As a writer of murder mysteries and suspense, I’m a huge fan of modern-day police procedural shows like Elementary, Bones, Forever, the CSI franchise, and the NCIS franchise. All of the shows are somewhat predictable in that there’s a crime – usually involving a murder or two – and the police and/or detectives assigned to the case are tasked to solve it using their intuitive intelligence and powers of reasoning (Elementary, Forever) or through the use of sophisticated forensic and laboratory equipment and highly-trained personnel (CSI) – in real life usually only readily accessible to the upper echelons of government agencies like the FBI.

The current hot topic of technology, the 3-D printer, has also had a starring role on television recently. The beauty of a 3-D printer is that it can make three-dimensional solid objects from a digital file. These printers are reportedly being used by many different types of companies for varying tasks ranging from the practical, such as creating prototypes of footwear, to loftier medical research used in the development of a 3-D printed synthetic bone substitute. The sky’s the limit where these machines are concerned. Take an episode from NCIS: Los Angeles, where some members of the military were murdered during an ambush in a country overseas. In order to solve the murders, two of the agents went to the embassy where the murders took place and, using a special camera, they photographed the four corners of the room where the murders took place and then uploaded the images to a flash drive, which were then fed into a 3-D printer which subsequently recreated the crime scene down to the minutest detail – all in 3-D, of course. And let’s not forget that episode on Elementary where the murderer printed his murder weapon – a plastic gun – on a 3-D printer.

Clearly, today’s police procedurals are edgy and much more sophisticated than their classic counterparts from the sixties and seventies, covering a wide variety of topics such as forensics, autopsies, the gathering of evidence, the assessment of a crime scene and the use of search warrants, etc. We viewers have front row seats to the blood and gore as human remains are pulled from rivers and recovered from barrels of acid, the effects of their demise painstakingly shown, analyzed and discussed in the most intimate of details. There is little, if anything, left to our imagination.

Unfortunately, these same shows also raise the bar considerably for authors writing thrillers, suspense, murder mysteries and police procedurals since it stands to reason that it’s those same sophisticated viewers who will be reading the thrillers, murder mysteries and police procedurals. The more simplistic “bang, bang, you’re dead!” books of yesteryear simply don’t cut it these days, not with terms like “unsubs” and “perps” as commonplace as “contaminating the crime scene”. Authors writing in these genres must know the difference between a ViCAP database and a BOLO or between an affidavit and a search warrant. In the same vein, authors must constantly step up their game and come up with interesting ways to kill off their characters, especially in books populated by more than one body. Should their killers use an ice pick to paralyze their victim or an axe to kill them? How about using peanut butter and some rats? All equally effective and all achieve the end result. Of course, having a contact at the FBI or a friend in law enforcement is invaluable since very few authors can afford to retain a slew of technical experts to ensure that everything is said and done properly.

Technology has, unfortunately, opened up countless avenues for would-be murderers intent on committing the perfect crime – or cyber crime, as the case may be. For writers like myself, it gives rise to inventive new ways to “off” a hapless victim when your basic “bang, bang!” by gunshot just doesn’t do it anymore.