Finding Inspiration in Strange Places by Martha Reed

When people find out I’m an author, one of the first questions I get asked is: “Where do you get your ideas?” Since I write crime fiction, I try to play nice and not scare them with my answer. It is true my research rabbit holes tend to go dark and deep, teetering on the borderline of the macabre, but as Manfred Mann’s Earth Band sang in Blinded by the Light, “But Mama, that’s where the fun is.”

Earlier this month, I was handed a cracker of a deep dive research opportunity when I toured the Allegheny County Medical Examiner’s Office (and associated state-of-the-art laboratories) with fellow members of the Pittsburgh chapter of Sisters in Crime.

I’ll admit I earned a few wide-eyed surprised face emojis on my Facebook page when I posted this field trip event.

First, a bit of history. The Allegheny County Medical Examiner’s Office we toured opened in 2009. Working downtown, I’d passed the block-long building hundreds of times never knowing what it was. The previous Pittsburgh Morgue looked like a properly ghoulish Victorian House of Horrors. Bodies were stashed in basement coolers. The old morgue was infamous for being the late night Pittsburgh post-Prom date rendezvous location. I kid you not. What can I say? Pittsburghers are my kind of people.

During our tour, there was knowledge on the slabs. The visit turned out to be a goldmine of previously unknown forensic information that I was able to fold into my current developing work-in-progress manuscript. Details like: How long can sealed evidence submitted to the ME’s laboratory be held before the lab receives a court order for its return or its destruction? In the Allegheny County ME’s Office, the minimum hold policy is one year. So, for my story, what does it mean if the evidence is destroyed before the year is up? Was it simply an accidental oversight, or was it enemy action?

Did you know that a baseball cap is a great resource in aiding identification? The brim may hold fingerprints while the sweatband holds DNA. Did you know that one part of the standard equipment of an actual morgue unit is a bug zapper?

In the laboratory, who is responsible for comparing dental records to establish identity (Forensic Odontologist). Who studies bone records to uncover possible trauma (Forensic Anthropologist). Any CSI nerd might guess these two answers, but did you know that a Forensic Engineer studies and deconstructs any floor or building plans that are involved in a suspicious death? Would developing any of these back office laboratory characters or adding a sentence or two about the labs add to your story and give it a better sense of being real?

Crime fiction and mystery readers these days are so over-saturated with CSI TV forensic details that I give thanks whenever I uncover anything new and interesting that might capture their jaded attention and keep them glued to my pages.

Do you have an inspiration resource? What are your surprising sources of inspiration?