Maggots, Murder, and Men : Book Review

Every once in awhile I come across a book that introduces old topics in a completely new way. We all know about bugs, and we all have seen murder mysteries. Combine the two, mix in a strong dash of British ambience, and you get something completely novel and different:

Maggots, Murderm and Men(2002) is a non-fiction book written by a British Forensic Entymologist, Dr. Zakaria Erzincllioglu(!) Dr. Zak comes across as a combination of Nero Wolfe, Sherlock Holmes, and the Orkin Man.

The writing is wonderfully English in tone, and the content consists of countless stories and anecdotes about the author's experience in using insect knowledge to help solve murders and other crimes.

Grossout warning: You need a strong stomach to read this stuff. Dr. Zak cheerfully discusses the laying of flies eggs on rotting human flesh and the resulting growth of maggots and bluebottle flies. However, the book manages to be engaging and a refreshing alternative to the plethora of murder novels that seem to be so popular now.

Orchids and Baseball

Excerpt from The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean:

"Do you know where these neoregelias[Bromeliad Specie] came from? ... One day he found a little mysterious seedling on an orchid he'd gotten. He stuck the seedling in a hollowed-out coconut shell and grew it up, and it was this good-looking bromeliad. He set up his own little nursery and sold nothing but pups from that bromeliad. He must have made fifty thousand dollars on it. He lived off that one plant for years. "

The Orchid Thief is a non-fiction book about the Orchid and tropical plant industry in south Florida. As such it is a record of the investigations of writer Susan Orlean. But it is actually a collection of stories, which have taken on the character of local myths.

There is a line between reality and non-reality, and part of that line is myth and story. Stories sit on the interface between now and the past and future, with our senses and intuition as individual gatekeepers of what is real and what isn't.

I think it is interesting to explore not only the stories themselves but also the circumstances in which they arise and the manner in which they are introduced to the unwary public.

Stories are out of favor right now, and it is just because of this that they hold such power. They come in under the guise of real information, which reporters are just now beginning to understand. I think it is because of this that most of us are so much more interested in outright fantasy, such as Star Wars and Batman; it is presented as not real, and therefore is sterile and safe. One author/screenwriter who remains popular in exception to this is Michael Crichton, who manages to add a shadow of reality to his techno-thrillers through research and endnotes.

It seems the one area of reality that we have left is that of sports, but even that category is crumbling in the face of creeping commercialism which has begun to cast doubt on the integrity of some events. You can watch or replay in your head the plot from 'Field of Dreams' and understand it in the same light as some of these other examples. The whole historical premise on which 'Dreams' is based is the half-truth that Shoeless Joe Jackson and other players threw a baseball game for money. This half truth is then built upon with real people, such as J.D. Salinger (who became Terrence Mann in the movie). A whole new story, with its own myth and atmosphere, is built into an enormous edifice of poetry that transcends the controversial event upon which it is based.

If you look closely in our millennial (or is it millenial?) world, you will find many such unrealities masquerading as fact. More on this in a later (or is it earlier?) post.