truepenny | UBC: Craig, Teasing Secrets from the Dead

Teasing Secrets from the Dead: My Investigations at America's Most Infamous Crime Scenes by Emily Craig

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

How do you explain that you do innovative and important work in your field without sounding self-aggrandizing? It's not a rhetorical question; it's a problem that the forensic anthropologists and forensic pathologists who write autobiographies are right up against, even if they don't recognize it. I disliked William R. Maples when I read his book, but when I saw footage of him on some true-crime show or other, I understood immediately what hadn't translated into text: the personality that infused his speech was conveyed by nonverbal cues, by cadence, by intonation, none of which the written word is necessarily good at recording. And Emily Craig has, I think, much the same problem, where her personality is badly represented by words on the page. Where I found Maples pedantic and overbearing, I find Craig fascinating when she's talking about her cases, but false and saccharine when talking about emotions, and unbearably twee when talking about the "intuition" that lets her "just know" things about the bones she's examining.

All of which sounds extremely harsh, but I want to emphasize that I don't thing Craig is false, saccharine, or twee. I think that written English is a lousy medium for conveying the experiences she's trying to describe and that the picture her written words give of her character is inaccurate.

And I don't think she's bragging. She has legitimately done extremely innovative, pioneering work in her field; she is clearly exceptionally good at what she does; and how is she supposed to describe her work without remarking on her success? But it's hard to make that work in writing, where you can't use tone of voice and body language to soften the litany of me, me, me.

Those problems aside, this was a quick and absorbing read. She is very good at describing the training and working conditions of a forensic anthropologist, both in general and in special cases like Waco or 9/11. Her explanation of the logistics of those investigations was more than worth the price of admission. And her cases were fascinating.

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