BESTSELLER:Bullet entrances, slash wounds, bludgeoning, dismemberment - and that's just the day job. Author and forensic anthropologist Kathy Reichs tells fellow crime writer John Connollyhow she prefers to let her books do the talking
INTERVIEWING KATHY REICHS is a rather frustrating experience. Not that she isn't pleasant: she is perfectly so. Perhaps it helps that we share a publisher, and I have met her socially once before, but some journalists appear to struggle with her. She gives almost nothing away, a reticence justified, in part, by what she says is a need to protect herself and her family from some of the people against whom she has testified. What little she does reveal of herself has to be dragged out of her.
It's a shame, because Reichs is that rarity: a writer of fiction who is genuinely interesting beyond what she writes, and not simply because of her non-literary work, although that, in itself, would be reason enough to talk to her.
After all, this is a woman who has raked through the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks; who has disinterred the victims of death squads in Guatemala and reviewed the evidence of genocide in Rwanda; who is a member of the Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team (DMORT), the expert American organisation that deals with disasters involving mass fatalities; and who has drawn on her experiences to produce 11 best-selling novels, the latest of which is Devil Bones, and a popular television series, Bones, all featuring a forensic anthropologist named Temperance Brennan.
But Reichs (60), born in Chicago in a southside Irish neighbourhood, was also married at 19, had her first child, Kerry, while still an undergraduate and, by the time she moved to Charlotte, North Carolina, with her lawyer husband to work in her chosen field of forensic anthropology, had a second child, Courtney, and was pregnant with her third, Brendan. This was in 1978, when there was considerably more antipathy towards working mothers than there is now, especially in such an unusual environment.
"Well, I didn't think things through along those lines, but forensic anthropology was, and still is, a male-dominated field, and I do remember that in our neighbourhood I was the only working wife and mother," she says.
That's it. What must, at times, have been a considerable struggle against an institutionalised antipathy towards women, and working mothers in particular, is largely dispensed with in a single sentence. Kathy Reichs, it's fair to say, is very tough indeed.
For the uninitiated, a forensic anthropologist's work can be boiled down, if that's the right term, to one word: bones.
"In a nutshell, that's it," says Reichs. "We focus on the human skeleton, and we help identify it. We get cases where you can't do a visual ID; you can't do fingerprints and you can't do dental, because you have no idea who the person is. You can't use DNA or fingerprints in a vacuum, or on a total unknown: you've got to have a name. So if we get a complete unknown and it's compromised - burned, mutilated, mummified, decomposed, just bones - we can give a profile of age, sex, race, weight, height, unique characteristics, always from the bones, and then the cop can go and match that against lists of missing persons and come up with a possible name.
"So ID is one thing that we do, and the second thing is trauma analysis to determine the cause or method of death, so bullet entrances and exits, slash wounds, bludgeoning. Then sometimes we look at body treatment after death: dismemberment, tools, the pattern of dismemberment. But the common denominator is bones."
Reichs began as an academic bioarchaeologist, dealing with the ancient dead, but increasingly found herself dealing with more recent evidence of mortality. Her first forensic case was a leg retrieved from a lake, still preserved in a nylon stocking from the 1950s. She ended up working for the office of the chief medical examiner in Charlotte, although her writing job has now largely put paid to that, and she continues to consult for the Laboratoire de Sciences Judiciaires et de Médecine Légale for the province of Québec. She is also a professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte. In her spare time, assuming that there is any, she likes fast cars and playing tennis.
I ask her if she's a driven person.
"I don't think I'm driven," she replies. "I think I'm disciplined. I have a lot on my plate. I have a lot I have to accomplish in any given year. There are days I'd rather sit by the pool, but I go sit by the computer instead." Um, that would probably be most people's definition of "driven", then. One wonders what Reichs might actually accomplish if she really decided to apply herself.
Each of her books has drawn, to some degree, on her experiences as a forensic anthropologist. The first, Déjà Dead, took its inspiration from a serial killer named Serge Archambault, also known as "The Butcher of St-Eustache", who was convicted in 1993 for the murders of three women.
"He was a stalker, and a butcher, among many other things. He kept notes on his victims. When they finally arrested him, he had notes that read, 'Second floor. Has a dog. Works eight to seven', that kind of thing, so he clearly was stalking his victims before killing them. He killed three women, but he had other women that he didn't get to, fortunately, so by today's standards he was just getting started. But he mutilated. He was very vicious in what he did. He was arrested after the second known victim, but those were pathology cases: they were found right after they were killed. After his arrest, he admitted to killing another woman two years earlier, and cutting her up and burying her in five different places, so that was the one I was involved in: not so much the ID, because we had dental records and that was pretty straightforward, but the dismemberment, which is the cut marks and the way he went about it. So that's typical of what I do: I took that core idea and created a fictional story from it."
Devil Bones, she says, derived not from one single case, but the repeated experience of receiving skulls that had been mistreated in some way: trophy skulls brought back by soldiers from the second World War or Southeast Asia that were thrown away, or skulls, covered in blood or feathers, that had been used on altars or in a religious or ceremonial setting.
This less specific point of origin for the book may explain why Devil Boneslacks the focus of the better novels in the series. At times, the research overwhelms the plot, and Reichs is forced to fall back on a degree of coincidence and contrivance that makes for an uneasy read. Yet there is still a great deal that is fascinating in the scientific details, and therein lies much of the appeal of her novels.
I find it interesting, I tell her, that it was two female authors - Patricia Cornwell and herself - who effectively created a whole new genre in crime writing: mysteries that investigated the commission of a crime through the medium of the human body. I wonder aloud if that is because women are more comfortable with their physiology, more aware of the workings of their own bodies than men, but, true to form, Reichs is reluctant even to speculate.
"I'm trying to think if there are male writers writing about the body in that way," she says, eventually. "I don't know if you can generalise by gender: some men are squeamish, some women are squeamish. Some men aren't, some women aren't. It's a hard one for me to comment on. I don't know how you creatures think!"
Manfully, I try to disguise my hurt at being described as a "creature", but the mention of Cornwell does lead Reichs to continue, pointedly: "Well, for me it was just natural to write about the body in that way because that's what I do. I didn't decide to come up with an idea and go out and research it, as she did. She worked part-time, or volunteer work, or whatever it was, in a medical examiner's office in a clerical capacity. I was regularly in an autopsy room, and regularly handling victims of violent crimes. When I thought about writing fiction it never occurred to me to write anything else."
I don't ask if she and Cornwell have ever met. As far as I'm aware, they have not. If they do, it probably won't be a long conversation.
Bones, the TV series starring David Boreanaz and Emily Deschanel that is based loosely on Reich's books, is the latest, lightest, but probably most scientifically accurate in a recent glut of shows dealing with forensic science.
Reichs traces the public's growing fascination with the subject back to extensive TV coverage of the O J Simpson trial in 1995, but acknowledges that, in this case, a little knowledge may be a dangerous thing.
"I think the good aspect is that it makes juries aware of science and the power of certain tools like DNA, but it also makes expectations way too high, that someone is going to find that one minute clue in acres and acres of forest. There is also more negative evidence at trials: lawyers are forced to explain to juries why they are not going to introduce DNA, or hair and fibre evidence. That's something I hadn't seen before. Otherwise, juries say, where was the DNA evidence? Well, you know, it was just a fender-bender . . ."
I ask if her work ever troubles her, or if she was aware of a political dimension to her involvement in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide or the recovery of victims of the Guatemalan death squads.
"I think you do have to detach yourself from any political dimension. Your job is to recover those victims, identify them, and document what took place, and you really should do that in an objective manner, just as you would at a crime scene. As a scientist, you're really not supposed to be adversarial, but when you're digging up children and 15-year-old women and their newborn babies out of the ground, then it's hard to stay objective. The cases that stay with me are the ones I don't solve, because, unlike television, you don't solve everything. And child cases, the innocent victim cases. They stay with me."
Reich's daughter Kerry, a lawyer and also an author, is with us as we talk. In the past, she has spoken of how her mother became more protective of her children, reining them in more, when she dealt with child cases.
"I think I did that on an unconscious level rather than actively doing it," says Reichs, somewhat reluctantly. "They tell me that I did it, and so they could tell when I was working on a child murder case. So, yeah, there must be some carry-over from these things. You can't completely block your mind from it."
With that, we're done. Reichs is far from being a journalist's nightmare - she's too polite, and too self-aware, for that, and she has a dry, spiky wit that takes the edge off her seriousness - but she is so intent upon maintaining her privacy that, at times, the interview process seems somewhat redundant. As her success continues, I think she'll probably end up enduring it less and less often.
And that, I suspect, will suit her just fine.
Devil Bones(£12.99) is published by William Heinemann