‘How would you go about murdering someone with a mosquito infected with malaria?’ I asked Gareth.
I pressed the send button with some trepidation. Gareth works at Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, where he does research aimed at saving people’s lives. I didn’t know how he’d feel about advising me on how to bump them off instead.
‘This is fun,’ he replied, adding that it made a change from writing grant proposals and reviewing scientific papers.
I gave a sigh of relief. I was in business.
As a writer of medical mysteries, I rely a lot on the kindness of strangers. My own medical knowledge is minimal. In fact it ended with ‘O’ Level Biology rather a long time ago. Not only that, I was the girl that came over faint and had to go out when the class was dissecting frogs.
My academic career as an art historian was pretty well devoid of blood and guts. And though my career as a crime writer does involve murdering people, I am not the kind of writer who goes into grisly details. Bad things tend to happen off stage.
But I am the kind of writer who likes doing research. (You can take the girl out of the university . . . ). A lot of this can be done through books. My reading related to inherited blood diseases began with The Cartoon Guide to Genetics (yes, really – it’s excellent) by Larry Gonick & Mark Wheeler and went on from there. You can discover a lot on-line too.
But in the end there is no substitute for picking up the phone and speaking to someone – and it’s even better if you can get out of the house and meet face to face.
In An Air That Kills, published this week, wealthy entrepreneur Lyle Lynstrum is funding research into transgenics – the mechanism by which viruses can jump the species barrier – at a high security lab on a tidal island off the coast of Devon. A suspiciously high turnover of staff has him worried and my protagonist goes in undercover as a lab technician.
So I needed to know about high security labs. A conversation with a friend of a friend who had worked at Porton Down was especially illuminating. That’s the government research facility which houses one of the few Category 4 research labs in the UK, where work can be carried out on highly infectious diseases like Ebola for which there is no known cure. I learned from that for the purposes of my plot I’d have to go for a Category 3 Lab which also deals with agents that may cause serious or potentially lethal disease through inhalation, but that are potentially curable.
It was my haematologist sister-in-law who put me in touch with someone who put me in touch with someone else at Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. Normally health and safety regulations would have prevented me from actually going inside a Category 3 lab, but on the day I visited there happened to be one that wasn’t currently in use. Gareth, who showed me round, was able to take me inside for a dry run. We put on blue disposable gowns and bootees over our shoes and Gareth showed me how he would infect mosquitos with malaria. Even more fascinating was the visit to the insectary where the mosquitos are breed. The first thing that struck me was the warmth and the humidity. And then there were the unexpected quirky details – popcorn buckets with tights stretched over them to make cages for mosquitos, paper cups and bridal veil used to make smaller cages – which I was able to use in my novel.
Even so there was a lot more that I needed to know when I actually started writing and I couldn’t be more grateful to Gareth and Russell and their colleagues at Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine who were so generous with their time. Gareth even read the final draft of my novel to make sure I got everything right.
The author questionnaire sent to me by my publishers asked the question, ‘Who or what inspires you?’ My answer was ‘the scientists and doctors who advise me on the scientific and medical content of my novels.’ I am only writing a novel that I hope will entertain people and perhaps make them think. Their work changes people’s lives.
An Air That Kills by Christine Poulson is published by Lion Hudson
