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My tolerance for gore is low; psychological horror is fine, but nothing involving detached body parts, thanks.
Yet I’ve read a number of Patricia Cornwell’s novels and all of Kathy Reichs’s fiction; I’m currently reading the latest, and I’m drafting a chapter on her Montreal-North Carolina-set crime stories.
Last September, I enjoyed seeing Reichs in conversation with Sir Ian Rankin in Scotland.
But these are dark and disturbing stories. The work of the forensic anthropologist/medical examiners is described in excruciating detail. I skip past the most gruesome paragraphs, but there are still some images that have lodged in me.
Bones, the TV series adaptation of Reichs’s work (which is very loose, mostly borrowing the name and occupation of the protagonist), aimed for a fair amount of humour, but it was still too grisly for my tastes.
It’s quite likely that next month’s limited series Scarpetta, based on Patricia Cornwell’s fiction will be, too. I’ll give it a try, because Nicole Kidman and Jamie Lee Curtis, as scrapping sisters! Actresses of a certain age are having A Moment.
(A quibble: Nicole Kidman, at least at first glance, seems like an odd casting choice for an Italian-American forensic scientist who is, in Cornwell’s first novel, in her early 40s.)
An MD/JD, she’s brilliant, gorgeous, and a fabulous cook (Cornwell also produced a cookbook), as well as a surrogate mother figure to her equally brilliant and gorgeous niece, Lucy, a computer tech prodigy. As the series progresses, Lucy’s adventures become more central, and while I appreciate the representation of Lucy’s sexual relationships with women, her mad genius persona is a bit wearing. And there are a lot of vehicles in Cornwell’s fiction: fast cars and helicopters and the like.
My first Scarpetta novel was The Body Farm, picked up at the grocery store cash register on a hot summer day in 1995 when I’d run out of library books.
The Body Farm had been published the previous year and it was the fifth novel in Cornwell’s series. By then I’d read all of Paretsky, Grafton, Muller, and early McDermid, and The Body Farm looked a little . . . different. The feminist politics were more muted; the body counts were significantly higher.
And there was a lot more graphic violence.
Paul Bernardo’s trial was underway, that long, humid summer. Newspaper headlines shared unbearable details from Karla Homolka’s testimony as we all realized, belatedly, what a sweetheart of a deal she had received after being an active participant in sexual assaults and murders–including the death of her own sister. Unimaginable evil.
I worked in a bleak rabbit warren of cubicles downtown and lived in a third-floor flat on a busy street near the train tracks. One of my jobs was to index news articles, and for a time I was assigned to help with tracking the Bernardo stories.
The couple downstairs drank too much and hit each other. Broken bottles were strewn on the front steps on Sunday mornings; I picked my way through the fragments gingerly and complained to the landlord.
After the third time I called the police, my mother begged me to move; she offered to give me $100 a month to find a better neighbourhood before I started grad school. A studio apartment in a quiet building on St. George Street meant I could study at Robarts in the evening and then walk a couple of blocks home. Safely. We both slept better.
It was only when I felt secure that I could really enjoy Cornwell’s darkly disturbing fiction.
The early books in the series had many virtues; for some readers, including me, the more recent ones have been less satisfactory, the crimes still macabre and imaginative while the plots feel paint-by-numbers.
But The Body Farm is a terrific book, with a great premise. From Cornwell’s own website, to avoid relying on my spotty memories:
“The Body Farm – a research institute that tests the decomposition of corpses. Black Mountain, North Carolina: a sleepy little town where the local police deal with one homicide a year, if they’re unlucky, and where people are still getting used to the idea of locking their doors at night. But violent death is no respecter of venue, and the discovery of the corpse of the corpse of an 11-year-old girl sends shock waves through the community. Dr Kay Scarpetta, Chief medical Examiner on a similar case in Virginia, is called in to apply her forensic skills to this latest atrocity, but the apparent simplicity of the case proves something of a poisoned chalice – until Scarpetta finds enlightenment through the curious pathologists’ playground known as the Body Farm.”
Cornwell really did her research, working and volunteering in forensic and criminal justice contexts to pick up everything from the lingo to the medical specifics. She was also an early adopter of incorporating computer-based investigation into her novels, and the details ring true, I’m told by more savvy folks.
I’m thinking, now, about Elisabeth de Mariaffi.
In recent years, de Mariaffi, who is now based in St. John, NL, has been writing fascinating woman-in-peril literary crime novels.
But early in her career she wrote a disquieting book, The Devil You Know. It’s set in Toronto in 1993, when the city was gripped by fears of a serial predator. And it’s a truly frightening novel: one I finished reading and immediately gave away, because I didn’t want to see it on my shelves.
Then I purchased another copy, because de Mariaffi is part of my book project, and I re-read it, realizing this time that much of the fear I was experiencing was my own remembered panic and anxiety of those late 1980s and early 1990s years.
The Annex neighbourhood where I lived was plagued by a serial rapist who was caught in 1986; all of the basement apartments I rented had bars on the window, which would have been a problem in the event of a fire.
And the Metropolitan Toronto police, in their wisdom, hadn’t cautioned women when there was an active threat. That became the basis for the important Jane Doe lawsuit.
Another memory of crime from the time I lived in Toronto: the kidnapping and murder of Holly Jones.
Last fall I lived a few blocks from a gorgeous brick wall mural in a tiny, windswept park near Bloor Street; when I waded through the mud one October day to look at it more closely, I realized that it was Holly Jones’s memorial.
For me, this is the ethical and aesthetic problem: there is too much real violence against women and girls for me to be able to enjoy graphic scenes of violence in fiction.
Holly’s mural is covered with butterflies. I’m not including a photo here, because that feels blasphemous, but the images are lovely. Peaceful.
(And the mural was apparently threatened with demolition, some years ago, but it’s still standing.)
Her murderer will be eligible to apply for parole in two years. But that can’t happen.
The Landscape of Canadian Women's Crime Fiction 
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