Author Profile

Page Updated: 14/02/00

Bernard Knight & Crowner John

		Forensic pathologist, barrister and writer Professor Bernard Knight has had a rich and distinguished career: Home Office pathologist; Professor of Forensic Pathology; Consultant to Amnesty and TV script writer. He has been involved in cases all over the world, the most notorious of which must be the Fred West case in 1994, where, as pathologist, he recovered the twelve bodies. Tangled Web talks to Bernard about his writing career and 'The Awful Secret', the latest in the highly regarded Crowner John Series based in Medieval England and featuring Devon's first coroner.
	The Awful Secret 07 Feb 00
	Crowner's Quest
	The Poisoned Chalice
	The Sanctuary Seeker

First Edition Simon Schuster (2000)

Throughout your career, writing fiction and non-fiction seems to have gone hand in hand. Which came first? Your non-fiction work obviously comes from your career in forensics and pathology, but what made you want to write crime fiction? How do writing fiction and non-fiction differ?
I began writing seriously around 1961, though even before this I had been editor of the medical students' magazine in university. When I was an Army doctor in Malaya (at about the same time that Leslie Thomas got his material for Virgin Soldiers!), I was an avid reader of mysteries from the NAAFI library and when I came back to a forensic job in London, I thought I might use my inside knowledge to write one myself. A court reporter got me a small plug in the Daily Mirror and next day, a publisher asked to see it, which was rather embarrassing, as I'd only written half of it! I knocked out half a dozen detective stories in the next few years, then graduated to radio and television scripts for while, as well as advising for series such as Marius Goring's 'The Expert', Bergerac and even 'District Nurse'.
For a dozen years after this, I became heavily involved in forensic medicine textbooks, writing nine, some of which went into five editions and are still going strong. However during this time, I also wrote the biography of the Chief Medical Examiner of New York City, financially my most successful book, as well as several 'popular' non-fiction books on medical subjects - and two historical novels about Wales, which started my near-obsession with the twelfth century that more recently has developed into the Crowner John series.
The contemporary crime novels were much easier to write, as I could make extensive use of my forensic knowledge, which I can hardly do in the more primitive milieu of medieval Devon.
For me, writing fiction and non-fiction is a totally different process - though some of my medical colleagues have said - whimsically, I hope - that they find the distinction rather blurred!
Technical writing follows a well-delineated path - the skeleton is already preordained by the subject matter; the flesh comes from a mixture of personal experience and necessary plagiarism, the most arduous part being the hacking away at the mountains of reference material.
Fiction is much harder, as there is no matrix to develop, every story being different. Historical mysteries are even more demanding, as I am always determined to get the history right, as well as produce an entertaining yarn. Just as most crime books and television dramas are somewhat spoiled for me by the almost inevitable forensic howlers, so quite a few historical novels slip a cog now and then. Even a single anachronism or historical error jolts me into disbelieving the story, which I suppose is illogical, as if the plot is intriguing and characters convincing, then it's the entertainment value that matters, not a pedantic insistence on accuracy.
Having been involved with the day-to-day realities of crime do you feel any unease with the notion of crime fiction as entertainment?
I see no problem with the enormous volume of crime fiction churned out in print, radio and screen, as most of the story-lines are so far removed from reality that they can hardly present a threat to society. Gratuitous violence is another matter when offered visually and I feel sure it has contributed to the marked change in the pattern of assault and homicide that I have seen over my forty-five years as a forensic pathologist. In the 'good old days', most murders were domestics, as the police used to say - if they arrested the spouse, they had a two-thirds chance of solving it without any investigation at all! But in last decade or so, causal street violence and the explosive increase in drug-related violence has altered the picture altogether - but I don't think the average crime-writer is to blame, though I don't think the same can be said of some film and television producers.
Are you ever tempted to write (fiction) about the real-life cases that you have been involved in?
Some of my early books had bits and pieces from real cases, heavily disguised - and one, The Thread of Evidence, was a parody of a real murder in Wales in 1920, with an alternative ending. Everyone involved was dead, so I had no qualms about using it, though I would not want to dredge up any more recent tragedies, which could upset relatives. That's why I have declined a number of persuasive offers to write my memoirs, especially about my role in the Fred and Rosemary West horror, feeling that enough people have been distressed already.
You started out writing detective novels set in the present day, what made you switch to historical fiction?
An absorbing interest in history led me to the Crowner John stories. Though Welsh history is my main passion, my qualifications in both medicine and law stimulated me to research the origins of the coroner, who is a central figure in all death investigations. I wrote and lectured on the subject and even extended my interest to the Chinese coroner-judges, over two millennia ago. It seemed a waste to let this fascinating topic stagnate in academic publications, so I decided to fictionalize him. I immediately had a problem, as my twelfth century knowledge of Wales was unusable in this context, as the coroner was revived by Richard Coeur de Lion in 1194, but Wales remained independent of England and its laws until well after 1282. So I had to forsake Wales and move to Devon, because I need a maritime county to allow the coroner to deal with wrecks and catches of royal fish.
The Crowner John series of novels, as well as being highly entertaining, are very informative and have obviously been researched extensively. How do you do your research? Did the Awful Secret really exist?
A great deal of research goes into each book and is the part I most enjoy. Actually bashing out the requisite eighty-thousand words is sheer hard labor, but devising the plot, searching out the historical substrate and checking for anachronisms is sheer pleasure. I can easily be diverted from the keyboard for half an evening, discovering how long a trotting horseman would take to get from Crediton to Totnes, or whether a man-at-arms wore underpants! I do a lot of on-site inspections and know the geography of medieval Exeter as well as present-day Cardiff, where I live. At the moment, I am tramping Dartmoor, looking at the traces of ancient tin-mining, for the next book, The Tinners's Corpse. The County Record Office and the Internet are invaluable, and Ordnance Survey maps and the Domesday Book are my constant companions.
An odd thing happened with the third book, Crowner's Quest. I had visited Berry Pomeroy Castle, near Totnes, the most haunted castle in England and was so taken by its dramatic site that I decided to use it in the book. So I quite arbitrarily involved the de Pomeroy family in the Prince John's rebellion against King Richard - and was later astounded to discover that this had really happened and that the father had killed himself when his treachery was exposed! My wife is convinced that if I was regressed under hypnosis, I would turn out to be some twelfth-century scribe - I think I'd like to be Giraldus Cambrensis!
The ideas for each of the Crowner John books, six of which have been commissioned so far, seem to appear spontaneously, I certainly have no difficulty in finding a theme. The next stage is to devise the plot, which starts as flow diagram on one sheet of paper, with X, Y and Z as the characters. I then delve into my bank of genuine Devon names from that century and build up a chapter synopsis, as I like to know where I'm going before I start writing - especially the end, which is so often an anticlimax in many novels. Perhaps my past experiences as a script writer lead me to keep the 'Bible', a fat file with every detail of each character, from the date of their father's birth down to the length of their hair. This saves an awful lot of scrabbling about in previous books to see if the bailiff's cook was a blonde or brunette. The Bible also contains everything I have found about food, dress and buildings, the complexities of the feudal village and the tortuous legal systems of those days.
Chronology has to be kept on a tight rein, too - if Page One starts on a Tuesday, it's so easy to lose track of the action at the end of a fortnight. unless a running diary is kept.
The Awful Secret was quite a challenge, as I had to read everything I could about the Templars, which then extended outwards to the Cathar heresy and even Rennes le Chateau and all that! At the end of the book, I put a suggested reading list for those who wanted to follow up the nature of the Awful Secret, admittedly with tongue slightly in cheek. Whether or not the readers will put any credence on the Secret is up to them, but where there's smoke there may be fire!
Do you see yourself as Crowner John when you are writing? How easy is it to imagine living in a time when attitudes to Law and Justice were so different from the present day? When, for example, outlaws were legally killed for the money their heads would earn the slayer and hands were cut off for petty crime.
I don't really identify myself with any of the characters, Crowner John himself being the obvious alter ego. He is based in appearance and manner on a senior lawyer I knew many years ago, but writing the text is very much a third-person operation. At the word-processor, I tap out a rolling description of what seems to be a silent video that's running in my mind. It's very much a visual experience, I have to synthesise the dialogue separately, almost like laying a sound-track over existing film.
I try to portray those times as faithfully as I can - warts and all! Dirt, discomfort, cruelty and violence were the norm, so I see no point in putting a romantic gloss over the reality. My script editor was very upset when she had to read of the hanging of a young boy in Sanctuary Seeker, but that's the way it was. Someone has described the series 'like Cadfael, but more robust' and I take the comparison as great compliment - one of the faults of the television adaptation of Cadfael, was that everything was too clean, with no garbage or horse droppings in the streets!
What sort of books do you read? Have you any favourite authors?
I read a great deal, but relatively little crime fiction now. I suppose, quite understandably, I prefer the police procedural type, such as Ed McBain and Colin Dexter. I also love Leslie Thomas for his humour and enjoy sea stories like those of Brian Collison, as well some darker novelists, like Stephen Gallagher.
As one of the judges for CWA Non-Fiction Silver Dagger Award, I get through quite a few of those, but history is still my main diet - not only for the background to Crowner John, but more generally in the twelfth century and also the Dark Ages, as in common with half the world, the Arthurian mystery fascinates me. I have had another novel half-finished for years, a post-apocalyptic story of Britain following a plague that leaves only one per-cent of the population alive, the remnants being led by a former Brigadier. It is a covert re-run of the British survival following the departure of the Romans and recreates the historical Arthur story in the immediate future - the only problem is that I have been so long in writing it, that I have to keep shifting the time-frame onwards!
What are your future plans?
I'd like to get back to a contemporary crime novel before long, just for a change. I have to admit that the old-style classic 'whodunnit' fails to grab me any longer, as years of dealing with impulsive, usually drunken homicides makes the body in the locked library somewhat unreal - and I no longer have the patience to bother with who was where at eleven minutes past two, if the church clock was quarter of hour fast, etc. I rather fancy trying a plot which begins with someone having a body to dispose of - and how it all goes progressively wrong. Not a new theme, but maybe I can give it a fresh twist, being in the business, so to speak!

---