Val McDermid and a novel sort of crime scene…
Saturday 13 June 2015
The Herald, Scotland
Not content with feeding the appetite of crime fiction readers worldwide, Val McDermid is now helping the University of Dundee’s Centre for Anatomy and Human Identification in a distinctly novel way.
Working at CAHID is clearly a bit of a wheeze. So enjoyable is the work they do, helping police identify corpses found in a range of highly unusual and complicated situations, they now want others to share the fun. Thus, lay people without so much as a GSCE in biology are being invited to take part in a completely free online course. Lasting six weeks, this will use a short story McDermid has written specially for the purpose. Given instruction in various forensic techniques, students can then try to solve the crime. Later, once the identity of the victim and the cause of death have been established, McDermid will publish the story that lies behind the crime, fleshing it out, as you might say.
Reading about this I had a moment of revelation. One of the reasons I rarely read crime fiction, and certainly not the sort where scientific terms are commoner than commas, is that I am never curious enough about why someone has been killed. Probably because I know it will all be explained to me in due course, I can’t be bothered trying to work out what’s going on and why, ahead of schedule.
