision to portray professional women as Playboy bunny wannabes.

I know how real-life crime scene investigators and cops feel about the CSI shows, and I know Without a Trace is based on a false premise – the FBI doesn’t have any units, in New York or elsewhere, dedicated solely to finding missing persons – but I haven’t heard female cops or CSIs or FBI agents speak out about the way women are portrayed on these programs. Are they insulted by it? Do they laugh it off? Do they worry that the public’s image of them is being influenced by TV fantasy, and they aren’t being taken seriously as well-trained, competent professionals?

How do you, as a viewer, feel about the way women are presented on TV crime shows? Has your image of female cops and CSIs been affected by television? Can you think of any explanation for why women are still being objectified this way by the entertainment industry, at this late date in our history?


When I call up my own mental picture of a dedicated, thoroughly professional woman in law enforcement, what I get is Cathy L. Lanier, chief of the Metropolitan Police Department of Washington, DC. I’m stubbornly hanging onto this image, regardless of what I see on TV.







(Photo of Chief Lanier from the DCMPD.)

Killers Who Refuse to Die

Sandra Parshall

Oh, how I hated to see Nicole Wallace go. She was such a bitch, and evil right down to her toes. I loved her.

Nicole, played by the wonderful Olivia d’Abo, was the only villain who’d ever outwitted the brilliant Bobby Goren on Law & Order: Criminal Intent. And Bobby was the only man who ever wandered into this poisonous spider’s web and lived to tell about it. They were perfectly matched. She should have gone on forever, making well-timed return appearances in Goren’s world. But last Sunday night she died, in a peculiarly unsatisfying fashion – not in a confrontation with Goren, but offstage, at the hand of another twisted soul who thought he was doing Goren a favor. Since we didn’t actually see her die, and we all know that on TV shows DNA results aren’t necessarily final, I hold out hope that we haven’t lost one of the crime genre’s creepiest and most fascinating recurring villains.

The majority of crime novels and all of television’s crime dramas are built around recurring heroes or heroines, but the villain who refuses to die and keeps popping up again and again seems to have fallen out of favor with most writers. The few authors who attempt such characters don’t always handle them well.

The most famous recurring villain in mystery fiction is Professor Moriarty, who tested Sherlock Holmes’s skills many times, and disappeared over Reichenbach Falls while locked in combat with the great detective. That was supposed to be the end of both of them, but readers wouldn’t let Arthur Conan Doyle get away with it.

Hannibal Lecter was a charismatic recurring villain until his creator decided to explain what made him the way he was. In the novel Hannibal, we were asked to believe that seeing enemy soliders make a meal of his little sister awakened Hannibal’s own appetite for human flesh. In fiction as in real life, there is such a thing as Too Much Information. I have no interest in ever reading about Hannibal again.

Chelsea Cain has created a female version of Hannibal in Heartsick and her upcoming book, Sweetheart. Her beautiful serial killer, Gretchen Lowell, is in prison, and Detective Archie Sheridan is the one victim who escaped before she got around to cutting out his heart, but he can’t shake off the psychological hold she has on him any more than Clarice Starling can rid herself of Hannibal Lecter.

On TV, Gil Grissom of CSI spent a couple of seasons pursuing a killer who created miniature replicas of her crime scenes before she actually committed the murders. An intriguing premise, but the killer, when she was tracked down, was sadly disappointing and unworthy of the long buildup.

The Joker in the Batman stories finally got an actor capable of playing him in all his twisted glory when Heath Ledger took on the part for The Dark Knight. Ledger’s performance is the only thing worth watching in that film. He made The Joker sick and menacing and genuinely scary, and his future portrayals of the character are among the many brilliant performances we will never see from this talented man who died too young.

One of my favorite recurring killers in crime fiction was the female contract assassin pursued by Lucas Davenport in a couple of John Sandford’s Prey novels. She wasn’t Lucas’s equal – who is, after all? – but she came close, and I was sorry to see her die.

Patricia Cornwell was quite a bit less successful in creating her own recurring villain. The French “werewolf” who bedeviled Kay Scarpetta (she insisted on calling him le loup garou) was alternately laughable and disgusting, but never believable. Without believability, a killer isn’t going to be frightening.

James Patterson did somewhat better with the determined killer who went after Alex Cross and his family more than once, but the overall quality of the stories wasn’t high enough to allow the character to shine.

There are a few more, but even the complete list of continuing villains in modern crime fiction is sadly skimpy. Why don’t more writers attempt to write recurring villains? Are they afraid to show their heroes and heroines as fallible beings who don’t always close the case? Or have they simply bowed to the marketing notion that every book must be self-contained?

What freaks out a CSI?

Elizabeth Becka (Guest blogger)


Our guest is the author of Trace Evidence and the just-released sequel, Unknown Means, both featuring crime scene investigator Evelyn James. When she isn’t writing thrillers, Elizabeth Becka is a real-life forensic specialist with the Cape Coral, Florida, Police Department. She previously worked as a crime scene investigator in Cleveland, the setting of her novels. Visit her web site at www.elizabethbecka.com.


Everybody’s afraid of something.

My heroine is a forensic scientist with the coroner’s office who investigates, of course, homicides. (Coroner = victims are dead.) But as part of her ‘other duties as assigned,’ she also investigates suicides, traffic deaths and industrial accidents. One such industrial accident has occurred in the salt mine which exists (I swear I am not making this up) 1800 feet below the surface of Cleveland, Ohio. Under Lake Erie, to be precise.

There’s just one problem. My heroine is claustrophobic.

So am I.

The only thing that ever scared me about working at the coroner’s office was the cooler—the large refrigerated room where the deceased, on gurneys, were stored. I hated the cooler. I couldn’t care less that it was full of dead bodies, that didn’t bother me a bit. What bothered me was that there were no windows. (I hated the cooler at my first job at an ice cream store too, and the most dangerous item there was a bag of Spanish peanuts…of course, the only dangerous thing in the coroner’s office cooler is possible exposure to TB.)

I rarely needed to go into the cooler, but occasionally it became necessary and I did it. I even shut the door behind me, because otherwise the refrigeration would flow into the hallway, wasting energy and taxpayer dollars.

There were only two things I ever refused to do at the coroner’s office: clean out the crypts, and ride the freight elevator without a light in it.

I didn’t like the freight elevator to begin with. It was one of those barbaric contraptions with the inner wall composed of grating that you had to pull shut after closing the outer door so that you could see the wall move when the elevator went up or down. At least you could have seen the wall move if you kept your eyes open, which I didn’t. It had one light bulb in the ceiling, which would occasionally burn out.

The deep freeze, a 20 x 10 room kept at minus 70 and used for storing old biological samples and bodies who weren’t going anywhere soon, had two light bulbs. The rear one had burnt out years before and had not been replaced, since the maintenance staff did not want to spend any more time in there than the rest of us, and the front one would burn out regularly too. I would go into the deep freeze armed with just a flashlight. But the perfectly empty freight elevator, no.

Please don’t point out that not having a light bulb scarcely made a difference if I kept my eyes closed anyway. It did, and you know it.

This isn’t quite as wimpy as it sounds, since most staff would consider saying no to my boss far more perilous than a silly dark freight elevator, but even she knew that you could only yank a dog’s chain so many times before it turns and bites, and did not push me.

The other thing I refused to do had nothing to do with claustrophobia. It was to clean out the old crypts (the small door and sliding tray system seen on TV, long since discontinued and used only for storage by the time I arrived there). That was out of the question because I had been traumatized about such crypts when I was a child, from the mere preview of a horror movie that made much use of surprises behind those doors. It appeared to be an utterly terrifying movie, at least to a small child, but in reality it must have been truly lousy since it doesn’t even show up in the Internet Movie Database. Doesn’t matter. The damage had been done. I would help clean out the crypts. Just not by myself.

The point is, a vital part of any suspense tale is facing something frightening, and much more so when it’s something the character finds personally frightening.

So readers are enjoying the subplot about the salt mine. It’s an interesting piece of industrial engineering, and it’s an odd role reversal: We’re used to seeing Evelyn walk up to a decomposed body without batting an eye while everyone around her is freaking out. Now Evelyn is, inwardly, freaking out, but to everyone else it’s just another day at work. 1800 feet down with a single elevator for egress? Sure, what’s odd about that? We’re actually under the lake? Yes, but there’s 1700 feet of stone between us and the water. There, that should make you feel better.

Sure.

Everyone’s afraid of something.