Kathy Reichs - Bones Are Forever

Whether analyzing bones at the lab or outlining a Temperance Brennan novel or a Bones TV script on my home computer, the process is like preparing vegetable soup. At the outset, I gather observations, ideas, and experiences—every legume for itself—and then they simmer together in my brain.

Eventually, disparate facts and details connect. A nicked phalange. A cranial fracture. A trip by train. An old woman observed on a beach. Out of brothy chaos, a complex potage is born. A story, with plot, setting, and characters.

Typically, I begin to contemplate Tempe’s next adventure as I am wrapping up the current book. At the time I was finishing Flash and Bones and considering what would become Bones Are Forever , I was involved in three real-life child homicide cases. The victims died at various ages, in different cities, in unknown ways. One was a baby, wrapped in a blanket and left to mummify in an attic. One was a toddler, stuffed in a garbage bag and tossed in a wood. One was a preteen, buried on a riverbank below a bridge. All were girls.

One mother went to jail. One mother went free. To date, no suspect has been arrested in the third murder.

The death of innocents. This trio of disturbing cases gave rise to the dual themes of infanticide and the abuse of children (or the childlike) in Bones Are Forever .

I now had the main elements of my plot. Peas, carrots, and mushrooms swirling in the narrative broth. Next, a dip into the kettle for a setting. Where to send our heroine?

In June 2011, I had the great good fortune to be invited to the NorthWords Literary Festival in Yellowknife, NWT, Canada. In my two decades as forensic anthropologist at the Laboratoire de Sciences judiciaires et de médecine légale in Montreal, I’d often heard talk of the Far North. Until I made my own voyage there that spring, I’d sorely underestimated just how far that “far” really was.

While in Yellowknife, I met some of the most hardy and thermally tolerant souls on the planet. Many were aboriginals. Some were writers, poets, or photographers. Warm and welcoming, all. But the highlight of the trip was the place itself.

Clinging to the shore of Great Slave Lake, on the edge of the Arctic, Yellowknife is the polar opposite of my native North Carolina. It is midnight sun and aurora borealis. Moose in the pines. Snow in June. Elk chops in the hotel restaurant.

And Yellowknife’s past is as fascinating as her present. Once home to a prosperous gold-mining industry, the town’s economic derrière now rests firmly and comfortably on diamond mining.

Diamonds on the Canadian tundra? Ridiculous, you say. My reaction, too. But the tale is true. Charles Fipke is the man most responsible for the diamond boom in Nunavut and the Northwest Territories. The founder of the country’s first diamond mine, Fipke has dedicated the past four decades to pursuing the precious stones.

And the citizenry of Yellowknife is well versed on Fipke and his search for bling in the raw. Many know the man personally. Some helped in his pursuit of the sparkly little buggers.

The hotel at which I stayed, the Explorer, served as Fipke’s base from time to time. His bush planes took off from a harbor visible through my window. Lying in bed, in wool socks and sweats, I’d wonder if Fipke once slept in the room I now occupied.

Equally soup-worthy were Yellowknife’s abandoned gold mines with their dark, meandering tunnels and bright yellow barrels of arsenic. It took just one subterranean visit and I was mentally penning a scene for my embryonic book.

Tomatoes. Lentils. Beans. Yellowknife. Tundra. Diamond and gold mines. I had my setting.

Add characters. Stir.

In a fiction series or TV show, the core ensemble carries through from book to book or episode to episode. On the cop front, each Temperance Brennan novel has Andrew Ryan, Luc Claudel, or Skinny Slidell. At the LSJML in Montreal or the ME Office in Charlotte, it’s Pierre LaManche or Tim Larabee. In Bones , there are Booth and the squints at the Jeffersonian. Since I interact with forensic scientists and members of law enforcement through my work, templates for these regulars are ever present in my cerebral stock.

But each story must introduce new personalities. Different good guys and bad guys to keep things lively. From whence these fresh ingredients?

Temperance Brennan is a professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte. So am I. When I need inspiration for a fictional professor, as in Devil Bones , fodder from my fellow academics is there floating in the pot.

Now and then Tempe works with an FBI agent. Case in point, Flash and Bones . For years I traveled to the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, to teach a course on the recovery of human remains. Special agent needed? Memory bytes are ready for the taking.

In Spider Bones , Tempe goes to Hawaii to assist with the resolution of a case for the Joint POW-MIA Accounting Command’s central identification laboratory. I once consulted for the organization and frequented that facility. Military personnel? JPAC scientist? Right there in the bisque.

Since 2004 I have served as a member of the National Police Services Advisory Council in Canada. The council provides strategic advice to the commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police on policing services such as the firearms program, the Canadian Police College, criminal intelligence, forensic and identification services, and technical operations.

Through the NPS council I have gotten to know many members of the force. I have learned about the role of the RCMP in Canadian law enforcement.

In Bones Are Forever , the action moves from Montreal to Edmonton to Yellowknife. The story involves murder. Clearly a Mountie was needed. No problemo. I ladled one out and seasoned him with a colorful past.

Okra. Onions. Oregano. A few corpses. A diamond-mining town way up on the tundra. An RCMP sergeant.

Mix thoroughly.

Simmer.

Bones Are Forever is served.

MARIE-REINE MATTER

KATHY REICHS, like her character Temperance Brennan, is a forensic anthropologist, formerly for the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in North Carolina and currently for the Laboratoire de sciences judiciaires et de médecine légale for the province of Quebec. A professor in the department of anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, she is one of only eighty-eight forensic anthropologists ever certified by the American Board of Forensic Anthropology, is past Vice President of both the American Academy of Forensic Sciences and the American Board of Forensic Anthropology, and serves on the National Police Services Advisory Council in Canada. Reichs’s first book, Déjà Dead , catapulted her to fame when it became a New York Times best-seller and won the 1997 Ellis Award for Best First Novel. Her latest Temperance Brennan novel, Flash and Bones , was a #1 New York Times bestseller. She is also the author, with Brendan Reichs, of Virals and Seizure . Her website is www.kathyreichs.com.

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