Leading crime authors compete for morgue prize

The winning crime fiction writer will have a morgue in Dundee named after them.

Author Lee Child

Leading crime authors are taking part in a campaign to raise a million pounds for a new morgue at Dundee University.

Among the ten participants are the writer of the most recent James Bond book, Jeffrey Deaver, and the Chinese-American Tess Gerritsen whose bibliography includes the title ‘Keeping The Dead’.

The competition is part of a fundraising initiative to raise a necessary extra £1 million to build a new morgue and research facility that will adopt a “revolutionary” way of keeping bodies for research and training.

Having all submitted detailed descriptions of grisly crimes, the authors will now compete against each other in a popularity poll online at www.millionforamorgue.com, which asks the public to donate £1 to vote for their favourite piece of fiction.

The authors are Tess Gerritsen, Kathy Reichs, Lee Child, Harlan Coben, Mark Billingham, Jeffrey Deaver, Jeff Lindsay, Stuart MacBride, Peter James and Val McDermid.

Suspense writer McDermid is a friend of the professor in charge of the project

“She has helped me tremendously with a lot of the sort of grisly technical detail that goes into my books,” she said.

The project, which has already raised £1 million, is lead by Professor Sue Black and colleagues in the Centre for Anatomy and Human Identification (CAHID) to adopt the revolutionary Thiel method of embalming.

Professor Black and other members of the CAHID team featured in the major BBC2 series 'History Cold Case'. The CAHID team have developed groundbreaking techniques in areas such as hand identification, which has directly led to the successful prosecution of a number of paedophiles identified from images of their hands found in obscene photographs and films.

telegraph.co.uk