His establishment has pioneered the study of the decomposition of bodies by insects and the changing chemistry of human remains. It has elucidated as never before the fate of the human corpse in fire and water. It has trained a cadre of devoted investigators, specialising in such matters as the dismemberment of corpses and the saw-marks on human bones, whose researches are more interesting to read about than pleasant to witness at first hand. One is grateful that such work is done, but also that one does not have to do it oneself.
The author has converted from Bible Belt Christianity to atheism. It was not his contact with the disagreeable traces of our earthly existence, or daily contact with the evidence of human wickedness, that changed his religious opinions, but the untimely death from cancer of his first two wives. Death until then had been for him an abstraction, something to be studied as others study, say, the economic history of mediaeval Corsica. But faced with the death of his wives, so sudden and so seemingly arbitrary, his faith collapsed. A body was henceforth not the temple of a soul, but a mass of chemicals.
Autobiographies written with the assistance of a ghost writer always raise the question as to how much of what is written has been at the suggestion of the ghost. Are the jokes the author’s own, or are they the practised gags of his ‘experienced’ co-author? However, the fundamental authenticity of this book was proved to me by its confirmation of the only law of forensic science that I have discovered for myself: that those who kill for insurance money do so almost immediately after the policy will pay out after the death of the insured party. Why waste premiums, once the decision to kill has been taken?
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