Bring out the Bodies.

Davis, J. Madison

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In 2003 I offered a story idea and received a contract to write an original novel using the characters and style of Law and Order. As readers probably recall, the show came within one season of being the longest-running drama on network television and spawned a list of spin-offs including Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, which is still on the air, and Law and Order: Criminal Intent. Only Gunsmoke survived longer in original broadcast. Law and Order appears on cable nearly every night of the week. Dick Wolf Productions was rightly proud and protective of its franchise and had been disappointed by a previously commissioned novel, not because it was bad--in fact, it was said to be very good--but because it did not seem to them to be close enough to the Law and Order model.

The novel (Law and Order: Deadline) came out the following year and sold quite well for me. Novels are obviously not the same as television shows and must be written differently, but to preserve the particular, popular flavor of Law and Order in the novel, I was asked to check in with an executive producer and writer of many episodes, William N. Fordes. This kind of arrangement frequently leads to insults being hurled back and forth, but Fordes was patient and witty, and we had a couple of long conversations that I much enjoyed while being educated about the specific elements that composed an episode of the long-running show.

One of these elements was the way the victim would be introduced. In many crime stories, the victim is introduced and various reasons are presented as to why this person is going to end up with poison in his arteries or a dagger in his heart. Tie's a thief. He's a cruel husband. He's a cheater. He is going to change his will. Although a living person often meets a curious natural death that requires a close investigation, it is important in a crime story that the victim is the accumulation of a number of circumstances leading to a chain of events: the detection. Murder at random is an unusual thing in real life, but rarer in fiction. The victim ends up being the body in the library because of who he is and what he has done, not because he happened to be there when the murderer felt an urge to murder. In the old Perry Mason, for example, most of the time before the first commercial was spent in establishing the obnoxiousness of a character who, as they say in Texas, "needed killim" The question of the story becomes which of the suspects rendered the world a service by finishing Mr. Obnoxious. It's a puzzle with an interesting collection of pieces we call suspects. We don't much care about Mr. Obnoxious. We care more about the sweet debutante or kindly housekeeper wrongly accused of the crime. Mr. O is there to start the crime ball rolling, to provide a body that must be avenged in order to restore the moral order and preserve civilization. It doesn't matter whether we liked him or her or not. That he is obnoxious is simply to justify a motive for the killer.

Law and Order's convention was that it almost always began with the discovery of a body by people who had nothing to do with the crime, and the writers and producers were quite pleased with this variable trope for introducing the story. In a coffee-table book by Jessica Burstein and Dick Wolf called Law and Order: Crime Scenes (2003), the authors demonstrate the pleasure of their inventions by creating a kind of trompe-l'oeil that plays with illusion and reality. It consists largely of Burstein's Weegee-like black-and-white photos of actors crumpled on the curb with dark streams of blood dribbling over the pavement or staring up from an almost closed body bag. How would anyone tell the staged from the real? Real victims become photographic art in Weegee, disturbing images, but their identities and history are not usually engaging. Fictional victims, if artful enough to engage, initiate a story.

A couple of out-of-towners are looking for a restaurant and find a bleeding man in a doorway. Two cops on horse patrol, one discussing the sad state of his marriage, see a man sleeping in a box. They think he should go to the homeless shelter, but he isn't going anywhere but the morgue. A couple of kids skipping school duck down an alley and trip over a stiff. Fishermen hook onto a corpse. And so on. Incidents like these illustrated how the sudden introduction of a body alters the mundane flow of reality. Life is going on as usual, and then death raises his bony finger and says, "Excuse me." John Donne said the death of anyone diminishes us, but when the death is brought about by murder, unnatural forces have been released into the world and we must do what we can to eradicate them. Of course, we can never eradicate them, but our sense of law and of order requires us to do something.

Fordes admitted that, after the show had gotten to the double digits in number of episodes, it had become a challenge, sometimes a fun one, to come up with new ways to discover the body. The trick was to create secondary characters who would be instantly recognized as typically New York in some way, who could exchange some entertaining banter to catch up the viewer but then drop out of the show without creating a sense of loss. The body precipitates the investigation, and, Fordes pointed out, a certain number of minutes are spent just establishing who used to inhabit the corpse. The purpose of having to seek out the identity of the victim was not to kill time but provided an opportunity for the kinds of reversals Law and Order specialized in. What is a rich guy doing in this neighborhood eating in a soup kitchen? The old man seems to have killed his wife, a Holocaust survivor, out of mercy for her pain, but, no, it was because she had discovered his history with the SS forty years ago.

Law and Order advertised its use of stories "ripped from the headlines" but often got to those stories circuitously or would begin with the obvious newsworthy story and twist away from it. By the second commercial you would often think you knew what the story was about, but it would take a strange turn, leading you into a story that, despite protestations to the contrary, could be quite recognizable from recent news. Two episodes, "Indifference" (1990) and "Fixed" (2004), drew from the Joel Steinberg/Heidi Nussbaum child-abuse case closely enough that the first followed the episode with a disingenuous denial that it had anything to do with the real case.

Many writers and critics assert that murder is the only crime worthy of a mystery writer's attention, despite the fact there are many excellent caper novels and occasional espionage stories without a murder. Murder is absolute. There is no way to recover the victim. In the transition from living being to body, the victim becomes a thing, rather than a person. Insulting someone, abusing someone, taking away their possessions may be in many respects a permanent violation of the self, but there is a sense in stories that these kinds of crimes can be repaired and they therefore don't seem as horrific. By setting up a series of events in which some justice is extracted in memory of the victim, murder mysteries mollify our fears of death. The many meaningless deaths that are part of every living person's experiences are thereby implied to be part of a larger meaning. These stories tell us that murder will out, when any mature person knows it all too often does not.

In medical schools, apprentice doctors are assigned their cadavers, strangely colored things hanging on a rack, and are solemnly urged to be respectful to them. My brother, now a surgeon, told me once that the cadaver on his table did not much affect him until he began the deconstruction of her toes. Suddenly, he saw that this thing on the stainless table had once been a person. Perhaps we couldn't much enjoy murder stories if we identified too much with the victim. A certain detachment is required, or it could not be anything other than profoundly disturbing. When the tongs reach into the mouth of the victim in The Silence of the Lambs and extract a death's-head moth, it is unsettling, a moment of horror, but not so much because we are thinking about the victim. The moth is a clue, and that is what interests us.

In an even impersonal sense, the body itself is merely another clue in most stories. The flesh bloated from floating in the Hudson River is an object for study. It is no longer a person. In the almost obligatory autopsy scenes in today's television, movies, and books, the examiners flourish their whizzing saws and keen scalpels and toss body parts into bowls as if to remind us that the victim is no longer a person, but merely a problem. Like Mr. Boddy in the game Clue, the victim is only relevant as the corner piece of a jigsaw. By placing it, we can begin to construct the entire picture. Working out how the puzzle solver (detective) fits the pieces together is what interests us because it rationalizes the irrational and, in a larger sense, the entirety of existence. This meat on the autopsy table once laughed. It never will again. Explain that.

University of Oklahoma

J. Madison Davis is the author of eight mystery novels, including The Murder of Frau Schutz, an Edgar nominee, and Law and Order: Dead Line. He has also published seven nonfiction books and dozens of short stories and articles, including his crime and mystery column in WLT since 2004.