Author Archives: Garry Rodgers

About Garry Rodgers

After three decades as a Royal Canadian Mounted Police homicide detective and British Columbia coroner, International Best Selling author and blogger Garry Rodgers has an expertise in death and the craft of writing on it. Now retired, he wants to provoke your thoughts about death and help authors give life to their words.

WHY HARDBOILED DETECTIVE FICTION REMAINS SO POPULAR

The old-fashioned private detective with hardboiled ways has been around since the 1920s. He/she’s still here a hundred years later and shows no sign of going away. There are good reasons—many good reasons—for hardboiled detective fiction’s popularity, but one seems to stand above the rest. That’s escapism. You can safely escape into the fictional, fast-moving, danger-filled crime world and let your hardboiled detective kill your enemies for you.

This post is timely for me as a crime writer. I’ve recently taken the plunge onto the mean streets of hardboiled fiction writing after a coincidental brush with the film industry. I was going about my way putting out based-on-true-crime books in a planned 12-part series when I got an unsolicited call from a New York City film producer. It was about a historic serial murder case I’d worked on and published an article about.

Google being Google, the film producer found me and we had a nice long chat about the true crime case. He’d done his homework before our Zoom call and was somewhat familiar with my books. Being the diligent and always-on-the-look film producer that he is, he asked the 64,000-dollar question, “So what else you got going?”

What I had on the go—in the back of my mind for the last few years—was a concept for a hardboiled crime fiction series based on the 1920s style but set in the 2020s. I said, “Here’s the logline. A modern city in dystopian crisis surreptitiously enlists two private detectives from its utopian past to dispense street justice and restore social order.”

There was a long pause before he said, “Reeeeally… This is exactly what my colleague at (leading net-stream provider) is looking for. Can we set up a joint talk?”

Not being one to look the proverbial gift-horse in the mouth, I readily agreed. Now, I’m on a full-time mission to figure out how to do this and get something in place by the fall. Regardless if this ever gets “Green Lit” in film, I’m retaining the ebook, print, and audio rights to the series titled City Of Danger.

I’ve researched hardboiled detective fiction for the past three months. It’s utterly consumed me, and I’m completely hooked on a fascinating genre. I’ve always believed that the best way to learn something is by writing on it or, better yet, teaching it. With that in mind, a month ago I wrote a post on The Kill Zone about hardboiled crime fiction’s popularity. Now, I’ll steal back my own work and republish the piece here on DyingWords. Here goes:

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Crime doesn’t pay, so they say. Well, whoever “they” are, they aren’t in touch with today’s entertainment market because crime—true and fiction—in books, audio, television, film, or net-streaming, is a highly popular commodity. One solid crime writing sub-genre, detective fiction, is hot as a Mexican’s lunch.

Detective fiction has been hot for a long, long time. Crime writing historians give Edgar Allan Poe credit for siring the first modern detective story. Back in 1841, Poe penned Murders In The Rue Morgue (set in Paris), and it was a smash hit in Graham’s Magazine. Poe’s detective, C. Auguste Dupin, used an investigation style called “ratiocination” which means a process of exact thinking.

Poe’s style brought on the cozy mysteries, aka The Golden Era of Crime Fiction of the 1920s. Detectives like Sherlock Holmes and Miss Marple solved locked-room crimes. They intrigued readers but spared them gruesome details like extreme violence, hardcore sex, and graphic killings.

The golden crime-fiction genre evolved into the hardboiled detective fiction movement, circa 1930s-1950s. Crime writers like Dashiell Hammett gave us the Continental Op and Sam Spade. Raymond Chandler brought Philip Marlowe to life. Carroll John Daly convincingly conceived Race Williams. And Mickey Spillane, bless his multi-million-selling soul, left Mike Hammer as his legacy.

The ’60s to 2000s gave more great detective fiction stories. Anyone heard of Elmore Leonard? How about Sarah Paretsky and Sue Grafton? Or, in current times, Michael Connelly, Megan Abbott, and a wildcard in the hardboiled and noir department, Christa Faust?

These storytellers broke ground that’s still being tilled by great fictional detectives. Television gave us Perry Mason, Ironside, Columbo, Jack Friday, Kojack, and Magnum. Murder She Wrote? How cool was mystery writer and amateur detective Jessica Fletcher? And let’s not even get into big screen and the now runaway net-stream stuff.

So why the unending popularity of detective fiction? I asked myself this question to understand and appreciate the detective fiction part of the crime story genre. I worked as a real detective for decades, and I know what it’s like to stare down a barrel and scrape up a cold one. But once I reinvented myself as a crime writer, I had to learn a new trade.

I’m on an even-newer venture right now, and that’s developing a net-streaming style series. It’s a different—but not too different—delve into hardboiled detective fiction, and the series is titled City Of Danger. To write this credibly, and with honor to heritage, I’ve plunged into a rabbit hole of research that’s becoming more like a badger den or a viper pit.

What I’m doing, as we “speak”, is learning this sub-genre of crime writing—hardboiled detective fiction—and I’ve learned two things. One, I found out I knew SFA almost nothing about this fascinating fictional world that’s entertained many millions of detective fiction fans for well over a hundred years. Two, detective fiction has far from gone away.

My take? Detective fiction—hardboiled, softboiled, over-easy, scrambled, or baked in a cake—is on the rise and will continue being a huge crime-paying moneymaker in coming years. There are reasons for that, why detective fiction remains so popular, and I think I’ve found some.

I stumbled on an interesting article at a site called Beemgee.com. Its title Why is Crime Fiction So Popular? caught my attention, so I copied and pasted it onto a Word.doc and dissected it. Here’s the nuts, bolts, and screws of what it says.

Crime fascinates people, and detectives (for the most part) work on solving crimes. But the crime genre popularity has little to do with the crime, per se. It has far more to do with the very essence of storytelling—people are hardwired to listen to stories, especially crime stories.

Detective fiction is premiere crime storytelling and clearly exhibits one of the fundamental rules of storytelling: cause and effect. In detective fiction, every scene must be justified—each plot event must have a raison d’etre within the story because the reader perceives every scene as the potential cause of a forthcoming effect.

Picture a Roman arch bridge. Every stone is held in place by its neighbor just like story archs with properly set scenes. Take away one scene that doesn’t support the story arch and the structure fails.

Well-written detective fiction has a bridge-like structure. Each scene in the storytelling trip has some sort of a cause that creates an effect. This subliminal action keeps readers turning pages.

The article drills into detective fiction cause and effect. It rightly says the universe has a law of cause and effect but we, as humans, can’t really see it in action. But we’re programmed to know it exists, so we naturally seek an agency—the active cause of any actions we perceive.

Detective fiction stories, like most storytelling types, provide a safety mechanism. A detective story is built around solving a crime by following clues. A cause. An effect. A cause. An effect. The story goes on until you find out whodunit and a well-told story leaves you with a satisfying end where you’ve picked up a take-away safety tip.

But detective fiction stories aren’t truly about whodunit. Sure, we want the crook caught and due justice served. However, we want to know something more. We want to know motive, and this is where the best detective fiction stories shine. They’re whydunnits.

Whydunnits are irresistible stories. They’re the search for truth, and in searching for truth in detective fiction storytelling—why this crime writing sub-genre remains so popular—I found another online article. Its title Why Is Detective Fiction So Popular? also caught my attention.

This short piece is on a blog by Swiss crime writer, Cristelle Comby. If you haven’t heard of Cristelle, I recommend you check her out. Her post has a quote that sums up why detective fiction is so popular, and it’s far more eloquent than anything I can write. Here’s a snippet:

“Detective novels do not demand emotional or intellectual involvement; they do not arouse one’s political opinions or exhaust one by its philosophical queries which may lead the reader towards self-analysis and exploration. They, at best, require a sense of vicarious participation and this is easy to give. Most readers identify themselves with the hero and share his adventures and sense of discovery.

Cristelle Comby

The concept of a hero in a detective story is different from that of a hero in any other kind of fictional work. A hero in a novel is the protagonist; things happen to him. His character grows or develops and it is his relationship to others which is important. In a detective story, there is no place for a hero of this kind. The person who is important is the detective and it is the way he fits the pieces of the puzzle together which arouses interest. Thus in a detective story it is the narration and the events which are overwhelmingly important, the growth of character is immaterial. What the detective story has to offer is suspense. It satisfies the most primitive element responsible for the development of story-telling, the element of curiosity, the desire to know why and how.

Detective stories offer suspense, a sense of vicarious satisfaction, and they also offer escape from the fears and worries and the stress and strain of everyday life. Many people who would rather stay away from intellectually ‘heavy’ books find it hard to resist these. Detective fiction is so popular because the story moves with speed.”

As a former detective, and now someone who writes this stuff, I think detective fiction is so popular because you can safely escape into a dark & dangerous world of wild causes and wild effects—full of fast-reading suspense—and you get powerful insight into what makes other people (like good guys and bad girls) tick. Yes, escapism. You can safely escape into the fictional, danger-filled crime world and let your hardboiled detective kill your enemies for you.

So that’s what went up on The Kill Zone blog. Now for a little bonus here at DyingWords. Here’s the City Of Danger series product description:

The City Of Danger is in peril. It’s in 2020s dystopian crisis with infrastructure crumbling, social systems collapsing, corruption infesting all civic layers, and crime overflowing from clogged gutters of every alley—gushing gangland and political blood onto its streets. The City Of Danger urgently needs help it can’t get from its mainstream. For salvation, it surreptitiously enlists two private detectives from its 1920s utopian past.

Susan Silverii and Al Monagham share a split-room office with frosted glass doors in the city’s low rent district. They’re ex-police officers who weren’t a good fit. It’s the Roaring Twenties, and they’ve struck out on their own. Al with his street justice vengeance. Susan with her social change agenda.

And they have a past, Susan and Al. A past of personal passion and poisoned positions. But when the City of Danger assigns, they put professionalism first and inter-conflict second as Susan Silverii and Al Monagham step from runnin’-wild, Charleston-dance speakeasies onto the mean streets in the ugly world of a modern city—an interconnected city sick with immoral chaos.

Dispense street justice. Restore social order. Treacherous tasks ordered by a desperate client— the City Of Danger.

Now for a double DyingWords bonus: Here’s a sneak peek at Scene One in the City Of Danger Pilot Episode:

CITY OF DANGER

Pilot Episode

Scene One

Monday, October 31 ­­- 7:50 a.m.

Setting:

Noir. Bleak. Dense urban. Icy drizzle has stopped. Civic lights are still on — what still work. Hard gusts blow wet leaves that stick to cracked brick, condemned structural glass, and corroded staircase metals. A failing foghorn on the waterfront echoes off battered buildings smothered by smog — its rhythm competes with sirens screeching hopelessly towards smoke, sickness, and sadness in the slums. Closing in — methane eerily seeps from open sewer grates. It nauseates. Yet, the taste is somehow sickly sweet — almost tolerable — and now expected; unapologetically not urbane, unlike those who fight entropy’s ultimatum in the City Of Danger.

Fade In:

Camera view:

Germanic Expressionist style. High-angle, downward capture. Sharp and dull shadows through contrasted lighting. Follows six feet back on quarter-rear sides as well as directly behind.

Narrator:

The City

Voice In:

A 2021 Beamer X3 SUV, deep-sea metallic blue, brakes to a halt behind a solid-black Tesla on Mean Street, a pock-marked route with water-filled potholes in the low rent district. A stunningly attractive and stylish high-status lady — exceptionally fit — a natural brunette, except for dyed umber highlights, showing dolphin-smooth skin — in her fifties with impeccable dark brows accenting mahogany eyes and classic red wine lipstick, steps out. Her Lululemon-clad legs hit hard on crumbling asphalt. Immediately, she clicks her fob and locks her doors then rapidly scans the streetscape. Her right hand subconsciously checks her shoulder-holstered .32 auto cloaked by her unzipped yellow & black Arc’teryx rain jacket, and she hurtfully limps into the claustrophobic narrows of Peril Alley.

On the lady’s left, angle-parked with one rear door propped open and its running engine spewing propane fumes, is a mid-2000s FedEx panel van parked beside a gold-trimmed 1999 Caddy Eldorado. A greaseball Latino takes a brown paper bag from the black F/X operator who glances at the lady with his one good eye. Twice and once more.

Further, on her right, the lady’s right, is an ‘85 Chevy Impala, a boring beige four-door with a flat front tire. A prune — a sun-wrinkled old olive-skinned guy with a faded white Masters golf cap and perpetually-down fly has it jacked-up. He curses the C-Word.

The lady pauses. She frowns. In Italian, she says, “Tua madre non ti ha insegnato le buone maniere”. He replies, “Ciao bella!” She blows a kiss at the ground, flips him the bird, and falters on. She quick-lefts a shoulder check then watches straight ahead, closing at the back end of a 1976 F150 Styleside, red and silver with a lichen-spattered canopy. A loosely attached, non-local plate catches her eye. Looks abandoned, she thinks. It’s at a chokepoint in the center of tightening Peril Alley. She stops. Slightly backs up. Sniffs. Nitrogen fertilizer with trigger device? No. Probably just organic sludge in the box of a stolen pickup dumped here as usual.

The lady squeezes past the Ford’s passenger side, avoiding its dented, dirt-dripping door and smashed mirror. She looks to her left at a late-60s muscle car, a puke-green Goat — a Pontiac GTO, idling with a leaded gas, throaty rumble. She can’t see the driver, but the Goat’s passenger is a mousey-haired hippy chick giving her a suggestive smile through a part-open window. The stink of shit-grade Sinsemilla scrunches the lady’s ideal nose.

Her right hand raises. Fingers pinch, then release, and her nostrils reopen after she’s passed — cautiously favoring her left side’s now-permanent short-step.

She hesitates. Stops. She looks up.

Chuck Berry’s hit Maybellene blasts from a transistor radio on a shaky fire escape landing. It’s thirty feet above her uncovered head, the same place invasive carrier pigeons roost and fecal-drop and terminally-diseased rats cunningly climb cone-shielded steel poles to steal mildewed barley seed scattered onto delaminating plywood.

The lady shivers. She keeps on.

On her right is an alley business, a family business she knows well, a WW2 era Chinese clothes cleaner and money launderer — Ho Lim’s — tucked into the set-back alcove of a used-brick façade with cast iron plumbing barely hanging from bolts set into breaking gray mortar. The lady moves to her left, avoiding intermittent blasts of perc solvent.

Peril Alley darkens. It cools even more. The buildings grow as she approaches dead end. Twenty stories and more overshadow brownstones and brownstones overshadow antiquated infrastructure of overloaded, overheated, overhead power poles draped with time-twisted lines strung through opaque glass insulators screwed into tired wood crossbars. On the ground — unpredictable ground — foundry-built catch basins guard root-filled, tiled storm drains that swirl-down rancid water mixed with more of the city’s rottenness.

Bang!

She spins left towards the sound. Lowers and goes sideways. Minimizes her silhouette exactly as she’s been tactically trained — intensely immersed during her now-discharged service — and hooks-out her handgun. But it’s the backfire from a red-as-raw-meat ’41 Packard 180 with a badly-floated carb. The owner, a flat-capper in elbow-patched tweed, laughs. She doesn’t. She reholsters. But leaves off her safety.

A bum, a Depression-era hobo with nothing more to her miserable life than a broken broom handle with a half-tied-on, once-gray pillowcase, rummages through an unlidded dumpster with her grease-crusted hands. The hag begs. The lady responds. She opens her overcoat, removes the Calabrian leather wallet handed down through her ‘Ndrangheta family, opens it, and gives the other a five.

Ahead — just before Peril’s dead-end — phonograph sounds of Charleston dance sing-out from inside a welded steel gate guarding a Prohibition speakeasy. It’s trailing off from last night’s steamy start, raucous non-stop laughter, and this morning’s explosive finish. The lady looks right. She smiles, slightly, at the flickering on-and-off red and orange and green and blue neon sign: Topper’s Grill & Bar.

The lady stands where she can go no more down Peril Alley. There’s a large door framed into a soot-stained, rough stucco wall Tommygunned with .45 holes. It’s flanked by a now-glassless window boarded-up after the latest kerosene-wicked, flame-thrown cocktail. The door is a heavy, metal-strapped oak door — not altruistic like her eyes and her soul — more fatalistic as a mix of splintered hardwood and oozing rust. Like her, risking to be shot once again.

Beside the door are two signs, business signs, in black & white Roaring Twenties font. One’s above the other. Al Monagham Private Detective Agency is on top. The other, below, is Susan Silverii Private Detective Agency.

The lady fishes a skeleton key from her outer garment — it’s now changed from her unzipped yellow & black Arc’teryx rain jacket to a peach Flapper coat (virgin wool, of course, and a color perfectly coordinating her stunningly attractive and stylish high-status Flapper headdress). She inserts the key with her right hand — her left hand and forearm so severely injured — they’re nearly impotent — and releases the lock.

She opens the door, and Susan Silverii struggles her step into temporary safety within her shared office workspace.

Fade Out.

USING OCCAM’S RAZOR WITHOUT CUTTING YOUR OWN THROAT

Occam’s razor is the law of parsimony. It’s a mental model of reasoning. At its core, Occam’s—also spelled Ockham’s or Ocham’s—states, “Among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected.” Simpler yet, when solving a problem, the simplest solution is usually the right solution… but not too simple lest you cut your own throat.

A razor is a philosophical principle, or heuristic (shortcut) rule of thumb, that allows you to cut to the chase of the matter and shave off, or eliminate, unlikely explanations for a phenomenon and/or avoid unnecessary actions. Razors include three reasoning forms: deductive, inductive, and abductive. We’ll get to those in a bit, but cutting to the chase of this piece, the simplest example of Occam’s razor is the duck test.

If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, swims like a duck, has feathers, and quacks, then it’s probably a duck. There’s also the zebra test commonly used in medical fields to avoid unnecessarily complicated diagnosis—when hearing hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.

That’s all fine and dandy when examining webbed birds and hooved mammals. How about using Occam’s razor in everyday situations like homicide investigations?

I was taught back in Murder School 101 to always use Occam’s razor for solving crimes. My mentor was an old sergeant named Fred Mahle. Wonderful guy, rest his soul. BTW, Fred was the RCMP detective who got child serial killer Clifford Olson to confess and turn over ten bodies for a fee of a hundred grand. Best business deal ever. Ten families got closure. Olson got life and painfully died in jail from pancreatic cancer.

Fred was right when he said, “Looking at murder cases, the simplest answer is usually the right answer, but be careful with that logic. It could backfire, and you could cut your own throat.” Fred also taught me that the more bizarre a situation, the closer the answer was to home. Additionally, Fred said, “You get more bees with honey than you do with vinegar” and, “You slide further on bullshit than you do on gravel”.

Anyway, back to Occam’s razor and how this logic works.

William of Occam was a fourteenth-century Franciscan friar who had trouble with conventional Christian doctrine like miracles. As a scholastic philosopher and theologian, William took a heuristic (mental shortcut) approach to explain the unexplainable. History credits William of Occam with wise quips like, “It is vain to do more with what can be done with fewer”, “A plurality is not to be posited without necessity”, “Circumstances being equal, that is better and more valuable which requires fewer”, and “Entities are not to be unnecessarily multiplied”.

Greats like Aristotle, Newton, Einstein, Hawking, and Sagan all bought into the law of parsimony—parsimony being defined as, “Quality of being careful with money or resources: Thrift. State of being stingy, economy in the use of a means to an end. Economy of explanation in conformity with Occam’s razor”. These thinkers knew the simplest explanation to a problem was preferable to one that’s more complex. (Usually).

Minds like these deferred to core mental models which are the way we see the world and interpret reality. Mental models include concepts like core competence, first principles thinking, thought experiment, second-order thinking, probabilistic thinking, inversion, and Occam’s razor. Great minds also employed the three forms of reasoning.

Deductive, inductive, and abductive reasoning support any analytical application of Occam’s razor. Rather than paraphrase what deductive, inductive, and abductive reasoning mean, I’ll simply copy and paste this piece from Merriam-Webster:

Deductive Reasoning

Deduction is generally defined as “the deriving of a conclusion by reasoning.” Its specific meaning in logic is “inference in which the conclusion about particulars follows necessarily from general or universal premises.” Simply put, deduction—or the process of deducing—is the formation of a conclusion based on generally accepted statements or facts. It occurs when you are planning out trips, for instance. Say you have a 10 o’clock appointment with the dentist and you know that it takes 30 minutes to drive from your house to the dentist’s. From those two facts, you deduce that you will have to leave your house at 9:30, at the latest, to be at the dentist’s on time.

Deductive reasoning always follows necessarily from general or universal premises. If a sandwich is defined as “two or more slices of bread or a split roll having a filling in between,” and a hot dog is defined as “a frankfurter; especially a frankfurter heated and served in a long split roll” then one must deduce that any hot dog served in a split roll is a sandwich.

Inductive Reasoning

Whereas in deduction the truth of the conclusion is guaranteed by the truth of the statements or facts considered (the hot dog is served in a split roll and a split roll with a filling in the middle is a sandwich), induction is a method of reasoning involving an element of probability. In logic, induction refers specifically to “inference of a generalized conclusion from particular instances.” In other words, it means forming a generalization based on what is known or observed.

For example, at lunch you observe 4 of your 6 coworkers ordering the same sandwich. From your observation, you then induce that the sandwich is probably good—and you decide to try it yourself. Induction is at play here since your reasoning is based on an observation of a small group, as opposed to universal premises.

Abductive Reasoning

The third method of reasoning, abduction, is defined as “a syllogism in which the major premise is evident but the minor premise and therefore the conclusion only probable.” Basically, it involves forming a conclusion from the information that is known. A familiar example of abduction is a detective’s identification of a criminal by piecing together evidence at a crime scene. In an everyday scenario, you may be puzzled by a half-eaten sandwich on the kitchen counter. Abduction will lead you to the best explanation. Your reasoning might be that your teenage son made the sandwich and then saw that he was late for work. In a rush, he put the sandwich on the counter and left.

If you have trouble differentiating deduction, induction, and abduction, thinking about their roots might help. All three words are based on Latin ducere, meaning “to lead.” The prefix de- means “from,” and deduction derives from generally accepted statements or facts. The prefix in- means “to” or “toward,” and induction leads you to a generalization. The prefix ab- means “away,” and you take away the best explanation in abduction.

Whether you reason by deduction, induction, or abduction, you can always learn from what the greats had to say about using Occam’s razor. Here are three reasonable quotes worth noting:

Albert Einstein referred to Occam’s razor when developing his theory of special relativity. He formulated his own version: “It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience. Or, everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”

Physicist Stephen Hawking advocated for Occam’s razor in his book, A Brief History of Time: “We could still imagine that there is a set of laws that determines events completely for some supernatural being, who could observe the present state of the universe without disturbing it. However, such models of the universe are not of much interest to us mortals. It seems better to employ the principle known as Occam’s razor and cut out all the features of the theory that cannot be observed.”

Isaac Newton used Occam’s razor, too, when developing his theories. Newton stated: “We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances.” Newton sought to make his theories, including the three laws of motion, as simple as possible, with only the necessary minimum of underlying assumptions.

Furthermore, simple is as simple does. A conclusion can’t rely just on its simplicity. It must be backed by empirical evidence. And when using Occam’s razor to make deductions, we must avoid falling prey to confirmation bias. In the case of the NASA moon landing conspiracy theory, for example, some people consider it simpler for the moon landing to have been faked, others for it to have been real.

Lisa Randall best expressed the issues with the narrow application of Occam’s razor in her book, Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe: “Another concern about Occam’s Razor is just a matter of fact. The world is more complicated than any of us would have been likely to conceive. Some particles and properties don’t seem necessary to any physical processes that matter—at least according to what we’ve deduced so far. Yet they exist. Sometimes the simplest model just isn’t the correct one. This is why it’s important to remember that opting for simpler explanations still requires work. They may be easier to falsify, but still require effort. And that the simpler explanation, although having a higher chance of being correct, is not always true.”

Occam’s razor is not intended to be a substitute for critical thinking. It is merely a tool to help make that thinking more efficient.

Harlan Coben has disputed many criticisms of Occam’s razor by stating that people fail to understand its exact purpose: “Most people oversimplify Occam’s razor to mean the simplest answer is usually correct. But the real meaning, what the Franciscan friar William of Ockham really wanted to emphasize, is that you shouldn’t complicate, that you shouldn’t “stack” a theory if a simpler explanation was at the ready. Pare it down. Prune the excess.”

Occam didn’t have the only razor in the think-tank shop. Other greats contributed to the critical thinking crowd. Here are some examples:

Hanlon’s razor — Never attribute to malice which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

Hitchen’s razor — What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

Hume’s razor — What ought to be cannot be deduced from what is.

Alder’s razor — If something cannot be settled by experiment or observation, then it’s not worthy of debate.

Sagan’s razor — Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Okay. This is all philosophical and eggheady. What about some real-life examples of critical thinking used to disprove flawed logic using Occam’s razor? To combat the Walmart of Weird Beliefs and the Grab Bag of Fake News? I’m not going to try and explain bizarre behavior like QAnon, Proud Boys, or crazy conspiracy theorists who wear tinfoil hats. As my wise, redneck brother-in-law Darryl says, “Ya can’t fix stupid.”

But I will touch on two high-profile puzzles that can be solved through the application of the law of parsimony—Occam’s razor. One is the JFK assassination. I’m a life-long student of that event and, at one time, I wasted hours debating the case on an internet board. Like Darryl says, “Ya can’t fix stupid”, so I gave up.

The Kennedy assassination brings out craziness in people. Conspiracy Theorists (CTs) will have you believe in a massive cover-up by the Illuminati, a hit by the Mafia, a plot by the military-industrial alliance, LBJ did it, and on and on and on and on…

Using Occam’s razor applied to the case facts, Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. A deranged man brought his cheap rifle to work and shot the President of the United States—arguably the most powerful and important person in the world—from a tall building. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, right? After 57 years there hasn’t been one single irrefutable piece of evidence that anyone other than Oswald was involved. Nothing. The simplest answer here is the correct answer.

Another Occam’s application is explaining the enigma of Donald Trump. Trump supporters will have you believe the man is an impeccably-crafted genius with sight farther than the furthest horizon. Others, using Occam’s razor, simply say the man is a natural-born grifter and a common asshole. I know which explanation I’ll accept.

Remember, Occam’s razor is complemented by other mental models, including fundamental error distribution, especially Hanlon’s razor, confirmation bias, availability heuristic thinking, and hindsight bias. The nature of mental models is that they tend to all interlock in a lattice and work best in conjunction.

It is important to note, like any mental model, Occam’s razor is not foolproof. Like Fred said, use it with care, lest you cut your own throat. This is especially crucial when it comes to important or risky decisions. There are exceptions to any rule, and we should never blindly follow the results of applying a mental model which logic, experience, or empirical evidence contradict.

Using Occam’s razor, though, you’ll generally call out quackery with the duck test, and when you hear hoofbeats behind you, in most cases you should think horses, not zebras—unless you’re on the African savannah.

COLIN PITCHFORK MURDERS — THE BIRTH OF DNA FORENSIC EVIDENCE

Colin Pitchfork. Just the name conjures up a devilish image—an evil monster—a story-villain of homicidal psychopathy. But Colin Pitchfork wasn’t a fictional work, though, like Hannibal Lecter. Pitchfork was a real serial murderer and sexual deviant who raped and strangled at least two teen girls in England in the mid-1980s as well as committing countless sexual offenses. And he was the first killer in the world to be convicted through DNA forensic evidence.

Four decades later, DNA forensic evidence is commonplace. So commonplace, in fact, that juries expect it. Through a phenomenon called the CSI Effect, clever defense counsels can plant doubtful seeds in jurors’ minds where they’ll wrongfully acquit a perfectly guilty person if there’s no DNA evidence linking the accused to the crime.

That wasn’t the case with Colin Pitchfork. He was perfectly guilty of murder, and DNA evidence proved it. We’ll look at the Pitchfork case facts in a moment and then do a DNA Forensic Evidence 101 crash course, but first let me tell you a bit of my police investigation background and why I have the authority to write this piece on the birth of DNA forensic evidence.

In the 1990s, when DNA evidence was under development, I was an active homicide detective with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) Serious Crimes Section. I was peripherally involved in surreptitiously collecting a biological sample from a suspect (later convicted) in the first DNA evidence trial in Canadian courts. Ryan Jason Love was taken down solely through DNA evidence for the 1990 murder of Lucie Turmel, a female cab driver who Love stabbed to death in the resort town of Banff, Alberta.

I was in the right place at the right time (DNA career-wise) in 1995 when Canada passed Bill C-104 Forensic DNA Analysis, a federal law. This legislation authorized search warrants for DNA sample collection on uncooperative suspects. The day the bill passed senate assent, I investigated a violent sexual assault where a police dog tracked and not-so-gently tackled a fleeing suspect. I executed the first DNA search warrant in Canada that resulted in convicting serial rapist Rodney John Camp.

Enough about me and my DNA exploits. Let’s take a quick look at the Colin Pitchfork murders and then try to make simple sense of this complicated business called DNA forensic evidence.

The Colin Pitchfork Murders

In November 1983, 15-year-old Lynda Mann’s body was found in the Narborough area of England, approximately one hundred miles northwest of London. She’d been beaten, raped, and murdered along a deserted pathway known as the Black Pad. Forensic evidence, at that time, determined semen on her was from a relatively common blood type that matched ten percent of males. The case fell cold after months of extensive investigation.

A second girl, 15-year-old Dawn Ashworth was found dead in July 1986. She’d also been beaten, raped, and strangled in a secluded Narborough footpath called Ten Pound Lane. As with Lynda Mann, the same semen type was on and in her body.

The Ashworth investigation revitalized the Mann file and the two cases became the Narborough Enquiry. Famed American crime writer Joseph Wambaugh would later write his book The Blooding about the phenomenal effort British authorities put into the investigations. Homicide detectives knew they had a serial killer—the similar blood types, the locations, and the modus operandis (MOs) were too strikingly similar to suggest otherwise.

The question was who donated the semen and how police could conclusively prove it.

Enter Alec Jefferys and his scientific team at the British Forensic Science Service. They’d been hard at work identifying Deoxyribonucleic Acid—the DNA double-helix molecule that provides a genetic fingerprint that’s unique to an individual except for identical twins. Jefferys & Company knew they were onto a world-changing forensic evidence breakthrough, and they used the Narborough Enquiry as a test case.

Initially in the Ashworth file, a strong suspect developed. He was a developmentally challenged youth named Richard Buckland who confessed under duress to the Dawn Ashworth murder. However, Buckland strongly denied the Lynda Mann slaying.

Alec Jefferys

By late 1986, Alec Jefferys’ team had their DNA identification process to the point where they were confident it could withstand courtroom scrutiny. The police took a blood sample from Richard Buckland and delivered it to the Jefferys lab. Conclusively, the lab results said, Buckland was not the semen donor in either the Mann or Ashworth killings. However, the DNA profile conclusively proved the Narborough killer was the same man.

Richard Buckland was a first—the first wrongfully accused person to be exonerated by DNA forensic evidence. Relying on a false confession is a law enforcement lesson harshly learned by detectives, but the British investigators moved on to find the real killer. The question was how?

The answer was a process of elimination.

The Narborough Enquirers took on the monumental task of getting blood samples for DNA analysis from as many late teen and adult males in the Narborough region as possible. This became known as “blooding” suspects and, after over 4,500 bloodings, it paid off.

Colin Pitchfork

In August 1987, police got a tip that one Ian Kelly had fraudulently submitted his blood sample to cover up for a friend, Colin Pitchfork. Both men worked as bakers in Narborough, and the plan backfired. Police took blood from Pitchfork under a court order. It matched the semen DNA profile in the Mann and Ashworth murders.

Colin Pitchfork confessed and got a life sentence. He also admitted to performing around 1,000 indecent exposure acts as well as other violent sexual assaults. Pitchfork’s motive for killing Lynda and Dawn, he said, was not for sexual gratification. He did it because the girls could identify him.

Since the first blooding that led to DNA forensic being soundly based in worldwide courtrooms, and even compounding the frustrating CSI Effect problem, DNA extraction and processing science has advanced leaps and bounds. Today, processing DNA for forensic evidence is mostly routine. Here’s a brief look—call it a crash course—in DNA Forensic Evidence 101.

DNA Forensic Evidence 101

Scientists have studied genetics since the early 1800s when Gregor Mendel suggested his theory that all living organisms had genetic blueprints that described and allowed their physical structure. Mendel also theorized all living organisms shared basic hereditary traits. Mr. Mendel did an interesting experiment with peas and proved that dominant and recessive genes got passed from parent to offspring. It’s a principle applying to peas and humans alike.

In the 1860s, Friedrich Meischer was the first to identify DNA in human blood white cells. (Note: DNA molecules do not appear in red blood cells because red cells are not really cells—they don’t have a nucleus which DNA needs to build a cell—DNA being the building blocks of cells.) By the 1920s, mainstream science widely accepted the DNA theory of genetics and inherited traits. And in the 1950s, famed genetic scientists James Watson and Francis Crick accurately described and isolated chemical structure in the double helix molecule.

Knowledge of this structure, the double helix, allowed Alec Jeffreys and his team to develop extraction, multiplication, and comparison techniques of DNA signatures within all species. DNA blueprints are present in the smallest of life’s creatures like gastropod mollusks to the largest like blue whales and are around 99.9% similar in every living species known to science. It’s that small 0.1% difference that makes species, and specimens within each species, entirely unique.

Your human body produces around 230 billion new cells each day. Nature programmed you for cell division where, uncontrolled by your conscious actions, your cells will divide into two with the new half receiving behavioral instructions from the old half. People being people and nature being nature, there are always small errors or slight changes to the genetic blueprint. Over time and through trillions of cell splits, we all become slightly different. Except, of course, for monozygotic or identical twins. (Science now finds tiny differences in monozygotic DNA structures at the mitochondrial level, but that’s for DNA 301.)

Genetic mistakes, or unintended differences, are where forensic scientists capitalize for evidence. Variances in DNA replication or sequences are called Single Nucleotide Polymorphism or SNPs. These variances normally go unnoticed, health-wise, but they’re the reasons things like hair and eye color vary, metabolisms aren’t the same in family members, and possibly why some seem to have God-given talents.

There really isn’t a lot known about why some relatives have two left feet and why some are Olympic athletes, but one thing that can be taken to the evidentiary bank is each human (save for those pesky twins) have tiny DNA blueprint variances, and that’s where the forensic folks go when examining DNA evidence.

Without stepping into DNA Forensic Evidence 201 or beyond, what’s needed for this crash course is knowing about markers and loci. DNA scientists break down the individual biological sample they’re examining and give it a barcode snapshot similar to a binary code. They have highlights called markers and loci which show unique traits of the sample. Quite simply, they make a graph of the markers and loci then compare the sample they’re questioning against the “known” one. If the markers and loci match, it’s an identification.

Caution! Spoiler Alert: DNA forensic evidence matching isn’t an exact science. It’s a complicated and precise process but, unlike fingerprinting with ridges, valleys, whorls, deltas, and accents which are 100% physically conclusive—to the elimination of all other humans in the world—DNA matches rely on conclusions based on statistical probabilities. However, the statistical matching models return such enormously large matching probabilities of 1:13 billion and such, that this circumstantial opinion or viewpoint is regularly accepted by juries as cold, hard fact.

DNA Forensic Evidence 101 isn’t the place to examine specific processing techniques like Restriction Fragment Length Polymorphism (RFLP), Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR), Short Tandem Repeats (STR), or Amplified Fragment Length Polymorphism (ALFP). It’s not the place to touch on Touch DNA (Low Level DNA), Mixtures, Rapid DNA, CODIS, or Southern Blot analysis. But it’s worthwhile knowing the DNA evidentiary processing chain from crime scene to courtroom. It goes like this:

Collection — where a biological sample is found at a crime scene.

Extraction — where DNA is released from the cell at the lab.

Quantification — where the lab determines how much DNA they have to work with.

Amplification — where the lab copies the DNA to characterize it.

Separation — where the lab separates amplified DNA for identification.

Analysis and Interpretation — where the lab compares DNA to other known profiles.

Statistical Computation — where the lab calculates a match’s probability.

Quality Assurance — where the lab triple checks process accuracy.

Evidence Delivery — where the lab testifies about their conclusion(s).

In 1987, the birth of Colin Pitchfork’s DNA evidence process was slow, labor extensive, and extremely expensive. It might have even been painful. That’s no longer the case, as four decades has taken this science—originally deemed pseudoscience—and molded it into fast, economical, and highly reliable forensic evidence used around the world. Now, if science could find a permanent remedy for the CSI Effect, that’d be a real breakthrough.

So, you’ve graduated from the DyingWords crash course in DNA Forensic Evidence 101 and your certificate is in the mail. If there’s enough interest, I may run crash courses 201 and 301 where I’ll invite some expert DNA guest lecturers to explain the differences between loci and markers and why the Southern Blot is so slow compared to Rapid and maybe talk fun stuff like Touch DNA, Mixtures, CODIS, and Dirty. In the meantime, if you’d like to continue with this third-degree program, here are five Forensic DNA websites well worth checking out:

http://www.forensicsciencesimplified.org/dna/DNA.pdf

https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/nij/bc000657.pdf

https://wyndhamforensic.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/WyndhamForensic_Presentation_DNAAnalysis.pdf

https://www.fbi.gov/services/laboratory

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3561883/