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It was a room full of murderous thoughts, but you'd never have known it to look about you. The auditorium at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice on Manhattan's West Side contained some 200 present and future writers of crime fiction, come to hear a symposium on physical evidence. To a person, they were making furious notes that will undoubtedly shape the creation of tomorrow's vile deeds.
The witness included author William Caunitz ("Black Sand"), who before he took up writing was for 29 years a high-ranking New York Police Department officer; Lt. Frank Bunting, a 20-year narcotics detective with the department; and Lawrence Kobilinsky, who is an expert on DNA "fingerprinting." The DNA work, already the subject of a book by Joseph Wambaugh, is the hot news in forensic medicine. Judging from all the note-taking and question-asking, it will be soon be harder to escape in crime fiction than red herrings.
The symposium was a feature of the annual gathering of the 2,500-member Mystery Writers of America, who met this time in an atmosphere of ebullient satisfaction. Measured by sales of both new and reprinted works (the mystery past is being ransacked), and by other symptoms, like the popularity of "Murder, She Wrote," there seems clearly a resurgence of interest in the form, which has never quite been out of fashion but rarely been chic.
The late eminent literary critic Edmund Wilson once wrote a snarling essay called "Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?" a...