So as I mentioned last night, I have been reading Vernon Geberth’s Practical Homicide Investigation
(and yes, I am geeky enough to be inspired by reading a textbook on homicide investigation–so sue me). For anyone who writes fiction about murder, I highly recommend it (though with a warning that there is some really graphic material and actual crime scene photos, just so you’re not surprised or accidentally open it when little ones are around). In any event, it raises many procedural issues that I hadn’t considered (being not a cop myself), so I have decided that as I read, I’m going to create a supplement dealing with crime and victimology for the various Novel Notebooks I’ve tried out and mentioned elsewhere on my blog. I haven’t gotten very far into the book yet (it’s over 800 pages, after all), and I can already tell that this is going to be a long worksheet! There will be a bunch of sections, not all of which will necessarily need filling out. What you use will depend entirely on what characters you’ll be using to present the information. If you tell anything from the point of view of the person who finds the body there’s one section. The first officer on the scene, another. The primary investigator. The profiler. The brass. There will be sections on evidence, profiling, contamination of the scene, and I’m not sure what all else. It’s a long-term project. But one that I will definitely be making available on my blog when it’s done so that other people will benefit from my research project. It will be particularly useful. So yeah, that’s what I’m up to this morning.
