GRAVE MATTERS

by James Lincoln Warren

It is no secret that writers of crime fiction are frequently inspired by actual events. Leigh Lundin’s award-winning story, “Swamped”, was inspired by the actual bizarre behavior of a Florida jurist. As a writer of predominantly “historical” crime fiction, I’m no different—the story is true, but the names have been changed to protect the story-teller. And in my case, the story is old.

I’m particularly interested in crimes that were defined by their times. My last completed work is about a witchcraft trial. When I chose to write a novel featuring my 18th century series detective, Alan Treviscoe, I decided to include an episode featuring a type of crime closely associated with the times I was writing about that has since become very rare: grave robbing.

Robert Louis Stevenson famously wrote the 1884 short story, “The Body Snatcher”, loosely based on the true story of early nineteenth-century criminals William Burke and William Hare, who provided bodies to Edinburgh surgeons—after having murdered them.

There was obviously no way I could compete with RLS, who is one of my gods. But the ground still seemed rather fertile, if somewhat disturbed.

One of the primary duties of a crime fiction writer is getting the criminal details right. So I went on a quest to find out how grave robbers actually performed their nefarious nocturnal defalcations of the dear departed. And came up with—zilch, nada, nothing. (It is an occupational hazard of mystery writing that criminals do not often carefully document their misdeeds.)

Until, that is, I found an eyewitness account of an actual 18th century grave robbery in the UCLA Medical Library. The rest, as they say, is historical fiction.

So to introduce a new albeit irregularly scheduled feature at Criminal Brief called Aural Argument, here is a podcast of me reading the whole of that part of the story, also available as a link on the right.