REVIEW: The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death (nonfiction book) essays and photographs by Corinne May Botz

The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death is nonfiction. I bought my copy new.

Review:

Frances Glessner Lee created the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death to act as teaching tools for police detectives. Each one depicts, in miniature, a crime scene based on a real-life crime scene or combination of crime scenes, along with some pertinent details such as the identity of the victim, when the crime was reported and who reported it, and initial statements from the first person or people questioned.

This starts with an introduction by Richard B. Woodward and then moves on to a couple essays by Corinne May Botz. Eighteen of the Nutshell Studies (there were originally twenty) then each get their own section, with several color photographs (close-ups, as though taken by a six-inch tall person walking through each of the scenes), the basic information provided to detectives using them for training purposes, and a diagram highlighting various areas of the scene. Some of the Nutshell Studies include crime scene investigator analyses. The book wraps up with more detailed information and solutions for five of the Nutshell Studies - the others aren't included because the Nutshell Studies are still used for training purposes to this day.

I was ridiculously excited just to have this book in my hands. This is probably the closest I'll ever come to seeing the Nutshell Studies in person. While I enjoyed Bruce Goldfarb's 18 Tiny Deaths overall, it didn't have nearly enough information about the Nutshell Studies, so this helped fill that gap.

Somewhat, anyway. The photographs were both wonderful and extremely frustrating. They were great for showing the level of detail that Frances Glessner Lee put into the scenes, but there were several instances where intriguing things mentioned in the diagram descriptions were impossible to match up to the photographs, either because the photographs weren't focused on those areas or were just plain taken from the wrong angle. 

The detailed solutions for five of the Nutshell Studies at the end seemed to indicate that each included lots of additional information besides the miniature scene and basic information included in the book - the solutions mentioned the results of autopsies, information provided by further questioning, etc. I didn't recall any of that being mentioned anywhere else in the book, which made me wish that Botz had included more detailed information about how the Nutshell Studies were used. I think Goldfarb's book might have covered some of that, but it's been a while.

Woodward's introduction struck me as being dismissive of Lee's work, although thankfully Botz's essays were generally better, albeit with more speculation about Lee's motivations and psychology than I might have liked.