New Blood Takes Over The 'CSI' Novels

Ken Goddard has experience in law enforcement and forensics, but he had to study up on CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.

Goddard has been investigating crimes for nearly four decades, but he said that the techniques used on CSI are very different from those he has used in real life. "Looking back," he told Shane Saunders of Modern Day Sherlock, "it’s sad to realize how much more we could have accomplished in terms of collecting, analyzing and interpreting evidence if we’d possessed even a small percentage of the sophisticated instrumentation and cross-linked databases available to [Gil] Grissom (William Petersen) and his team today." Since he did the job in real life, Goddard said that he had trouble suspending disbelief when he first began to watch CSI. "It was fun to watch the technologies being applied in varying situations," he explained, "and see each crime scene puzzle gradually unfold; but I couldn’t help but wince every time one of the CSIs interrogated a suspect or got emotionally involved in the investigation. Nice entertainment, but lousy forensics."

Goddard only began to watch CSI after Pocket Star Books editor Ed Schlesinger asked him to write a novel based on the show. "After our initial conversation, in which I had to confess that I rarely watched the show and hadn’t read any of the Max Collins novels, Ed sent me DVD sets of the show and several of the novels, and asked me to call him when I had a proposal for a new CSI: Las Vegas novel," Goddard said. For him, writing the novel, In Extremis, forced him to face certain challenges. The biggest one, he said, "was accepting the inherent limitations of a TV-series-based novel in which the characters are extremely well established and well known to the viewing and reading public."

Goddard said that he is used to writing his own original characters, "bringing them into 'three-dimensional' life as I write, modifying them to fit my plot, and sacrificing them as necessary when/if the appropriate moment in the story arrives." For this reason, it was quite a change to be writing characters that other people had created and developed over six years. He said that he watched and re-watched episodes of the show to ensure that he got each character's voice correct. Another problem came with killing characters or, in the case of CSI, not killing them. "I’ve had to accept the fact that I really can’t harm, alter or impact the main characters in any significant manner; and I certainly can’t knock one of them off to advance my plot," he said. "This was difficult for me at the onset because I tend to have a fairly high injury and/or casualty rate amongst the good and bad guys in my thriller novels."

However, in addition to facing difficulties, Goddard noticed something else as well. "[T]here was an unexpected benefit of having the main characters so well established: it gave me a lot more time to develop the antagonists and think about the necessary evidence twists." The plot that he went with for In Extremis was based on a real investigation that he worked in the San Bernardino desert many years ago. "The technical capabilities and tools we had at our disposal back then were far more limited than the resources available to the current CSI team; but that made the story all the more interesting from my viewpoint," he said. "It also gave me a nice opportunity to have Gil Grissom add to Greg Sanders' (Eric Szmanda) ongoing CSI education in a mildly painful but highly revealing manner." While Goddard wouldn't reveal any plot details, he did say that the book's "underlying events were as violent and confusing as any scene I’ve ever worked."

The full interview can be read at Modern Day Sherlock. Thanks to Shane Saunders for sharing with us. In Extremis will be released on October 30 of this year.

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