In an article for Writer’s Digest, Stephanie Kane says that she learned a lot about writing mysteries from studying the work of Frances Glessner Lee, an early 20th-century crime scene specialist known as the Godmother of Forensic Science.
As part of a program training Chicago detectives in crime scene investigations, Lee created painstakingly detailed dioramas depicting murder sites, which included tiny corpses, clues, and red herrings at a one-inch to one-foot scale. “She took police reports and photos from the most baffling cases she could find, reassembled them into composites, and inserted contradictory clues,” Kane explains. “Detectives were instructed to choose an entry point to her models and proceed clockwise, recording indicators of social and financial status as they spiraled inexorably inward to the body itself.”
What did Kane learn from Lee? “Be disciplined, meticulous, and ruthless in your habits and work,” she says. “To reel the reader in, set crimes in intimate and familiar places. Setting is character; nowhere is safe. Make every detail count.”
