Making the Invisible Visible
What began with a magnifying glass hovering over a footprint has, over the years, exploded into a glittering arsenal of blood tests, ballistics, CCTV, DNA, smartphones, search histories and now, AI. Each new technology gives the criminal new ways to hide, but it also gives the detective new ways to seek.
Perhaps crime-solving has always gone hand in hand with technology. Auguste Dupin, Edgar Allan Poe’s pioneering detective, was the OG data analyst, turning apparently random facts into patterns through pure deduction. Sherlock Holmes then made detection feel properly scientific, using chemistry, tobacco ash, handwriting, footprints and blood traces to support his dazzling leaps of logic. For decades, technology in crime fiction served one main purpose – it helped the detective seek better.
In the second half of the twentieth century, the genre transitioned from eccentric genius to police procedural, the lone detective with a hunch giving way to the machinery of modern investigation. Crime stories focused less on brilliant insight and more on teams, labs, surveillance, pathologists, and forensic officers. Adam Dalgliesh and Steve Carella spent as much time navigating experts as they did interviewing suspects.
Today, we all leave traces everywhere, and crime fiction must keep up. DNA can identify a killer, or absolve the wrongly convicted, decades later. CCTV can place a suspect near a crime at a specific time. Our smartphones are movement trackers. Banking records, emails, deleted messages, call logs, and internet searches have become the new cigarette ash. Kay Scarpetta and Lisbeth Salander are, in very different ways, heroes of this evidential age.
Until now, most of this tech has pointed detectives toward the truth. Criminals might use the same tools to commit more sophisticated crimes or cover their tracks, but the basic contract remains intact. Evidence exists, and if interpreted correctly, it will reveal what happened.
With AI and increasingly realistic deepfakes, this contract begins to fray, and that is why I find this so fascinating to write about. My latest book, Eden Falls, explores what happens when AI goes rogue. Because, inasmuch as AI can uncover reality, it can radically distort it. Yes, a detective can now use AI to spot patterns Poirot might once have intuited. But it can also generate deepfake videos, fake voices, manipulated evidence, fraudulent emails, and impersonations of the dead. It is no longer enough for a detective to ask who is lying, they must work out which version of reality has been digitally manufactured.
This is thrilling, but it creates a craft problem. Too much technology can kill suspense. If the police can solve everything with a database search, where is the mystery? The trick, I think, is to use technology to complicate the story, not resolve it too easily. Writing for both tech-savvy and non-tech-savvy readers is also a delicate balancing act. As with research, you need to wear the technology lightly. The protagonist of a book I have coming out next year, The Outsider, is a crypto billionaire, and I had to find a way to explain that world without boring or baffling the reader – not the easiest of jobs.
Crime writing has always followed the cutting-edge because every new tool changes the balance between secrecy and exposure. The magnifying glass made the invisible visible, but AI may do the opposite – make the visible untrustworthy. Now it is not just the narrator that is unreliable, everything is.
And that could just be where the next great crime story begins.
Eden Falls is published by Harvill
