You say you want to be a crime writer? Ever thought of studying physics?
I’m serious. While many automatically think of an English degree as the gateway to literary success, it’s also true that science-savvy novelists have excelled in every genre. Think of Primo Levi and E.L. Koingsburg, both chemists, Vladimir Nabokov, who was an entomologist and lepidopterist, mathematician Lewis Carroll, and contemporary authors Lisa Genova, a neuroscientist, or physicist Alan Lightman.
Edgar Allan Poe—widely credited with establishing modern detective fiction as a distinct genre—was fascinated by mathematics and science. His detective, C. Auguste Dupin, is regularly described as part poet, part mathematician.
In her 2017 essay, Reasoning Through Madness: The Detective in Gothic Crime Fiction, Michelle Miranda writes, “Poe was able to superimpose the illusion of logic and fact on the tales of horror and mystery, which allowed for the presentation of prevailing thoughts on science, logic and imagination. . . . In his [Dupin] stories, Poe [demonstrated] that when utilizing rational thought and reasoning, it was possible to discover causal links between events. In addition to causality, observation and comparison allowed scientists to identify and discriminate between objects and beings, which eventually became the cornerstone of criminal investigations and the forensic sciences.”
My interest in the specific connection between physics and writing is partly attributable to my friendship with author Andrew Crumey, who holds a PhD in theoretical physics. His self-described “philosophical comedies,” include Sputnik Caledonia, The Secret Knowledge, and Mobius Dick.
He tells me, “Science and art are both ways of organizing thought. Science is a form of detection. Think of the word ‘evidence.’ There is a problem to be solved—a definite ‘answer.’ Some novels do something like this—they tend to be crime novels, though not necessarily.”
“All complex narratives are networks,” writes Jane Alison in Meander, Spiral, Explode. “Any literary narrative of depth asks your brain to pull threads across the whole . . . your experience moving through them is never purely linear, but volumetric or spatial as your thoughts bounce across passages.”
That sounds like physics to me. This branch of science encompasses everything from mechanics, heat, light, radiation, sound, astronomy, atomic structure, electricity and magnetism. It demands elasticity of thought and an ability to think in metaphors. Physicists strive to describe the universe and understand the relationships between all its components.
That’s what novelists do, too!
As Crumey and others have noted, there’s an affinity between scientific and detective work, which brings us to the next reason for my interest in physics: as the programmer of Granite Noir, Aberdeen’s crime writing festival, I’m immersed in the world of crime fiction, where former physicists abound. Representing theoretical physics are Doug Johnstone (A Dark Matter and soon, The Big Chill), S. J. Watson (Before I Go To Sleep, and the upcoming Final Cut), Lexie Elliott (The Missing Years, The French Girl), and Valerie Laws (The Rotting Spot). Weighing in for research physicists are Helen Sedgwick (When the Dead Come Calling) and Camille Minichino (The Periodic Table mysteries).
I tracked some of them down to discuss the links between science and art.
“My work as a biophysicist was spent in a lab where I was trying to create what is called a lab on a chip device, a miniaturized device for isolating and studying single cancer cells.
“It was perfect training for learning to build stories. When you’re designing an experiment you think, ‘What do I want to explore? What are the questions? How can I set up an experiment that tests those questions—ideally one at a time, and in a controlled environment?’ Afterwards you ask, ‘What have I learned from that?’
“That’s a three act structure, right? That’s how I write novels. There’s often a question or theme that I want to explore. I set something up to introduce that question, and then prod all my characters in different ways to see how they react. At the end the question has, if not been answered, at least been explored in various ways. It’s a way of trying to understand human beings, while my experiments were a way of trying to understand human cells. There’s a similar driving force behind the two.
“You have to be really open-minded as a scientist. The whole point of science is to say, ‘We don’t understand this, and anything can be happening, so let’s wade in and see what we can learn.’ What could be more creative than following what you don’t know and asking questions about it?
“Writing crime is experimental in a way: you’re solving a giant puzzle. The logic of it and the way that you have to tie everything together and explore every possible end is a bit like a complicated physics experiment. You’re given something that doesn’t make any sense, and a bunch of clues, and have to explore different avenues and learn what you can in all different ways. You have to keep an open mind and follow the evidence, rather than follow your prejudice, and ideally, to stop following your instincts and just follow what you can actually learn from what you can observe around the world.”
Helen’s books all contain elements of the supernatural, and I wondered if that conflicted with a natural bent toward scientific rigor?
“That’s a good question. What I love about science is the unknown. What I hate is when people say it’s black-and-white, a matter of facts. Science is far more complicated. Every theory that comes along, even if it seems completely right, will at some point in our future be proved wrong. A true scientist is fascinated by that idea of the unknown. What I wanted to do was capture that sense that we can’t explain everything and there is something unknowable. That’s good, and that’s what science is about.
Does her scientific background make it easier to manage time and space when tackling her narrative structure?
“Yes. One of the things I studied for my PhD was complex phase transitions between solids and liquids, the boundary where life exists. I studied it by changing lots of different variables within a closed system. I tried to plot the phase transitions in three dimensional space.
“Imagine a fairly complicated graph in three dimensions, that you have to challenge and explore. I learned to hold that in my head. Writing a novel is very much like that. You’re moving through time and have all these different scenes happening in different places, and subplots moving through it. I see all these strands, almost like it’s playing out in front of me in a very visual way, and that’s exactly how I used to think about my experiments.
“Science is also very useful when I’m editing, in terms of the logic of following a character’s progression, or a relationship, all the way through a book. It’s something to do with the way you analyze data. Cause and effect, motivation, and the progression need to be logical in a way that makes emotional sense. The way you follow it is quite similar to what I would do if I was analyzing a complex set of data. We start here, and does it make sense to move here? Where’s our trajectory going? I can feel the same part of my brain kicking in when I’m editing that I used to use for analyzing data. Of course there’s also an element of pure creation, when you switch off and all logic goes—and that’s a bit like inventing the experiment in the first place.”
Camille Minichino was a researcher at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory before embarking on a career as a writer of mystery novels featuring a female physicist.
“The connection between doing physics and writing crime fiction is possibly summed up as the tendency to create models. The history of physics can be traced by a study of models—the Newtonian classical, deterministic model; the standard particle model that governs much of contemporary physics, and so on. The many realities of quantum physics also give us a wealth of creative avenues.
“Each piece of fiction is a model of a corner of the universe, a microcosm. I chose crime fiction because it presents us with a puzzle that, in traditional mysteries, is always solved neatly.”
“Physics is about trying to understand the world around us and the forces at work that make the world behave the way it behaves. I can see the connection to crime writing. It’s difficult to write convincingly about any universe unless you understand your protagonists, and why they do what they do. You’ve laid out a universe, you’ve laid out the rules of your universe in your head, and you have the characters bang around inside that, obeying those rules.
“You take all the evidence you can and try, in an unbiased fashion, to build a coherent narrative that fits all of those elements.”
“I think the aspects of my personality that made me suited to such a long life in academia—I did a masters in physics, then a DPhil in Theoretical Physics—make me well suited to being a writer. You have to be self-motivated and very organized, you have to be able to hold a lot of different things together in your head simultaneously to properly create a world. You need to do that whether you’re trying to hold together the idea of your thesis, or trying to bring a novel to a satisfying conclusion.
“Scientists and detectives both use elements of fact-based, objective analysis. You take all the evidence you can and try, in an unbiased fashion, to build a coherent narrative that fits all of those elements. You can’t cherry-pick what you want and ignore other things, you have to look at it all around, and that’s a very scientific way of approaching anything.”
Would she agree that many people fail to recognize the creativity inherent in scientific exploration?
“That’s oddly part of being objective rather than subjective—you open your mind to everything. You don’t allow yourself to be limited to only what you’ve seen before. Theoretical Physics is very good for that, because if you’re in the quantum realm you get something from nothing all the time. It might go back to nothing, but that’s what happens. No one makes any scientific advancement without some form of creativity. The people best suited to spending their lives in science are able to take in the same info everyone else is looking at and make a connection that other’s aren’t. Their brains make a creative leap.”
“I always knew I wanted to be a writer, and loved books before I loved physics. Arguably, I never loved physics, it was just something I was good at, and I chose to study sciences at A-Level because I would get better results! I thought science was a career choice, and writing would be my hobby.
“Physics is one of those subjects that doesn’t close many doors, it’s a general all-round subject. It’s an attempt to discover the rules that govern everything. Why do planets orbit the way they do? Why does ice freeze? From things on a microscopic level that we can’t see, to huge cosmological things. Why do things work the way they work? Why do things happen the way they do? Why does the apple fall towards Earth and not rise up? Why does time go forward and not backwards?
“This interest in understanding why is one of the things it has in common with writing and especially crime writing. Not just observing why train tracks buckle under the heat, but understanding why. Not just observing that someone murders, but understanding why you’d do that.”
I tell him about reading a description of a “quantum novel,” in which every probability was equally realistic and occurring simultaneously. Might this idea be relevant to crime fiction, where authors tease out a variety of possible perpetrators before springing the solution on us?
“Which of these myriad possibilities is the real one? Things happen, and you keep coming up with a hypothesis and testing it, and if it holds, asking another question, and another, until you sense you’re getting nearer the truth.
“I don’t feel I’m actively engaging the scientific part of the brain when I sit down to write, but my brain is my brain. It’s all in there as part of the mix. Perhaps there’s an approach to problem solving that comes from this scientific training. I do try to eliminate one thing at a time to fix a problem.”
“I always enjoyed the ‘big picture’ physics stuff at school, anything about space was fascinating, and as you dig deeper, physics is pretty mind-boggling, from cosmology to relativity to quantum mechanics. Weirdly I ended up doing my PhD in nuclear physics, which is looking at subatomic particles at the level of the nucleus. I was part of a large collaboration between universities and number crunching a lot.
“I can’t say I was conscious of any crossover between physics and writing to begin with. My first books weren’t really crime novels, I wasn’t interested in any particular genre at all (I’m still not, really). I used to always get asked about using physics specifically in my books, but I shied away from that, until now! In my last book, A Dark Matter, one of the central characters is a physics student, and I use a lot of her studies as metaphor throughout. This will become more explicit in the next two books, which are both also named after physics phenomena: The Big Chill and The Great Silence.
“In retrospect, I think a scientific background helps a lot with any writing, especially novels, especially crime novels. The elements of structure and plot are like a theory needing to be solved, a puzzle that needs completed. A lot of what you’re doing is making the story flow as seamlessly as possible, making sure there are no obvious plot holes. That takes an objective kind of analytical mind, and years of doing science of whatever kind can really help with that.
“We look at the data and it doesn’t quite fit what we expected, so we have to find out and explain why.”
“Scientists, and especially physicists, are problem-solvers. We look at the data and it doesn’t quite fit what we expected, so we have to find out and explain why. It’s very similar in a crime novel, solving the problems of motivations and plot, of character and story. There is a kind of lateral thinking that crosses over between the two disciplines. You have to be prepared to throw out what you previously thought if it isn’t working.
“And yes, I believe science to be incredibly creative. I’ve always hated the false dichotomy of science versus the arts. Writing a novel is partly creative, but also a lot of methodical hard work solving lots of logical and logistical problems. And there’s nothing more creative than brilliant science—Einstein’s theories are a prime example, they take a leap into the unknown in the same way a writer does with a blank page. Not that I’m comparing myself to Einstein!”
