Wordcrime: Solving Crime Through Forensic Linguistics - Hardcover

John Olsson

3.87

303 ratings by Goodreads

9781847062598: Wordcrime: Solving Crime Through Forensic Linguistics

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1847062598 ISBN 13: 9781847062598

Publisher: Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd., 2009

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"Tell kids not to worry. sorting my life out. be in touch to get some things." Instead of being a text message from one partner to another, this text message turns out to be crucial and chilling evidence in convicting the deceptive killer of a mother of two. Sent from her phone, after her death, a few tell tale signs give him away to a forensic linguist. Rarely is a crime committed without there being some evidence in the form of language. The book includes the much-discussed dispute between the publishers of The Da Vinci Code and the author of Daughter of God where Dan Brown was accused of plagiarism and Olsson provided expert opinion. The case of Jenny Nicholl, so recently in the press, is also covered. There are a series of further chapters where gripping cases are described - involving murder, sexual assault, hate mail, suspicious death, code deciphering, arson and even genocide. Olsson describes the evidence he gave in each one. In approachable and clear prose, he details how forensic linguistics helps the law beat the criminals. This is fascinating reading for anyone interested in true crime, in modern, cutting-edge criminology and also where the study of language meets the law.

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Review:

'Once upon a time, the only way to tell that a suicide note had been faked was by matching its faded e's and crooked g's to the keys on the murderer's typewriter. Not any more. You might think that these days you could just text `goodbye cruel world' to everyone in your victim's phone book before chucking their mobile off the balcony after them - a perfect crime, so long as you didn't forget to wear your rubber gloves. Except that John Olsson, `the world's only full-time forensic linguist', could well, even then, be able to bust you.'
Once upon a time, the only way to tell that a suicide note had been faked was by matching its faded e's and crooked g's to the keys on the murderer's typewriter. Not any more. You might think that these days you could just text `goodbye cruel world' to everyone in your victim's phone book before chucking their mobile off the balcony after them - a perfect crime, so long as you didn't forget to wear your rubber gloves. Except that John Olsson, `the world's only full-time forensic linguist', could well, even then, be able to bust you.

In his latest book, Wordcrime: Solving Crime through Forensic Linguistics, Olsson documents a couple of dozen of the hundreds of cases he's worked on over the years: analysing, for example, the text messages sent among a gang of teenagers who beat a middle-aged cyclist to death in an underpass in Luton; scrutinising witness statements accusing a former mayor of a town in Rwanda of complicity in the genocide; or more banally comparing The Da Vinci Code to the novels of Lew Perdue, one of several people to have accused Dan Brown of plagiarism.

Olsson acknowledges Jan Svartvik as `the "father" of the discipline' for the part he played in the posthumous pardoning of Timothy Evans, John Christie's neighbour at 10 Rillington Place. Evans was hanged in 1950 for the murder of his wife and child, which Christie was almost certainly guilty of. More than a decade later Svartvik showed that Evans's `confession' was largely written in `what is known as "policeman's register"'.

But Olsson is otherwise fairly protective of his turf, and ruthlessly scathing of the part-timers. He doesn't so much as mention Don Foster, for example, and devotes one of his chapters to exposing the incompetence of `Professor Willerby (not his real name)', an expert witness for the prosecution of a man falsely accused of anonymous libel. No prizes for guessing whose evidence led to the case being thrown out of court.

From the Author:

I enjoyed writing this book, just as I enjoyed working on these cases. I hope it will send a clear message to criminals planning on faking authorship and then committing a crime: don't do it because either I or one of my colleagues will find out. Authorship is detectable.

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