I received several interesting responses to my Book Meme last week. Many wanted to know: Why so many forensics books?
Well, it's both complicated and simple.
If you know me well, you know I have been interested in forensics since I started a play detective agency as a kid. My friends and I never labeled our various activities as forensics, but that is surely what they were. Microscopic examinations of blood, hair, and insects. Evidence carefully preserved in Ziplock bags. Polaroids of imagined crime scenes. Search warrants. Play trials.
The inspiration for the detective agency? A murder in our midst. My father found the body lying in the street in front of our yard. It turned out a man had been stabbed, tied up with thick rope, locked in a closet, and left to die in the yellow duplex two houses down from us. Somehow, he escaped and walked up the street, dripping blood all over the curb. He collapsed sometime in the late night hours and was cold by the time my father left for work. The murder motive: a drug deal gone bad.
As a kid, I watched my entire extended family waste away from cancer, and I developed an intense interest in autopsies, pathology and death. I created an insect graveyard under a bush in our front yard, complete with elaborately painted tombstones and funerals. I noted cause of death and wrote it down in a record book. None of this was macabre or depressing. It was uplifting, actually. Spiritual.
For a kid with an alcoholic, violently angry father, the graveyard offered a place to bury grief itself.
One uncle's girlfriend was murdered, too, though I know nothing of the actual details. My mother revealed very little, when I asked about the woman posing in family photographs. Who is she? I would ask, hoping for more details. Your uncle's girlfriend. But she was killed a long time ago, My mother would say. You mean murdered? I would ask. Yes, she was murdered. And then she would close the photo album, just like a detective closing a case.
Those who know me also know that the murder of Tammy Zywicki has haunted me since I was seventeen. But even before that case, I kept company with the missing. (I am writing an essay now about why.)
And I have always loved the intersections between science and art. For years now, I have thought of writing as a forensic science.
There are also reasons I do not want to share. Have never shared.
Of course, forensics are nothing new on anti:freeze. A few years back, I created a whole category devoted to the subject. My very first post was about forensic taphonomy.
And one of my other sites,evidentiary:alchemy is devoted to criminal trials, forensics, and creative writing. (I recently moved & redesigned that site, so check it out.)
Why so many forensics books? Because I must.