Murder and Mayhem

D P Lyle

Saint Martins, 2003, £15.00, pp 288

ISBN 0 312 30945 7

Rating: ****

If you want to know how dangerous it is to transport heroin in a swallowed condom, how many rhubarb leaves are needed to kill someone, or how mood cosmetics would look on a corpse, then Murder and Mayhem is the book for you.

The origins of this volume are, appropriately for a crime writer, rather convoluted. It all began with a suggestion from the past president of the south Californian chapter of the Mystery Writers of America. The idea was that the newsletters March of Crime and The Sleuth Sayer would benefit from a source of specialist medical knowledge. A column, “The doctor is in,” was born and proved to be so popular that cardiologist Dr Lyle received hundreds of letters from “detail conscious” writers looking for plausible solutions to their complex plot problems. Murder and Mayhem is a compilation of some of these questions and their often surprising answers.

Dr Lyle provides clear, concise explanations of the physiology and anatomy involved in the variety of injuries, accidents, and general bad luck that authors propose to inflict on their characters. This might sound slightly boring, but these particular applications of the basic sciences are unlikely to have appeared on a medical school curriculum.

The book is divided into broad subject groups, such as “poisons and drugs” and “medical murder,” and a wide range of material is covered. However, since each question and answer is independent from the next it is easy to skip around and read in bits.

Murder and Mayhem provides the answers to questions you didnt even know you wanted to ask, but youll be glad that someone else did. There are loads of positive comments from fairly well known crime writers suggesting that they found the book useful and what I found particularly interesting was how the explanations were tailored towards answering a specific question. Often these deal with the functional impact of an injury or the likelihood of it arousing police suspicion. Just in case anyone should get any ideas, there is a bold warning that the book “is not to be used as a manual for any criminal activity or to bring harm to anyone.”