A girl on a farm is devoured by pigs. A stacker’s throat is cut by the broken blade of a lawnmower after it hits a rock. A woman fires 13 bullets into the body of her apparently sleeping father, but is acquitted of murder because he died of an aneurysm three hours earlier.
Miniature tragedies like these fill the pages of the books of Belgian forensic pathologist Philippe Boxho, and explain why his bestsellers are at numbers one, two and three on France’s non-fiction charts: they are macabre, but also darkly comic and, above all, true.
“If I were to write a novel, I would be judged on what is conceivable,” the medical examiner a publishing sensation told the Guardian. “But I write about things that really happened, and sometimes the truth is absolutely unimaginable.”
His trilogy, which is published at a rate of a book a year and is fast approaching the combined 1 million copies sold mark, contains detailed medical descriptions of how Boxho cuts open the dead bodies and examines them to investigate what happened to them, how corpses either can rot or mummify. or “saponification” (when the corpse turns into a soapy substance) if left untouched for too long, and how flies and maggots can help date their death.
The first volume, La Mort and Face (Facing Death), came with a health warning: “Sensitive souls beware.” Still, Boxho said provocation was never at the forefront of his mind. The 59-year-old from Liège, a veteran pathologist who has performed more than 2,500 autopsies, was motivated to write about the reality of his workday routine because he believed his profession was “widely misunderstood”.
A large part of the books is taken up by correcting myths created by popular TV series like CSI or Silent Witness. A single hair found at a crime scene can advance an investigation, but rarely solves the case. “I have known only three such cases in 30 years,” he writes. Fingerprints are mostly useless, especially in countries without a comprehensive database such as e.g Belgium and France. Forensic pathologists are not as glamorous as they are often portrayed. They are rarely smartly dressed and they wear protective clothing that makes them look “like the Michelin man”.
Boxho said his profession is chronically underfunded: over the past 20 years, the number of people doing his work has halved, and Belgium performs autopsies on only 0.2% of its dead, below the European average. “My thought was that if I could explain what people like me actually do, it might help gain political support for my profession,” he said.
When he was approached by publisher Kennes after doing a podcast for French-language Belgian broadcaster RTBF, he was initially confident. “I used to tell stories to my students, but I wasn’t sure if I could write,” he said.
He decided some creative license was needed so the cases he wrote about didn’t read like police reports, and he fictionalized some of the context so as not to reveal the identities of the dead. To anonymize the victims and perpetrators he used the names of his friends. “But the basic facts and the solution of every case are always true.”
Also true is the story of the man who was so determined to take his own life that he tried two ways at once: hanging himself and shooting himself in the head. The shot misfired and cut the rope around his neck. Unbalanced by the recoil, the man fell headfirst to the ground – and died of a fractured skull.
The first book was published in 2022 with a modest initial print run of 5,000 copies. It has since sold over 270,000.
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For this August’s release of the third volume, Les Morts Ont La Parole (The dead have their say), a bookstore in Charleroi opened from midnight to 6:30 a.m., and a thousand people lined up for a signing session. Translations into 20 languages were requested, with three publishers offering to publish them in the UK.
Boxho mentioned three factors that could explain the popularity of his books: “People love true stories, that these stories are quite short, and that I tell them with a sense of humor. Death is not necessarily always sad.” He said humor and a degree of cynicism are coping strategies essential to his profession.
Before choosing a career in medicine, Boxho dreamed of becoming a priest. But since then, he hasn’t looked back. “If you’re a pathologist and you keep fainting when you see dead people, you should probably change jobs,” he said. “When I see a dead body, I think: oh, how tempting. I’m a little special.”
