Serial Killers - The Women Who Write Crime Fiction imagine...

This programme contains some strong language

and some scenes which some viewers may find upsetting.

In here, there's, like, a shotgun,

and there's a puddle of blood

and so that shows evidence that a guy or woman was here.

So maybe a lot of blood came from there

and then he was dragging her into there and killed them.

The bodies of Robert and Kate Judson and their baby Linda Mae

were discovered in their home on a November morning in 1937.

In the baby's room, in here,

there might be, like, another boy in the child's bed.

If there is a boy in there,

then that could have killed the baby and that would be the case.

This model is one of a collection

of meticulously-crafted miniature crime scenes,

based on a real murder.

They were created over 70 years ago to train forensic detectives

from across America and they're still used today.

Young lady here appears to be stabbed in the chest.

We have blood coming up from underneath of the suspect

with what appears to be some trauma to the right side of her head...

The doll's houses are not the work of a police department -

they're entirely the creation of a rich heiress from New England

with a fascination for murder

and a passion to improve police detective work.

And this was all conceived by a woman called Frances Glessner Lee.

That's correct, right. She made these in the 1930s and '40s.

She started a homicide seminar to train police detectives.

Before then, there was no training for homicide cops.

When she began the seminar,

she thought it would be great to take everybody

to a real crime scene and use it as a practice, which you can't do,

so the next best thing is to make little crime scenes

that they can practise with.

You can't overstate her influence on the field

and she really did transform death investigation.

She is the mother of forensic science.

The answers to the crime scenes are still kept a secret,

even the curator's daughter,

who's grown up with them thinks of them as mysteries to puzzle over.

Right now, I really need a stool to see over the girl

and see her face because I need to see how she died as well.

The miniatures are housed

in the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Baltimore,

a city with one of the highest homicide rates in America.

Murder, and our fascination with it, fills the books we read.

Today, crime fiction tops the bestseller charts

and most of those books are now read and written by women.

So why are we so drawn to the nasty business of murder?

I don't know.

This one is a very big mystery.

It's long been known that women are more likely to read than men,

and when it comes to crime fiction, they completely dominate.

Women are choosing to read books that focus on the worst crimes

that can happen to them -

novels that are filled with sadistic killers

and the bruised flesh of raped, murdered women.

I think that women are interested in crime fiction because to be female

in this world is to move through it with a feeling that you're prey.

For as much as we like the detectives,

we seem to like the murderers well.

We find it exciting, as though somehow they've got the secret

to what makes us tick.

Women haven't only just discovered their dark sides.

Today's crime fiction writers stand on the shoulders of some

of the genre's most inventive minds,

with little to connect them, other than someone is going to die.

"Queens of crime" - dreadful expression,

which we're united, I think, in disliking heartily.

Where crime books were once concerned

with the riddles of detection,

a mystery to be solved, now the whodunnits are more likely to be

why- and how-dunnits,

as writers explore the reality of violent crime.

You have a narrative where women are to blame

for the worst things that men do

and the way that they blame us is by saying that

we're not perfect, that we're not good.

Any woman who has sex, any woman who's had a drink,

any woman who flirts, any woman who basically behaves in the way

that human beings do are blamed for the worst of what men do.

"This city's going to rue the day I was ever born.

"People are going to pay.

"I'll make sure certain people pay and you want to know why?

"Because nobody who counts gives a damn

"when women are raped and murdered.

"The same bastards who work the cases go out on the town

"and watch movies about women being raped, strangled, slashed.

"To them it's sexy, they like to look at it in magazines.

"They fantasise.

"They probably get their rocks off by looking at the scene photographs.

"The cops, they make jokes about it. I hear them laughing."

'America's biggest selling female crime writer is Patricia Cornwell.

'For three decades, she's published a novel almost every year

'and sold over 100 million books.

'There are a number of reasons not to mess with her.

'Her Los Angeles apartment is a self-made museum

'of Victorian crime paraphernalia and a ton of research material

'to support her obsession

'with finding out who was Jack the Ripper.'

This is 1888...

And this is just one book from 1888, this is just a few months of it.

See all these under here? These are all 1888.

This is July to September, April to June, January to March

and this is the fall when the seven crimes that we know about...

-I mean, at least...

-Of the Ripper's crimes, yes.

It was during the period that this book covered.

Well, I'm just looking at this. It says, "Another Whitechapel murder.

"During the early hours of yesterday morning,

"another murder of a most revolting and fiendish character

"took place in Spitalfields."

This is not a fantasy.

This is not some mythological creature, you know,

in his top hat and his tails going through foggy alleyways.

This was a violent psychopath

who might have traversed the surface of life

as a very normal and charming, relatively successful human being

but that's who he was at his core.

Autopsies weren't a staple of crime fiction

until Patricia Cornwell came along.

She created a forensic detective, Dr Kay Scarpetta,

who's so far featured in 24 bestsellers.

When Cornwell set out to write her first Scarpetta novel,

she took a full-time job as an assistant in a morgue.

Annie Leibovitz famously photographed her

in 1997 for Vanity Fair.

So, Patricia, it's now 25 years, more or less, since you invented

the character of Dr Kay Scarpetta

with the novel Postmortem, which is now a kind of landmark novel,

but when it arrived, people were baffled by it...

Oh, my God, that was a bad time.

That was just one more broken dream because, you know,

I'd had three books rejected before I wrote that one

and I actually thought, "I think know what I'm doing now, finally."

And the book came out, a very tiny printing of only 6,000,

no publicity, nothing.

It came out and a local bookstore decided to ban it because

they thought it was too graphic and violent and that got picked up

by the news and I was uninvited from the one or two little dinky signings

I'd been asked to do at women's clubs and stuff

and I thought, "I'm ruined and I've not even gotten started.

"What's the matter with me? I can't do anything right."

"I gently wedged a finger under the electrical cord ligature around

"Lori Petersen's neck, exposing an angry furrow in the flesh.

"The margin wasn't clearly defined,

"the strangulation was slower than I'd originally thought.

"I could see the faint abrasions from the cord's having slipped

"in place several times.

"It was loose enough to keep her barely alive for a while,

"then suddenly it was jerked tight."

The murders in Postmortem are drawn from a real-life case,

that of the Southside Strangler,

a serial killer who was the first American to be convicted

using DNA evidence and sentenced to the electric chair.

You drew on a story which was almost local, in Richmond, Virginia.

I was working at the medical examiner's office

when those cases began and the city literally was terrorised

because these were women who were in their own homes,

minding their own business, not doing anything that's high risk

and someone's coming in and finding these unbelievably brutal crimes.

And one of them was murdered in her bed

while the family was sleeping in the house.

They couldn't get her to open the door in the morning

and when they went in there,

she's bound in duct tape, and had been raped and strangled

in the bed in the house.

What kind of person does something like this?

So I was scared to death.

Those descriptions though, even in Postmortem,

were things which might have not just...

sort of might have repelled some of those readers.

I face this dilemma of how do I make this entertainment

without adding to the problem, as I already perceive it,

why I am so offended by all this,

and so I thought, "You only have two choices.

"You either turn your back and walk away and don't do it,

"or you just get right in there

"and you do it through Scarpetta's perspective

"and you show violence for what it is.

"You don't celebrate it, you condemn it."

But that was a conscious decision of mine that I said,

"I'm not going to make this pretty.

"This is not going to be the drowned poet Shelley, you know, at Oxford.

"'Ahhh, you look so beautiful

"'when you've been floating in the water for days.'"

I don't think so. No. I'm sorry.

If Scarpetta's going to show you what she does,

she's damn well going to show it to you,

so of course I have empathy for the victims,

and that's where I get my ideas as I go.

I go into my fear hole.

I've got a big, deep one there from my childhood

and I just say, "Let me just reach over the edge and lift that out,

"and then I'm going to go away from it and close the lid,"

and I pull scary characters out of that place,

cos I had a lot of them.

Forensic science is now a staple of crime fiction.

It's also one of the only science disciplines

that is overwhelmingly female.

At the University of Dundee, Professor Sue Black

is a world-leading forensic anthropologist.

Here she's adopted the revolutionary Thiel method,

a new way of embalming which leaves the body more flexible.

These students are about to meet the dead body

that they will practise dissection on.

This is the first time

that they've been introduced to their cadaver.

-Does everybody look like...?

-No.

This one, there's been a little bit of dissection done on this body,

so some of it's opened up, and you can see that, obviously,

one of her students, I suspect, has been looking at veins.

Yeah, so they've been opening up the skin

to see what some of the veins look like.

But the flexibility is what's important about this,

is that the bodies are completely flexible.

-Can I just touch?

-Yes, of course you can.

So, if you move the hand.

Just at the wrist there.

-Oh, my God.

-You can see just how flexible that is.

-Yes.

And that's what's really important for our surgeons.

-Is that flexibility.

-Right.

-Is it what you expected?

-We were talking about this,

and we kind of pictured just, like, a regular body, but paler.

We didn't expect it to be all sunken like it is cos of the Thiel fluid,

and how the eyes, they're all flattened as well.

-The slack-jawedness.

-Faces are hard.

Faces are hard in terms of being able to deal with them.

Sue Black's work takes her into areas of death investigation

that make for rich plunderings for many crime fiction writers.

The bestselling novelist Val McDermid

has been consulting with her for over 20 years.

Val is now up to her 31st novel,

and when she has an idea for a new method of killing,

she needs Sue to provide the science.

-Hello.

-Hello!

-How are you?

-I'm very well.

-Good.

-How are you?

-All the better for seeing you.

-And you, too.

-Come and tell me what you're going to write.

-Well...

A killer is strangling his victims and putting them in their own car,

driving them to a remote location, putting them in the driver's seat,

setting fire to the car.

The intention is twofold.

One is to obscure forensic traces of his presence

and the other is to try and confuse the issue

about whether or not this is a murder or something other.

When you burn a body,

you know when you cook a piece of roast beef

and you stick it into a hot oven

and it can burn on the outside but can be raw on the inside?

So, a short duration intensity fire

will give you cooking on the outside,

but will still give you soft tissue on the inside.

You kill a lot of people in your books.

-You wouldn't deny that, would you?

-No. That's my job, really,

killing people for fun and profit.

And yet you tell me you're squeamish.

I'm very squeamish. I really don't like blood.

But, you know...

The squeamishness doesn't affect the work,

because I know that's not real.

There's a distance between me and the blood, if you like.

I was always the person watching ER going, "No, I can't look at that."

-You know. So, that's...

-But...

-Big Jessie.

If you're going to strangle somebody...

I've wanted to do this for a long time!

-That's sore, isn't it?

-It's...

-It's really sore.

-It's tender.

-You can feel a spring.

-Yeah.

That's what you're pressing on, are these.

So, that little bit of spring that you could feel is that spring.

-Right.

-OK?

-Now, if that's a horseshoe...

-Yeah.

-..and you squeeze them, it's going to break.

-Yeah.

-SHE EXCLAIMS

-Just like that.

Oops.

"The deep slash to the throat had virtually decapitated the man,

"leaving the head tilted as if hinged at the back of the neck.

"Tony took a deep breath and said,

"'Sentinel Times said they'd all died from having their throats cut.

"'Is that right?'

"'Yes,' Carol said.

"'They were all tortured while they were still alive,

"'but it's the throat wounds that have been fatal in each case.'"

In the mid-'90s, serial killers dominated crime fiction.

Val McDermid did something unexpected with one of hers.

She created a psychopath who mutilated and tortured his victims,

victims who were all men.

I started to wonder how it would alter the investigation

if the victims were male,

how it would affect the way the police viewed these crimes

because the idea of men being the victims of sexual homicide

was not comfortable for them to deal with,

how it would affect the media coverage of the crimes

and how it would affect how the investigation played out.

If he's smart enough to pose his body in the driver's seat

with the head back...

Would you think about doing that if you were a murderer?

-I would.

-Well...

-I've never been caught so far!

-You're not your average kind of killer.

-Yeah.

Not been caught so far.

In terms of victims,

where do you stand in terms of the count of male and female victims?

I haven't done a headcount for a long time, if I'm honest,

but I remember someone raising this some years ago,

accusing me of being misogynist and violent towards women,

and I did do a headcount at the time, and at that point,

I had killed 12 men, 12 women and one transgendered person.

I think it's harder to get more equal ops than that, really.

I think probably on balance

there are more female victims than male,

but that's because that kind of reflects the way the world is.

Serial killers are rare.

The demons that we might find harder to run away from

are the ones that haunt our psyche.

I think I am very interested in madness,

and I like writing about it.

I like reading about it,

reading about types of psychopathy and madness

and then putting them on paper.

I have been asked if I think I get rid of violence in my own nature,

because I don't think I am a very violent person at all,

-but I'm not aware of it.

-Yeah.

But, of course, if it's in my unconscious,

I wouldn't be aware of it, would I?

What did I do between five o'clock and 10.15? What was I doing?

I imagine myself going into the house.

I think about sliding open the glass doors,

stealthily creeping into the kitchen,

and her sitting at her table.

I grab her from behind,

I wind my hand into her long, blonde hair,

I jerk her head backwards, I pull her to the floor

and I smash her head against the cool blue tiles.

Paula Hawkins's novel

was number one on the UK hardback list for over 30 weeks.

No other book has ever done that.

It's the story of an out-of-work alcoholic

who on the daily commuter train to a job she no longer has

gazes into the houses on the street where she used to live.

Her constant blackouts make her an unreliable witness

to a terrible crime.

She can't even be sure whether she is the killer.

Can you explain... or what's your rationale

for why your book has been so astonishingly successful?

I mean, you had written a few books which didn't get that reception.

-I certainly had.

-Yes!

No, I can't.

I mean, if I knew exactly why it had done quite so well,

I would do exactly the same thing again, and I don't know.

There were clearly things that people latched onto.

I mean, the voyeuristic impulse that Rachel has is universal.

Everybody sits... Now everybody sits on the train and stares at their phone,

but in the old days, everybody used to sit on the train and watch people around them.

Now you're looking on Facebook

and, you know, watching people voyeuristically in that way.

But that impulse is universal.

I think that was something people related to.

I think the character of Rachel, being as unusual as she is, she...

a lot of people... Well, not everyone likes her,

but, you know, she provokes a reaction in most people.

But the fact that Rachel is a bit of a mess one way or another

and kind of rather a flawed character...

She doesn't fit the familiar pattern

-of central characters in crime fiction, does she?

-Yeah.

I wasn't interested in writing some sort of happy, sunny person.

I wanted to write someone who was a mess

and who had all these things to overcome

and who was, essentially, incredibly unreliable,

not just to others but to herself,

because she can't remember what she did last night.

All these things seemed to me to open up lots of avenues to explore.

Paula Hawkins's flawed, drunken voyeur

not only caught imaginations here,

Hollywood immediately made the movie.

My husband...

He used to tell me what I'd done the night before.

And I learnt when you wake up like that, you just say you're sorry.

You just say you're sorry for what you did

and you're sorry for who you are,

and you're never going to do it again.

But you do. You do it again.

This sort of crime fiction deals very seriously

with things that go wrong in women's lives and women's roles.

And, yes, in some cases they are victims,

but they're not only victims, there's so much more to it.

You're not just talking about a pretty dead body on page one

that you never really learn about.

I'm just asking a provocative question.

Do you write what you actually want to write

or just think, "I've got to make some money here"?

I honestly didn't think a sort of slightly depressing story

about an alcoholic obsessed with her ex-husband

was going to be a huge money-spinner.

I thought it would be quite a quiet book.

It was a story I was interested in telling.

Mostly I was interested in that character and her memory loss

and how her memory loss affects her sense of self

and her sense of guilt and responsibility.

So it didn't seem to me like,

"Ooh, yes, this is going to be a huge blockbuster."

The Girl On The Train,

along with that other psychological thriller, Gone Girl,

were the standout literary sensations of recent years.

At book festivals, publishers are desperate to figure out

what will be the next must-read novel.

The market seems to be dominated

by these domestic noir psychological thrillers,

so that's a huge trend.

-And written by women.

-And written by women.

And I guess what I'm trying to do in my job

is to think...what will people be reading in a year's time?

So, something I'm kind of looking for at the moment

is a warmer, cosier crime read.

-Warmer and cosier?

-I know.

I think the market might swing back round

to those Agatha Christie, golden age, locked room mysteries.

But then they're things which are sort of

slightly remote from real life, whereas a psychological thriller

-is taking us more into domestic situations.

-Yeah.

That's not going to make you a better person, is it,

inform you about the world?

-What, the cosy crime genre?

-Yeah.

It's about exploring human character,

so, you know, the Agatha Christie novels

might seem a superficial puzzle,

but actually, they're about human characters

and about how people interact,

so I think cosies can have depth and psychological insight

that thrillers have as well.

I'm standing outside the Ambassadors Theatre

in the heart of London's West End,

where the curtain has just come down on performance 8,320

of The Mousetrap by Agatha Christie,

which makes it far and away the longest-running play

in the history of the British theatre.

Why do people still flock to see it?

Because I like whodunnits and I like Agatha Christie.

What do you think makes it such a successful play?

Because nobody tells you who it is.

What do you think makes it such a successful play?

Because it's clean.

The cosy version of Christie

is something that we've had on our televisions on Sunday nights

for decades,

but there's another, lesser-known side to Agatha Christie,

and it hasn't often made it to our screens.

Last year, Sarah Phelps changed that

when she adapted And Then There Were None,

an incredibly bleak story

which nonetheless was a huge hit in the Christmas schedule.

Phelps is now adapting another of Christie's dark tales,

The Witness For The Prosecution.

What is it about the appeal of Agatha Christie, do you think?

Here's the thing. First of all, I have to make a confession,

which is...

before I got sent And Then There Were None to read,

I'd never read an Agatha Christie.

I thought I knew what it was,

which was murderers, cosy tea-time entertainment.

There's a dead body on the carpet, on the rug, by the veranda doors.

It's really interrupted somebody's tennis. How annoying.

And here comes the outsider, or the investigator.

In they come and find out who it was. It was whoever over there.

And they package up the Englishness and make it safe again.

The outsider makes Englishness safe again. It's cosy.

And then I got sent this book to read.

Phelps's version of Christie's tale is unremittingly dark.

The ten strangers invited to an isolated island

all have a guilty secret

and one by one will be killed.

-'Ladies and gentlemen, silence, please.'

-Who is that?

'You and charged with the following indictments.

'Edward George Armstrong,

-'that you murdered Louisa...'

-Who is this?

-I don't know, sir.

-'Emily Caroline Brent,

-'that you murdered Beatrice Taylor.'

-Who is this?

What really shocked me was how savage it was.

The savagery of it just takes your breath away.

So uncosy.

There was no-one coming to solve the problem,

there was no-one coming to make it better.

It's a portrait of a psychopath,

and it's utterly, utterly brutal, and it thrilled me to bits.

Two little soldier boys sitting in the sun.

One got frizzled up, and then there was one.

For her adaptation of The Witness For The Prosecution,

Phelps has taken Agatha Christie's original short story

and has fleshed out the dark possibilities she sees within it.

It's 1923,

and a young man is accused of killing an older rich socialite.

Somehow, the concept of Christie

is one which is about plot and unravelling

and riddles and whodunnits,

and is it just your sort of wilful desires and fears

which have found their way into your interpretation of Agatha Christie?

Well, quite possibly, yeah.

It could quite possibly be my wilful desires and fears,

but I've always kind of imagined

that when it comes down to the sort of, like...

the Christies where you've got Marple and where you've got Poirot,

that, actually, the body on the floor isn't that meaningful.

But for me, the body on the floor is really important,

because if you don't care about the body on the floor,

then you don't care about the person who put the body on the floor,

and if you don't care about the person who put the body on the floor

and why they did it,

then I don't see the point of telling the story, I really don't.

Where there's a body, there's a killer.

In the 1950s, a writer came along

who would take us straight into the mind of the murderer.

"Would a corpse burn enough in the open to become ashes?

"Didn't it require a sort of oven to augment the heat?

"The bones were not going to burn, he knew.

"It would mean another grave.

"He'd have to get a shovel somewhere."

Patricia Highsmith created Tom Ripley,

a likeable psychopath who kills to escape difficult situations,

with a logic that seems almost excusable.

I don't think that, really, somehow, murder is my theme.

If anybody wants to ask me,

I will say guilt.

-Guilt?

-The absence or the presence of guilt is the...

Guilt and morality?

-Well, yes, naturally, it goes into morality.

-Yeah.

This is what I'm inclined to do, which is,

"Oh, my God, what have I done?" you know.

This can be a pain in the neck,

whereas Ripley, he's very gay about what he's done,

he doesn't give a damn,

and gets away with it.

Very cool.

So far, but what are you going to do with him?

He'll always get away with it.

-Oh.

-He will?

-Mm.

-He will?

-Mm.

CAT PURRS

The rationale of Tom Ripley makes us wonder,

given the right prodding, what we, too, might be capable of.

Real life serial killers are different,

usually defined as someone who kills two or more people

at different times and places.

They're driven by a motivation that could be anything from anger,

thrill-seeking or sexual gratification.

In Montreal, there was a particularly gruesome case.

"Her head had been cut off high in the neck,

"and the truncated muscles looked bright poppy red.

"The pallid skin rolled back gently at the severed edges

"as if recoiling from contact with the fresh, raw meat.

"Her right hand had been partially detached

"and the ends of the creamy white tendons

"jutted out like snapped electrical cords.

"With a stab of pain,

"I'd noticed that her toenails were painted a soft pink.

"The intimacy of that simple act had caused me such an ache

"that I wanted to cover her,

"to scream at all of them to leave her alone.

"Instead, I'd stood and watched,

"waiting for my turn to trespass."

In the '90s, Kathy Reichs, here in her lab in Quebec,

was working at the forefront of forensic anthropology

and human identification, and specialising in cold cases,

where the only means of identifying a body was through the bones.

Her work would bring her close

to some of the most gruesome crimes in Canada's history.

Anna-Maria Codina disappeared without a trace three years ago.

She told her mother she was going out on a date

with a man she'd met at work.

On Friday, 36-year-old Serge Archambault was arrested

in connection with her case and two others.

The victim in St Calixte that was found January 6th had been shot.

The second victim found on November 26th

hadn't been shot. She...

She died from asphyxiation...

Serge Archambault came to be known as the Butcher of St Eustache,

both for his day job and for what he did to his victims,

some of whose bodies he buried in woodlands across Montreal.

Kathy Reichs turned her experience of the case into her first novel.

Who was this killer? What was this about?

Yeah, of course, at the outset we didn't know. Two women were killed.

I was not involved in those first two cases because

those were fresh bodies, they went straight to the pathologist,

but when he was arrested he admitted to having killed a third woman

two years earlier, cut her up

and buried her in five different locations, so that was the case

that I was involved in. It was not a question of ID.

We had a name, so she could be identified by dental records,

but what I did is I looked at the bones to see if there was

anything we could find there that told us something about

manner of death or manner of body treatment, and what I found

was an unusual pattern, without going into detail, of dismemberment.

And I testified to that. I testified that probably

whoever did this, and I didn't know who they were suspecting,

had a knowledge of anatomy, such as a butcher.

And did he get his comeuppance in the end?

He was convicted of three counts of first-degree murder.

-So you should be safe for a while.

-For a while, yeah, I think so!

Cold case investigation has become a rich seam for crime writers,

where forgotten cases can be dug up again

and killers who may have got away with it are finally caught.

And how do you get to the bones?

Sometimes what I get are just bones.

Those are lovely cases, nice, dry bones.

If it's a decomposed body,

then I would have to clean off the flesh and get down to...

Boiling is a little simplistic.

There's a process of removing flesh from bones,

and then I would do the analysis.

When you said boiling, what do you mean by that?

Well, you don't really boil them

but you put them in an apparatus that's like a giant cooker,

and then you slowly, um...

..cook it until the flesh can be detached cleanly from the bones.

You talk about this in a way that's very natural to you because

it's your work and everyday life,

but some of those descriptions are incredibly gruesome, obviously,

and yet people obviously, that's what people like to read.

What is it about that?

Well, some people. Some people don't want to have anything to do with it

but my books are not for everyone.

I mean, they are quite detailed.

It's important to me, two things -

one is to get the science correct and accurate

because I think people do read my books because they want a sense of,

"Well, how does that work?" So I do put in details

but I never want to put in anything just for sensationalism,

just put in gore to make it sensational and grisly

and attractive in that way,

so it's a balance between doing those two things.

Most of us don't need to worry about serial killers.

We need to worry about who we live with.

The female crime writer Nicci French is actually a he and a she,

married couple Nicci Gerrard and Sean French.

They write from home. She has the attic, he has the shed.

I think there's a real danger in me saying, you know,

because I'm this man who suddenly found himself

as a female crime writer, saying it must be because

I've got a very particular understanding of the female psyche

and the female imagination.

Well, I must say, we have three daughters and if they heard me

saying that I had a very particular understanding of women,

they would first laugh and then get very irritated, so absolutely not.

We never write together

and we never write in the same room together either.

We have such different writing lives, if you like,

but there was one time when we did that as well

and it was a big disaster, so I was sitting there,

kind of over-concentrated and frowning and trying to write,

and Sean kind of started later than me.

He kind of wandered in. Very nicely, he gave me coffee.

He kind of sat down for about ten minutes,

he looked out of the window and saw a bird that he didn't recognise

and he got out a bird book and we identified it

and then he started saying what we were going to have for lunch.

And the final straw was when

he started saying that he thought we should learn Russian together,

and at that point, that was it.

We've never sat down in the same room to work together since then.

Nicci French novels are dark thrillers.

They explore the terrors that lurk in the very place

you should feel safe - your home.

You decided on Nicci French

but you could have decided on Sean Gerrard, couldn't you?

And a whole other world would have opened up in front of us.

Yes, it's true. I mean, the first book that we wrote, The Memory Game,

because of its subject matter, which was about false or recovered memory,

which happened almost entirely to women,

we had to have a female narrator, and because we had a female narrator

it just made absolute sense to us

that we should have a female persona,

that the name on the book jacket,

it was always only going to be one name, was going to be a female name.

The birth of Nicci French came from that.

After that, Nicci French became a female psychological thriller writer

who wrote from the perspective of a woman.

"Freda sat up and listened but heard nothing,

"except the soft wind outside.

"She swung her feet to the floor,

"feeling the cat wind its body around her legs, purring,

"and then stood, still weak and nauseous from the night terrors.

"There had been something. She was certain. Something downstairs."

"She pulled on tracksuit bottoms and a T-shirt

"and made her way onto the landing, then, step-by-step,

"gripping the banisters, down the stairs, stopping halfway."

The crime novel, the thriller, is such a wonderful, elastic genre.

It allows us to think about all those things which kind of feel

somehow a bit taboo or feel scary, you know -

what is it like to feel jealous, to be bereaved, to be scared,

to feel lonely, to feel kind of somehow that life has passed you by?

And then you just turn the dial a bit

and it becomes a crime novel as well

so it's like safely allowing you to explore all those hidden fears.

You talked about this concept that coming together you become one,

so like Bonnie and Clyde are more lethal together than they are alone.

There's this psychological idea, folie a deux, where people,

where two people get together and often people who wouldn't have done

anything on their own but they'll commit terrible crimes together

because they sort of spur each other on,

and I really think that when it's really worked with us,

we do that, we just push each other into strange areas and, you know,

you are writing for readers but I think mainly I'm writing for Nicci,

you know, and somehow thinking, "Well... Deal with this, Nicci!"

-Or "This'll show you!"

-So you can surprise each other?

And that, we have to, otherwise why write together?

If we knew everything that was going to happen as we wrote it and

how it was going to happen, there's almost no point in writing it.

"The house she knew so well had become unfamiliar,

"full of shadows and secrets.

"In the hall she stood and strained to hear

"but there was nothing, nobody. She turned on the lights,

"blinking in the sudden dazzle, and then she saw it.

"A large, brown envelope lying on the doormat.

"She stooped and picked it up.

"And now she knew that he was near, in the street outside,

"close to her home, to her place of refuge."

SHE TYPES

I think I am a frightened person,

-that I am afraid of some sort of nemesis.

-Yes.

I do carry that about with me.

I don't like the post when it comes.

It's simply two kinds of people, aren't there, that the post comes

-and they're all full of excitement at what it might be bringing...

-Yes.

..and I feel a kind of tightening of the muscles.

I'd really like to make sure, I'd like to have a look at those letters

and have a pretty good idea what's in them before I open them.

One of Britain's most popular authors drags us into

the ganglands of London's East End.

Martina Cole's books give us gang executions, domestic violence,

child prostitution, drugs, rape and murder.

Her novel The Take was turned into a TV series

with Tom Hardy playing the terrifying psychopath Freddie.

My point is...

My point is why this joker thinks he can earn on my turf

without my fucking permission!

-HE STAMMERS

-You let him go now!

Now, Shane, what you need to do, yeah, is tell your weekend warrior

to put his fucking gun down and calm down, right?

Cos all we want is your money.

You better reconsider this.

-Because from over here you're both fucked.

-Fucked?! Poofter!

You're not mincing around the bush now cos you're in fucking London!

And you're way, way out of your league.

How much has this got to do with how you grew up?

You've had quite a life, haven't you?

Well, my first boyfriend was a bank robber. I've never hidden that.

Um, and he didn't know how old I was.

I was 14 - he didn't know that.

He thought I was my sister.

I saw him on and off until I was 25,

and he was very exciting.

You write about what you know,

and I know far more about the criminal element

than I do about the police.

Why are you a crime fiction writer? Why do you write in this genre?

I don't know, I think because

I was always obsessed with crime as a child.

I love the whole concept of crime and, "Can you get away with it?"

When I read Graham Greene, when I read Brighton Rock,

I actually felt sorry for Pinkie,

and I'm probably the only person in the world who thought,

"What a terrible life he must have had!"

And I was only about 11 or 12.

So I think, even then, I was more interested in the criminal element

than I was in the police element.

You know - why do people commit crime?

Is it nurture over nature, nature over nurture?

We just don't know.

Some of Martina Cole's most enthusiastic readers are criminals,

and it's a readership she engages with directly.

She often does workshops with convicts

in prisons throughout the country.

One of her biggest fans is the writer Erwin James,

who spent 20 years in prison for double murder.

Where did you first come across Martina?

So I met her through her books, in jail, in prison.

You know, I was a long-term prisoner.

I wasn't a great reader particularly.

However, Martina's books were very readable, you know.

And they were...

I discovered, the most borrowed from the prison library,

and the most stolen.

And, I mean, I lived a horrendous life

and I read Martina's books and I thought,

"Christ, she gets it, this girl.

"She understands these vile lives." You know?

It didn't make me want to be more vile,

it just made me realise that,

"Christ, I'm not unique in this life."

She has insights into criminal thinking, criminal lifestyles,

which are pretty... I think, pretty unique,

and I think that's what endears her

to so many people in prison, you know?

It's not all murderers.

Cole's books are as much about the women who live with, suffer by

and, in her hands, stand up to the men.

Of course, we've talked about the men to some extent.

But the women are very central in your books,

and they're both kind of strong and yet they're vulnerable as well,

and they're victims and yet they fight back.

I want my women to be... my women to be strong,

and I want them to, you know, to overcome any adversity.

And I think that's the whole concept of a book.

And often times they start out very, very vulnerable, you know?

They meet a man very young, which often happens, and, you know...

And then, as the years go on, they have to toughen up.

And I'm a great believer in toughening up.

Also, I also believe that, you know, men get mad and women get even.

You know? And I always say,

you know, I'm the luckiest woman in the world,

because I get to be with people I want to be with all the time,

and spend hours with them.

And if they get on my nerves, I can kill them.

So it worked perfectly for me. Works perfectly.

One of the truisms of crime fiction that doesn't sit well

is the fact that scenes of graphic sexual violence against women

are increasingly written by women.

Julie Bindel is a journalist and campaigner for justice

for female victims of sexual violence.

She's also a big fan of crime fiction.

I don't believe that girls are born good and potentially victimised.

And I don't think that boys are born to rape and to murder.

I think that that comes with the power that boy babies are ascribed

by having a penis and by living under patriarchy.

And so I like mess in sorting this out.

Your work has brought you close to witnessing and understanding

women's suffering at the hands of very violent men.

And yet you're passionate about crime fiction.

Well, I don't think that the two are mutually exclusive at all.

I read crime fiction, good crime fiction...

..BECAUSE I do the work that I do.

So when I come back from a research trip to Albania,

and I've heard about a trafficked woman who escaped her trafficker

and was literally bricked inside a wall, alive, as punishment,

and as a warning to the other trafficked women

not to escape from the brothel, then what gets me to sleep at night?

It's not that story that spins around in my head,

because there is no good ending to that story.

But it's the kind of crime novel where things are dealt with,

that, at some stage, justice will be done.

Even if the baddie isn't caught, she will be believed,

someone will care about that corpse lying on the mortuary slab,

people will want to solve these crimes.

And that... Maybe what I've seen in my research can never be resolved,

and that story can never come to an end.

But with a crime novel, it can give you a sense of closure.

There were over 88,000 sexual offences recorded by the police

in the United Kingdom last year.

Crimes of sexual violence against women

are often at the heart of the work that forensic scientists do,

as they look for new ways to improve crime detection and conviction.

Can you tell me about some of these cases?

For instance, tell me about the webcam.

It's based in London, and it was a young girl

who was alleging that her father was coming into her bedroom at night

and interfering with her.

She put up her Skype camera.

And I don't know if you know, if you run your Skype camera at night,

it clicks into infrared mode.

And, in infrared mode...

If you look at your veins under infrared light,

they look like black tramlines, so they really stick out,

because the infrared, the way it interacts with deoxygenated blood,

makes it stand out.

And so she put this camera on and, about half past four in the morning,

you see a hand coming into view

and interfering with her under the covers.

And because it's in infrared,

we have this beautiful view of the back of a hand

and the back of a forearm,

and you can see all the superficial vein patterns.

And the police came to us and said, "What can we do with it?"

We said, "We've absolutely no idea,

"because we've never done anything like this before."

So we did a comparison between the hand and the forearm

of the individual in the video, and the vein patterns matched.

We went through the trial and the jury found him not guilty.

-And, at that point, we thought, "What have we done wrong?"

-Mm.

Because, you know, we think this is about as clear as it can get.

We asked the barrister if she would mind going away to the jury

and asking, "What did we do wrong?"

And what's probably the scariest thing I've ever heard in my life

was that she came back and said, "You didn't do anything wrong.

"They believed the science, they thought that was fine.

"They didn't believe the girl because she wasn't upset enough."

'In America, the relationship between forensic investigation

'and crime fiction has an unusual showpiece,

'given to detectives by a crime writer

'and named after her most famous character.'

This is our training facility.

We call it the Scarpetta House.

This was donated by Patricia Cornwell, the novelist,

and we use this to set up death scenes

to train our forensic investigators.

We can do shootings, stabbings, hangings, poisonings -

you name it.

And you never know what you'll find.

Oh, my God!

She's in the cupboard.

Oh! That's shocking.

'Patricia Cornwell's Scarpetta House is in Baltimore,

'in the same building as the doll's houses and the mortuary.

'If you die in Baltimore in an unexplained way,

'this is where you're going to end up.'

I just saw a sheet today that came in,

which had someone who hanged himself in prison,

there were people who died of gunshot wounds,

there were people who were decomposed.

-That was all within the last 24 hours?

-Yes, sir.

They had a total today of about 18 cases.

Um, lately we've been getting a caseload

anywhere from 15 to 20, 25 bodies a day.

Baltimore is an unusual city

for its crossover between crime fiction and reality.

Scarred by vacant housing,

the fallout of a war on drugs and gang warfare -

rich pickings for crime writers,

many of whom cut their teeth at the crime desks of city newspapers.

The Baltimore Sun has nurtured more than its fair share.

Hi, this is Alison Knezevich from The Sun.

I talked...

Good, how are you doing?

Oh, OK.

Um, I just wanted to check if there's anything new

with the Tawon Boyd case.

Alumni from The Sun include a famous married couple -

the creator of The Wire, David Simon,

and the novelist Laura Lippman.

Her books have been known to cameo on her husband's show.

Who caught the one from Edmonton last night, Anton Artis?

Cole. With an assist from Donegan.

Well before The Wire, it was Lippman who put Baltimore crime

into popular award-winning novels.

"Every day there was a little death, the kind of murder that rated

"no more than four paragraphs deep inside the Beacon-Light.

"Yet no-one seemed to notice or care except those playing

"the homicide tally in the Pick 3.

"The mayor still called it The City That Reads,

"but others had long ago twisted that civic motto.

" 'The city that bleeds, hon.

" 'And the city that grieves. The city that seethes.' "

What is it that draws you to this genre?

What is it you think you're... you're trying to do in your book?

What I really want to do with the crime novel

is to do something that I felt I couldn't do as a reporter.

Because the way people read a newspaper

or watch a television programme is to find that moment

where they can stop worrying it will happen to them. Which is...

vital, I think, because if you do nothing but worry

about what will happen to you,

you end up in the foetal position on the floor of your kitchen

and you don't want to leave the house.

Because you can... It's like an abyss.

It's like thinking about your own death.

This could happen, this could happen.

For the reader of a novel, that... that need to disengage drops.

Instead, they need to engage.

And maybe for the first time they can imagine, "You know what?

"I might make that mistake

"of being a teenage girl walking someplace I shouldn't walk

"and being in a position where a stranger can abduct me.

"I-I might be the person whose child has done something terrible,

"and my instinct is to take care of my child, to cover for my child."

I feel like in writing crime fiction...

..there's an opportunity to create empathy

that's sometimes missing when we actually consider real-life crimes.

Does this mean that...

that actually it's possible within the context of a popular form

like crime fiction, to make people think more about the world,

think harder about who we are and how we live our lives?

I think so.

There's something very much in the news in Baltimore now that I know

will be finding its way into a future book.

And that's this audit of the Baltimore City Police Department.

Most people have been really focused

on the death of the young African-American man in custody

that yielded no convictions and led to riots last spring.

But there's another piece of this which is...

what a poor job they did on sexual assaults.

And I was really caught by an e-mail exchange

between a prosecutor and a detective,

in which they kind of cavalierly joke about

they don't have any sympathy for the victim.

And...that's definitely something

that's going to find its way into a future novel.

-COMPUTERISED VOICE:

-'This is a Global Tel Link

'pre-paid call from...'

-MAN:

-'Adnan Syed.'

'..an inmate at... the Maryland correctional facility.'

From This American Life, NWBEC Chicago, it's Serial.

One story told week by week. I'm Sarah Koenig.

On the edge of the city is the now infamous Lincoln Park.

It's where Baltimore's criminals dump the bodies.

And it's a key location for the ground-breaking podcast, Serial.

Almost 15 years ago, on January 13th, 1999,

a girl named Hae Min Lee disappeared.

About a month later, on February 9th,

Hae's body was found in a big park in Baltimore,

really a rambling forest.

The cause of death was manual strangulation,

meaning someone did it with their hands.

Serial really was a podcast phenomenon.

Reporter Sarah Koenig investigated

the conviction of Hae Min Lee's boyfriend, Adnan Syed,

on the way unearthing serious anomalies in the case.

It has prompted a retrial for Syed.

-SYED:

-'No-one could ever come with any type of proof or anecdote

'or anything to ever say that I was ever mad at her,

'that I was ever angry with her, that I ever threatened her.

'You know, that's the only thing I could really hold on to.

'At the end of the day, man,

'the only thing I can say is I had no reason to kill her.'

The startling informality of Koenig's approach

captured the imagination.

150 million people tuned in to hear the story unfold.

About Hae I can only tell you what I've heard from non-family members -

that she was cheerful and light and funny,

that she loved the movie Titanic

that she sometimes put nail polish on just so she could pick it off.

That she was a good friend to her friends.

She took in their problems and their pain

and tried to help them if she could.

Crime writers have taken a lot from real-life cases

and the forensic scientists who investigate them.

But now crime fiction is giving something back.

A group of authors have got together

to fund a brand-new, state-of-the-art mortuary

for Professor Sue Black.

This tank room doesn't exist anywhere else in the world,

because we designed it.

If you look at this one, cos this one I can lift...

WHIRRING

And you can see that inside...

we have one body there floating.

Now it's effectively pickling.

That's exactly what it's like, it's the same process as pickling.

And how long has this... body been here?

That will be very recent,

so probably just within the last few days.

So there's another sort of six-month residency here?

At least three, at least three.

Depending how quickly we need to turn them over.

You can close it if you want.

There you go.

As a thank you to the crime writers,

Sue Black has named the body tanks after them...

..with a special place reserved for her closest collaborator.

APPLAUSE

We've had the murder, now it's time for the love.

Take it away!

WHOOPING

CHEERING

# When I wake up Then I know I'm gonna be

# I'm gonna be the one Who wakes up next to you

# When I go out, Then I know I'm gonna be

# I'm gonna be the one who goes along with you... #

If you're referred to as a female crime writer, this gender thing,

is that a negative or is it just something one has to put up with?

Well, there's all sorts of ways I'm described.

I'm described as a female writer, as a Scottish writer,

as a lesbian writer.

All these things are true, but they're only a part of my identity.

And people like to put labels on things.

Personally, I think labels are for jam, but there you go.

I mean, I'm not even sure to what extent there's any value

in calling someone a crime writer these days.

Genre boundaries are blurring more and more with each passing year,

so I guess I just kind of go, "You know what?

"I'm doing the work I'm doing because it matters to me

"and I really don't care what you think about it."

# And I would walk five hundred miles

# And I would walk five hundred more

# Just to be the one who walked a thousand miles

# To fall down at your door

# Da lat da, da lat da Da lat da, da lat da

# Da-da-da dun-diddle un-diddle un-diddle uh da-da

# Da lat da, da lat da Da lat da, da lat da

# Da-da-da dun-diddle un-diddle un-diddle uh da-da

# And I would walk five hundred miles

# And I would walk five hundred more

# Just to be the one who walked a thousand miles

# To fall down at your door. #

WHOOPING AND CHEERING