Bill Bass

Knoxville’s world-renowned forensic anthropologist Bill Bass has tilled another fiction thriller from “the Body Farm.”

The Devil’s Bones, his most recent cooperation with science writer Jon Jefferson, is the third in a series of fiction novels on which the two have combined their names and efforts under the slug “Jefferson Bass.” Together they have also penned Carved in Bone, Flesh and Bone and two nonfiction works, Death’s Acre and Beyond the Body Farm.

Bass, a now-retired University of Tennessee anthropology professor, has been the bellwether on the study of human decomposition and founded the world’s first outdoor forensic anthropology laboratory  — three acres of land devoted to the study of environmental effects on crime scenes — here in Knoxville. He and his case studies have become a sort of pulp fiction, the inspiration for TV crime shows like CSI and The Dead Zone and Patricia Cornwell’s novel The Body Farm.

Knoxville Voice grabbed at a chance to speak with the man-behind-the-macabre in the midst of his busy book-signing circuit for The Devil’s Bones.

Tell us about the new book.

It deals with fire deaths, so we called it The Devil’s Bones. We thought that might be a good title for it, and what we have tried to do is cover a different topic in each book. In the second book, we dealt with the subject of skin slippage — or body degloving. That’s when the outside layer of skin with fingerprints will come off.
The Devil’s Bones is about how you can identify bones that have been burned and look at fracture patterns and things of that nature — how hot the fire was — so this one covers fire scenes, investigations and how they find bodies.

There’s a part in your new book based on events that really happened in Georgia in 2002. If Body Farm Novels books are about real events, why write them as fiction?

There is a section in there dealing with a cremating at the Noble, Ga., crematory. So we talked a little bit about how you identify cremations, but yes, all of them, in all three books, they are all based on good forensic anthropological data and actual cases. Now, the cases might not be exactly what’s in the book. We might use things from two or three cases that have occurred to project the story that’s in the book.
Let’s go back a little bit before my retirement. My students asked me when I was going to write a popular book. Jon Jefferson — he’s the author with me — he was a science writer at Oak Ridge for a little while, and he asked me if he could do a two-hour documentary on the Body Farm. He’s very sharp, and I like working with him, so one day I asked him, ‘How would you like to write a book with me?’ Then he said yes. We did a nonfiction book called Death’s Acre, and that was case-based.

Now, Jon is a true writer, and he eventually said, ‘I would like to write some fictional books.’ So I said, ‘Fine, that’s all right with me.’

Now, I’m gonna guess that your next question is going to be do I prefer fiction. No, I don’t. I like nonfiction best. I don’t think we can improve on what nature has given us.

Could you tell us more about the dynamics of your writing partnership with Jon Jefferson?

Jon comes up with the story. Like in the second book, he came to me and said, ‘I want to put a body in a cave.’ Then I said, ‘OK, Jon, is this a dry cave or a wet cave?’ In a dry cave — the body — it will mummify. In a wet cave, the skin will turn sort of soapy or kind of waxy. They really do look like wax people in a wax museum. There’s nothing made up in that. So Jon comes up with the story, and I help with the scientific cases.

How much of the character “Dr. Bill Brockton” is actually you?

The name Bill Brockton is not very far from Bill Bass. But Brockton does things that Bass wouldn’t do. Like he kisses a student. The Friends of Literacy had a gala at Crowne Plaza Hotel downtown last week, and they had 100 people come. All of the money goes to Friends of Literacy. At the last two or three of those, people have said, ‘You need to have more love scenes in the book.’ Dr. Bill Brockton has a relationship with a fictitious medical examiner. Well, Jon had the medical examiner killed, and a lot of people had bonded with that medical examiner.