“They were delighted to tell me everything…”

I decided to write The Cobra Event as a novel in order to solve a very specific journalistic problem. I became interested in biological weapons while writing The Hot Zone, and I realized that there was something very important about them that the scientific community was trying its damndest to ignore. But the weapons experts I need to talk to wouldn’t go on the record because their positions in the government were too sensitive.

But once I decided to write a novel about biological weapons, they were delighted to tell me everything I needed to know, from how FBI agents dress and get along with their families, to the scientific work they did on bioterrorism…I ended up visiting the FBI facilities at Quantico, Virginia, including a secret facility that I ended up describing in The Cobra Event.

—Richard Preston, to Robert S. Boynton in The New New Journalism

“The boy in the cooler was looking rather the worse for wear…”

(Note: This post is the thirty-first installment in my author’s commentary for The Icon Thief, covering Chapter 30. You can read the earlier installments here.)

Everybody loves a good autopsy scene. There are few narrative tropes, in fact, where our experience of something in fiction bears such a slender relation to what our feelings about it would be in real life. We’re all fascinated by autopsies in novels or onscreen, when we might not last more than a minute or two in an actual morgue, and resent being confronted by images of real death or decay. It isn’t hard to pin down the roots of this fascination: an autopsy scene provides a safe zone, within the comforting confines of the crime procedural, for us to look squarely at issues of death, disease, and the human body that we otherwise might like to forget. Forensic pathology has its own lore and body of knowledge, like any technical trade, and in this case, it’s being applied to a machine with which we’re all intimately familiar. And although it’s ultimately a form of voyeurism, it strikes me as relatively harmless, as long as it’s kept to the confines of fiction. Speaking for myself, I can say that while I was eager to research most of my locations firsthand, this is one instance in which I was happy to rely on secondary sources for most of my information.

The trouble with autopsy scenes is that anyone who has read more than a few thrillers or watched a police procedural on television has probably seen dozens of them. We’re bored by the Y-shaped incision and the medical examiner’s detached commentary into the tape recorder, so any author who decides to write such a scene has to take the reader’s familiarity—and potential boredom—with the genre’s conventions into account. I’ve written two autopsy scenes in my published work, and in both cases, I did my best to make them at least somewhat distinctive. For City of Exiles, I decided to focus on the specifics of forensic procedure in the United Kingdom, which meant reading several books on the subject, many of which I plucked from the true crime shelves in bookstores in London. I also based certain details on coroner’s reports for similar crimes, in which the victim’s body was set on fire. (Incidentally, the best account of an autopsy I’ve read is in David Simon’s great Homicide, which I highly recommend to any authors who want to write such a scene for themselves, and my favorite fictional autopsy is probably the one in Richard Preston’s The Cobra Event.)

The autopsy scene in Chapter 30 of The Icon Thief was a late addition to the plot, and resulted from a number of narrative considerations. As I’ve mentioned before, in the first draft, the figure of Powell was only dimly realized, and much less interesting than either Maddy or Ilya. One of my objectives in the rewrite was to invigorate him as a protagonist, both by going into his inner life in more detail and by giving him interesting things to do. A previous chapter, in which he engages in a bit of illegal entry to obtain a piece of crucial evidence, was created from scratch with this in mind, and this scene was conceived for the same reason. In the initial draft, this was a much weaker chapter with Powell and Wolfe having a conversation at the office about the progress of the investigation, which was about as interesting as it sounds. Reading over the novel again, it occurred to me that conveying the same information at an autopsy would at least give me a colorful background, and would serve a secondary purpose by reintroducing the plot point of the three Armenians whom Sharkovsky kills in Brighton Beach, a scene that I’d written to insert a necessary action beat in the first act of the novel, but which, in earlier versions, was never mentioned again.

The result was a chapter that solved a number of story problems at once, and it was a pleasure to write, despite its gruesome content. To give the scene some additional interest, I decided to set it in a part of the morgue that novels don’t normally visit. In a previous chapter, I’d depicted the use of multislice computed tomography to examine a mummified body; here, I decided to show the decomp room, where bodies in an advanced state of decay are brought. This was partially due to the fact that at this point, the victims in question have been dead for quite some time, but also because I wanted to describe a location that was distinct from the autopsy rooms that we’ve all seen before. Writing a good autopsy scene, I discovered, was not so different from describing a murder: it’s the specifics that make a familiar scene memorable. I focused, then, on some necessarily gory details—such as the fact that the loose skin on the hands of a decomposing body has a way of slipping off altogether, like a glove—and the look of the room itself, with its gray acrylic floors, exhaust fan, and gently sloping tables. The result isn’t all that essential to the plot, but it’s a nice little set piece that serves its intended purpose. I certainly won’t forget it soon…