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Women dissecting bodies >> Déjà Dead author Kathy Reichs hits big with forensics
by JULIET WATERS
Mirror: It's supposed to be a given in mass-market fiction that American publishers always force writers to set their fiction in the States. Did you have to work to sell Montreal to Scribner? Kathy Reichs: No. Montreal's a wonderful setting and it never occurred to me to set it anywhere else. I just sent them the manuscript and they bought it immediately. Although, before I got the offer I will say that I think I had a phone conversation with Susanne Kirk (who later became my editor) and she did say, "Well, you know, we have a little hesitation about a Canadian setting." But after she finished reading she had no reservations. Also, when I was writing the second book I asked her what she thought about me having Temperance go somewhere else and she said, "Absolutely not--you keep it in Montreal." M: Death du Jour is based pretty strongly on the Solar Temple cult deaths. Did you work on those? KR: No. But they were done at our lab, so I was present when the Solar Temple bodies came in, and I was present for the autopsies. M: Were they as gruesome as they are in the book? KR: Yeah. Anytime there are children involved it's particularly gruesome. And two of those victims were burned. M: So why did you end up going into this field? KR: I actually trained in archeology. I was really interested in paleopathology--the diseases people suffer from and how they treated them when they lived. Then, because I was a local expert in bones, the police would come to me with questions. I started doing casework and discovered I really liked it. It felt more relevant. You know, when you go to court and testify, or identify someone's missing child, there's a relevance that was lacking in archeology. In archeology you generate a hypothesis and you test it and if you're wrong you go into long debates. Whereas with the forensic work it's different. You can't be wrong. I like that stress. M: On TV these days there seem to be more and more women dissecting bodies. There's Scully on X-Files; there's that forensics specialist on Law & Order; in Britain there's Silent Witness, a TV series about a female coroner. Are there actually more women doing these kinds of jobs? KR: It's true in forensic anthropology. There are only 50 people certified in the U.S. and it's about 3 to 1, men to women, which isn't nearly as bad as some of the forensic sciences. For instance, in forensic dentistry there's a 100 to 1 male to female ratio. In forensic engineering and forensic chemistry it's much more skewed. M: So what about Temperance? Is she going to be on the screen soon? KR: We've turned down several movie offers. But my agent told me the day before yesterday that we're very, very close to a TV series agreement. We've had two offers and they're bidding, and I'm pretty sure we're going to go for one. I think one of those is a joint Canadian-American venture and the other isn't. But right now I'm just focusing on the author tour, so I'm going to let my agent deal with that.
Death du Jour by Kathy Reichs, Scribner, hc, 379pp, $37
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By day, Kathy Reichs is a forensic anthropologist who works for the state of North Carolina, the province of Quebec and has recently advised on cases as far away as Rwanda. By night, early morning or whenever she has a break, she's the mystery writer who put Montreal on the map for American publishers with her bestseller Déjà Dead. In town to promote her second book, Death du Jour, Reichs talks about why she will continue to set her work in Quebec, how she got into such a gory job in the first place (forensics, not writing) and the strong possibility that her character Temperance Brennan will soon have her own TV series.