Hello. My name is Plot.
This is a portion of a foreword I wrote for Malice Domestic: Murder Most Conventional. It is a conversational approach to much of my philosophical forensic thinking. Enjoy.
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plot /plät/ noun
1. A plan made in secret by a person or a group of people to do something illegal or harmful
2. The main events of a play, novel, movie, or similar work, devised and presented by the writer as an interrelated sequence.
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Time “Runs” Forward
Take an egg from the refrigerator. Hold it over the floor. Now drop it. See those pieces of shell and the viscous splatter? All you need to know about detection and solving crimes is right there in one messy example. Let me explain.
Physics, time, evidence, and history, all the information required to solve The Case of the Broken Egg is evident and irrefutable to anyone who did not witness the event. The crime is easy to solve because of the way the universe runs behind the scenes, so consistently and reliably that the rules are rarely considered. Yet every detective, every writer, every reader, every person uses them to answer questions all the time; some of those questions involve crimes and murder, most do not. For writers, these factors are embodied in plot. Plot is the sequencing of motivation, actions, and resolution in a story. In crime fiction, it involves the transgression of personal and social norms (motivation and actions) and the return to some form of normal life (resolution) by the solving of the crime. Someone is wronged/jilted/jealous and decides to take revenge in the form of humiliation/theft/assault/murder, thinking this will put the axis of life back on a normal (if selfish) tilt. The actions of the criminal are central to the plot and the factors running the universe make them so because of one irreducible feature: The actions are committed forward in time. Once committed, they are history and exist only in the past. The actions of the criminal are revealed out of order, however, to those in the present by the process of detection. Finally, the story of their revelation and reconstruction is told in forward time from a certain perspective using much, if not most, of the available information.
Look at the egg. Look at it. It hit the floor (forward in time). How is that known? The pieces and the mess are there on the floor. In the commission of the crime, the breaking of the egg came last in that particular chain of events but for the detectives it was seen first in their investigation. The shells, yolk, and albumin splashed everywhere are evidence of the crime, the historical indicators of past activities. Shell fragments and eggy goop on the floor are de facto proof that an egg fell and hit the floor. Those indicators are an example of Locard’s Exchange Principle, which states that when two objects come into contact, information is exchanged. Formulated by the French forensic pioneer Edmund Locard in the early 1900s, the Exchange Principle is a central philosophical concept in forensic science. All evidence consists of stuff left behind or picked up while committing a crime, whether DNA, fingerprints, wounds, fibers, or instant message files, they are all the “leftovers” of past criminal actions discovered in the present. The remnants may be very small or obscure but it is the viewer’s responsibility to see the traces for what they are: Flags, clues, evidence. As Edward Heinrich, another pioneer of forensic science said, “Rarely are other than ordinary phenomena involved in the commission of a crime. One is confronted with scrambled effects, all parts of which separately are attributed to causes.” Detectives and forensic scientists must understand “ordinary phenomena” in order to unravel the clues left behind at crimes.
Saying that the egg “fell” may seem a bit passive, both temperamentally and grammatically, but that kind of distance is necessary until an agent—in police parlance, a suspect—is suggested. This is where many real investigations go wrong, by not considering all of the reasonable hypotheses open to the circumstances under inquiry. Biases creep in, potential avenues of questioning get closed off, and mistakes are made. Confirmation bias is a good example. Looking for, collecting, and using only those bits of information that support or confirm a particular pet theory is confirmation bias. “The husband was out and has no alibi for the time period when we think the wife was killed,” says the detective. “That’s funny. Let’s focus on him.” The husband was out with an old female friend (“Must be an affair.”), had a couple of beers (“He didn’t get the promotion; his wife must have been nagging him.”), and won’t hand over his cellphone without a warrant (“He’s hiding something.”). Fixated on the ‘husband theory’, the detectives ignore other possible reasons for the evidence they find. This is one of the big reasons that wrongful convictions happen. Interestingly, a host of analytical thinking methods to avoid this kind of mental error is openly available and is used by professional intelligence analysts. Why this kind of training is not required at police academies and in forensic science programs is a different kind of mystery that should be solved and soon.
Detection Works Backwards
How do these indicators, these clues mean something? Because time only works in one direction. Time does not flow, per se, but rather is a series of events that form an irreversible sequence that is cumulative in only one direction. Broken eggs do not spontaneously reassemble. Thus, the world is asymmetrical in time and that provides detectives, historians, and the like with the ability to sort out what actions have taken place—to reconstruct the egg, so to speak—if given enough evidence (shells, mess, etc.). If a video was taken of the egg dropping and breaking, running the video backwards would look ridiculous and be obvious for what it is. Again, broken eggs do not suddenly become whole. If the video were cut up into individual images and scrambled (much like the egg), they could be re-ordered into a sensible sequence because the asymmetry of time is intuitively understood. What is revealed, in real life by the crook and in fiction by the author’s plot, is the logic of the criminal actions, the logic that the real or fictional criminal has imposed on the world through plotting and committing the crime.
That detectives are historians is a short leap in logic (or faith). Many professions are historical in nature, including astronomy (you think that starlight just left the Crab Nebula on Monday?), geology, paleontology, archaeology, forensic science, and investigations of many sorts. The three things these professions all share are the manipulation of space, time, and scale. First, space is manipulated by the choice of where to look, what to pay attention to, and how much to use. For example, not everything at a crime scene relates to the crime and not all evidence at a crime scene can be collected. Evidence may degrade or decay, be lost or damaged, or be obscured. Working a crime scene involves hundreds of decisions about what is relevant (Do you collect a kitchen knife in a shooting case?) based on the various hypothesized scenarios (plural) of the crime. Not every scrap of evidence can be collected at a scene and not every bit that is collected can be used to solve a case or reconstruct a crime. Some of it just will not make sense. Second, historical professionals play with time by being in more than one place or time at once. The detective is here now but is thinking about the scene yesterday and when the crime occurred last week. Authors do this routinely, if more abstractly. This mental time travel helps sort through the individual images (like from the egg video) and to put them in the correct order. Finally, historical professionals play with scale by looking at the “big picture” and then a tiny scrap of incriminating or misleading evidence and then stepping back to the larger view to see how it compares. Macro, micro, macro. Similarly, detectives jump scales by looking at evidence (like egg shells), interviewing suspects and witnesses, talking with informants, comparing activities to larger patterns across a jurisdiction, and so on.
Why space, time, and scale? Because a literal interpretation of reality is too cumbersome and impractical. A distillation of relevant information (editing, in other words) is required to present a coherent story or narrative. Again, plot is bound within these elements and makes use of the author’s abilities to manipulate space, time, and scale to best effect in story telling. We have an expectation of how things are going to work, time being asymmetrical and all, and when they do not, we are surprised. Plot twists do just that, they bend our expectations of space (The killer is in the back seat of the car!), time (The killer knew the victim in high school?), or scale (The postage stamps are the fortune!) and violate our previous assumptions about the story or characters. A proper plot twist is enormously satisfying (“I am your father.”) but a clunky or whole unbelievable one can ruin the entire narrative. Just as bad are twists that the reader has not been properly prepared for; too-clever-by-half authors also make assumptions about what they have told the reader and the groundwork they have laid. Caution and craft are therefore recommended when twisting plots.
The main reason a literal interpretation of reality is impractical is because of the asymmetry of time. Ironically, because time is asymmetrical, far more evidence of a past action is produced than is actually needed to conclude it happened. Consider this: A baseball is thrown through the window of a living room. Not every piece of glass would be needed to conclude that the window was broken. Notwithstanding the baseball on the floor, many other types of evidence also could lead to that conclusion, such as sounds (the birds are now louder), moisture (rain on the floor), a breeze, and then there is all those glass fragments on the floor. Time’s asymmetry highlights why the perfect crime is nearly impossible to commit. All the evidence, every last speck, each skin cell, all the tiny traces would have to be eliminated to cover up the crime. Miss one and a modern-day Sherlock Holmes will discover it. And each clue is not independent: Removing a fingerprint does not erase the footprint or the other fingerprints. As Raymond Chandler said, “The boys with their feet on the desks know that the easiest murder case in the world to break is the one somebody tried to get very cute with; the one that really bothers them is the murder somebody only thought of two minutes before he pulled it off.” Fewer moving parts, less complexity, fewer anomalies and patterns to leave evidence. As a final proof that time is asymmetrical, consider that there is a very easy way of erasing all traces of a crime and eliminating any potential evidence: Don’t do it. But that would make for a very boring plot.