A recent segment on a TV show (one of the ones about mysteries in museums) lead me back to my CSI trail. Frances Glessner Lee was born at the wrong time. Intelligent and creative, there wasn't much for her to do, due to her gender, and her father refused to let her get any 'unnecessary' schooling. She spent some time making miniatures, the kind one might see in a doll house, only much more detailed. The one she made of a local music group featured accurate music on the stands, and instruments that actually produced music. At some point she started going to crime scenes with a friend of her brother. He explained how they were investigated (is it murder? suicide? natural death?) and this would lead to what became known as 'Nutshells'. (So called so they could never be confused with something for a doll house). Naturally, I had to find a book!

The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death by Corinne May Botz has photographs of these miniatures as well as a nice biography of Lee. Each scene may be studied and conclusions drawn but only a few answers are provided as the miniatures are so well done they are still being used to train investigators today. They were the inspiration for several episodes of the original CSI show. (The one set in Vegas).

Hidden Evidence: 50 True Crimes and How Forensic Science Helped Solve Them by David Owen is a detailed 'how it's done' book on crime scene investigations interspersed with the 50 crimes from the subtitle. I'll admit, it was almost too much information! All in all, though, a most interesting read, and included the first murderer caught using the telegraph! (Which earned the ! there because I'd read about it in The Victorian Internet so recently). :-)

While I'd learned some time ago that many of the dead bodies you see in shows such as 'Law & Order', 'CSI' and so forth are really people, it had pretty much slipped my mind until I saw the episode of 'Castle' where the body was found in the wall safe ... and learned that it was a real person! (A contortionist). That took me back to Law & Order: Crime Scenes by Dick Wolf with photographs by Jessica Burstein. It includes a history of the show, a behind the scenes look at how an episode is created and filmed, (and the folks who do so), and descriptions of the main characters, as well as the photographs of many of the opening scenes, the one with the body. As odd as it might sound, I really enjoyed this book.

Reading Hermit With Dog