Researching crime might be a dangerous business - Linda Strachan

Writing about crime can be fascinating especially when you start looking in depth into exactly to how the crime might be committed and you discover there are lots of things you really do need to know.
Such as -

• How do the police investigate a crime

• How do you break in and steal a car? 

• How do you get it started? 

• How do bank alarms work? 

• But most of all how do you go about asking all the right questions without it looking like you are planning the next big bank robbery or murder? 

'Honestly Officer, I was just doing a bit of research for a book.....!'

 

When I was writing Spider I did quite a bit of research .  I went to meet a boy who had a history of stealing cars and 'joyriding'.  He was nervous at first but once he started speaking he seemed quite happy to answer anything I asked. I got the 'voice' of Spider from him.


I interviewed a youth liaison officer to find out what he could tell me about youth car crime.

I went out as an observer with paramedic crew from the Scottish Ambulance Service and also found out how calls were taken in their control room.



I also went to watch the Fire Service training school as they set up a practice scenario for extracting people from crashed cars.










This was really useful to get the sound of crunching metal, and other noises, and I got a sense of what it must be like for those trapped inside a car after a crash.


Then there is the victim -

• How does it feel if you work in a bank that is being robbed?

• How does it feel if someone stabs you?

For Dead boy Talking I needed to find out what the physical signs were when someone is bleeding heavily from a stab wound,  how quickly do they start to lose consciousness, and what other symptoms appear as time goes on. 

How long would they have to live? 

I had heard (and the main character Josh tells us this, too) that it takes about 25 minutes to bleed to death.  But in reality it would depend on where you have been stabbed and how much you are bleeding.  It can all happen much more quickly  and take a lot less time than that, but Josh doesn't know this.  As happens to many of us at times, we hear a snippet of information and assume that we know the whole story.




Research can be not only interesting but also quite a lot of fun. 

The Society of Authors in Scotland have organised several tours of police stations for authors with the Lothian and Borders Police.


 
I went on a couple of these and had a chance to get on a police motor bike - okay - so they were wise enough not to let me drive it anywhere!!






We spoke to the armed police who demonstrated all the gear they have to carry around with them.

But we also got to see the police dogs and horses in training, probably my favourite part of the day.







Research into crime is fascinating and can be fun,  but just watch out how you ask those potentially incriminating questions.

Someone might get the wrong idea.

I didn't do it! by Anne Rooney

A favourite body-dumping spot of Anne's...

I was driving my daughter to school. She was unusually quiet for a long time, until…

‘Mum – have you killed someone?’

‘Er, no. Why?’

‘Are you sure?’

I thought back over people I’ve wanted to kill in the recent past, but their activity on twitter suggests they’re all still alive.

‘Yep. Sure. Why?’

‘Google.’

‘What?’

‘On Google Earth, on your computer, it says “Dump body here”. So I wondered…’

Researching a crime story is almost as good as doing a crime. You get all the fun of the plotting but without (usually) actually being accused, tried and punished. Google Earth is great. You can see just where there’s a ditch that will hide a body from the road but that can be seen from the railway line. You can track your police chases, insert a hold-up at a level crossing in just the right place, and find a building to burn down.

Not all research is virtual. When I wanted to dump a body in a Venetian canal for three months, I asked a pathologist at the local hospital about the optimum conditions for a body to remain undecayed (the fat turns to a soapy substance called adipocere), how I’d have to protect the corpse from wildlife, and so on. You

have to be careful how you approach experts, though. Starting with ‘I want to dump a body in a canal…’ doesn’t go down well. As it turned out, the very helpful pathologist was so pleased to have something a little different to do he invited me to an autopsy.

You can get it wrong. One friend told me she’d phoned an embassy and asked if it was possible to drive a car with a bomb in it right up to the front door. That was a bad move.

(The body in the Google Earth debacle was not actually dead, but the kidnap victim in Off The Rails. So I really didn’t kill them at all.)

Anne Rooney sounds as if she's protesting too much. She is the author of more than 100 books, both fiction and non-fiction, including Off The Rails and her latest, The Story of Physics. She lives in Cambridge. The daft friend who phoned the Paris embassy about the bomb may be not a million miles from the poster of this blog.