In this tale of crime and detection, you will find no mention of CSI, DNA, SOCOS, PCA, PCR, PACE, CPS, HOLMES, FME or any of the endless forensic acronyms, as the action is deliberately placed in 1955. This was the year the author first became a pathologist and is a blatant piece of nostalgia, though the era has now become very popular in books, radio and television, possibly as a form of escapism.
To write an authentic crime novel nowadays, one has to defer to Health and Safety Regulations, Crime Scene Managers, Team Initiatives, Mission Statements, Human Tissue Act, Data Protection Act, Home Office Directives and all the depressing panoply of the bureaucratic Nanny State and political correctness.
Maybe our overcrowded world now needs these Orwellian strictures, but the stress levels were far less fifty years ago, when a trilby-wearing detective inspector in a belted raincoat could lean against the autopsy table with a fag and a mug of Typhoo Tips and chat to the pathologist about last Saturday’s game!
Though the geography is authentic, considerable trouble has been taken to make all the characters and situations totally fictitious.
‘Taceant colloquia, effugiat risus. Hic locus est ubi mors gaudet succurrere vitae…’
‘Let conversation cease, let laughter flee. This is the place where death delights to help the living’
Inscription on the marble wall of the City of New York Chief Medical Examiner’s Office and Morgue