Are traditional crime stories passé?
Recently there occurred a terrible crime in Gotham: an imam and his assistant were shot execution style in the back of the head while walking on the sidewalk in the middle of the afternoon. NYPD already caught the assassin and charged him with first degree murder. The case is still pending. Whether this was a hate crime—the Bangladeshi community was justifiably outraged and thinking it was—the perpetrator will get life in prison.
Besides being shocked, angry, and saddened, in that order, I was impressed by how the police did their job. While forensic science stepped in, of course, old-style detective work found the killer—interviewing witnesses, identifying the suspect’s car with video (no visible plate, though), and connecting the murder with a hit-and-run that occurred nearby right after the shooting—the suspect was in a hurry to get away.
Forensics data could be used later to build an air-tight case against the suspect, and more data could be forthcoming to prove it’s a hate crime (that’s not so easy, by the way, although it seems obvious in this case). But what’s interesting to this crime writer is that the old gumshoe methods of the NYPD detectives led to this suspect’s capture, not the forensics. It made me wonder: Do the old-style PIs and police detectives still have a place in our modern crime literature?
Forensic science continuously improves, of course. While TV’s CSI X (X can be nothing, meaning Las Vegas; or Miami; or New York) or the slew of crime novels with forensic techs as main characters (Cornwell, Deaver Garritsen,…) would have readers and the public in general believe that it’s forensics that solves crimes, it’s not true. As an ex-scientist, I’d like it to be, but it’s generally done the old way for many reasons. One is simply the matter of time—performing the tests doesn’t take hours, it takes days and weeks. And, especially in large metropolitan areas, staffing is woefully inadequate.
In some (near?) future, we all might have chips buried in our shoulders that broadcast our personal data, allowing authorities to determine blood types, DNA profiles, vaccination and dental records, and so forth. An extension of that videocam network currently used by NYPD could record this on the fly, tracking person’s movements—such videocams are ubiquitous, although they are complemented by smartphone videos these days, which authorities could also figure out how to assess. Only in that nightmarish “big brother” scenario could forensics actually solve a crime, almost immediately.
How’s that? Consider the following hypothetical case: a rich citizen’s butler finds his boss lying in a pool of blood, dead. Under the victim’s nails are blood and skin simples—the old man fought his assailant before the knife found his heart. Police try to match that with a DNA sample from the butler. OMG! The butler didn’t do it! What are the police (or some modern Sam Spade) going to do in that case?
Old-style detective work, that’s what. Canvas the neighborhood—did anyone hear the skirmish or the rich man’s death screams? Check for cars in the traffic videocams nearby and around the ME’s determination of TOD (he’s not a CSI per se). Question relatives, friends, and business associates of the victim. Determine if he had any enemies and whether they had threatened him. Determine if anything was taken and check pawnshops or local fences if jewels. There is a large list of things to check, and many have nothing to do with forensics. Whether DNA or a sample fingerprint, the forensics data only serve to prove the guy you catch is the perpetrator after the evil deed is done.
Writers for CSI Miami must have realized this as a mistake in the original CSI (Las Vegas). The Horatio Caine character was more a cop than forensics expert. By giving him a gun and having him spend time outside the lab (not the traditional techie, in other words), he could mix it up with the bad guys on those mean streets of Miami.
Lincoln Rhyme, a paraplegic, wasn’t confined to a lab—he was confined to a bed. His girlfriend was probably added to have someone mixing it up too. As much as I’d like science to be the story, laboratory forensics is basically boring. Give me the old-style gumshoes any day, whether PI or police detective. They’re needed to put the collar on the culprit. They might be led to him by some forensics (the bullet is from an 18th century musket that collector X has), and they might put him away for good with the help of forensic evidence after he’s caught, but the old gumshoe is needed to do the on-street work of bringing the perp in.
This is why I like Connolly’s Harry Bosch more than Deaver’s Lincoln Rhyme, for example. It’s also why all the support staff, including CSUs, that backs up detectives Chen and Castilblanco play a secondary role in my detective series. There just isn’t that much action in that forensics or ME’s lab, unless the bad guys come in and blow them up (this happened in one CSI Miami episode).
“But the real cerebral work occurs there,” you the reader might counter. My rebuttal is simple: Good detectives analyze and synthesize clues, plodding along step by step, as in the NYC case I mentioned, and they make bold leaps of intuition. A thinking woman or man of action is a lot more interesting than a nerdy lab tech. I’m sorry, techies. That’s the way it is. We science types are pretty boring guys!
In libris libertas!
