 |
©Hugo Glendinning
|
So,
why was I walking through a deserted field in somewhere near Aldershot, in the
rain, and wondering why there were no road signs? Moreover, why hadn’t I taken the advice of
the Air Crash Investigation Branch and caught a taxi from the station? In addition, why wasn’t I wearing a coat?
All
good questions, as I tramped past a golf course (a golf course? Where the hell was I?) knowing I was already late.
The
answer was that I’d agreed to write a radio play about an Air Crash Investigator,
having been asked by John Taylor of Fiction Factory productions. And I was doing my homework.
I’m
a crime writer. At the heart of my work
is the idea of evidence. In my Sister
Agnes novels, the evidence comes from odd places. A hunch, maybe. A sense that someone is lying. The real forensic evidence happens around the
edge of the story. This is the problem
of writing a contemporary amateur detective.
In Sherlock Holmes’ day, the police could be bumbling fools way behind
the razor-sharp brilliance of Our Hero, but in the present, to write this kind
of detective would just be plain unbelievable.
So Agnes’s work, by definition, relies on the police doing their job
just outside the main heart of the story.
And she, because she works in a hostel for homeless kids in a rough old
part of London, has access to the kind of privileged information that no one
wants to tell to the authorities. As I
say, a hunch, an instinct that someone is hiding something.
But
now here I am, at the AAIB, looking at Evidence with a capital E. There are people sitting by screens, reading
the traces left by the Black Box recorders (in fact they’re huge indestructible
bright orange things), the computer read-outs of every activity recorded by all
the equipment on board the aircraft. There
are cubicles, which play the Cockpit Voice Recorders. And in the hangars themselves, the wreckage
of planes is laid out. It is forensic
but respectful, acknowledging the tragedy of the loss of life.
For
this play, I’ve had to learn about fuel injection systems, cargo hold design,
the patterns of ice formation in jet engines, the self-igniting dangers of
lithium batteries. Or even, as in one
case I researched, a screw coming loose in the engine.
It’s
been a challenge, writing Mitchener. He’s
an air crash investigator. Where he
follows real life, he deals with Evidence with a capital E. Where he’s fictional, he’s a loner, on the
outside, following his instincts. Crime
fiction deals with human suffering, with loss, grief, rage, revenge, whether
it’s a cop, a nun, or an air crash investigator. And that’s what I learned, standing in those
hangars on that rainy day in Aldershot, that the search for Evidence, as much
as it’s about computer read-outs and ice-formation - it’s also all about
compassion.
MITCHENER
Black
Box Detective
A
new radio play to be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on Thursday 2nd August
at 2.15. It will also be available to hear for a week afterwards on the BBC website.
Alison Joseph is a crime writer and radio writer. She is best known for her Sister Agnes books. Alison also writes plays and adapts fiction and non-fiction for the BBC. More information and her work can be found on her website http://www.alisonjoseph.com
