In crime fiction, factual scientific accuracy can make or break the credibility of your book. Author and crime science advisor Brian Price looks at getting it right – and getting it wrong
Last summer I was credited in two national newspapers for keeping award-winning crime writer M.W. Craven out of jail. This was not because of my skills as a solicitor – I’m not one, and Mike was never arrested – but because of advice I gave him about a deadly poison.
Let me explain. I am a chemist and a biologist and I advise other writers on the scientific aspects of crime. I can help authors with the effects of poisons, knocking people out, body disposal, firearms, explosions, DNA and anything scientific related to their plots. I don’t do post-mortems, though, and I hasten to add that my help is purely theoretical rather than practical. An odd way to spend one’s time, you might think, but my help is often acknowledged in print.
I started doing this for two reasons: firstly, I attended Crimefest, the Bristol festival for crime writers and readers, and found the crime writing community so open and friendly that I wanted to contribute something. Secondly, I was frequently annoyed by scenes in books, and especially in TV programmes and films, which completely flouted the rules of physics, chemistry and biology. So, I set up a website offering tips for writers on how to avoid scientific mistakes (www.crimewriterscience. co.uk). My wife then suggested turning it into a book and Crime writing: How to write the sciencewas published, by Studymates, in 2019.
Some of the common errors I addressed are:
• You can’t knock someone out with chloroform for prolonged periods. When it was used in surgery, it took about five minutes to anaesthetise someone with the stuff, and the patient woke up when the chloroform was removed.
• Injecting someone in the neck with an anaesthetic like propofol or midazolam does not produce rapid unconsciousness unless you find a vein – and who’s going to wait around for you to do that? • You cannot silence a normal pistol, especially a revolver, so that it makes a tiny phut when fired – there are too many sources of noise, including mechanical sounds from the weapon and a sonic boom from the bullet’s supersonic speed.
• Unless inhaled or injected, poisons do not produce death within seconds – in most cases it takes around fifteen minutes for them to be absorbed from the small intestine. Some substances can take days to kill.
• Shooting someone with a shotg
