The Best Crime Novels Featuring Forensic Linguists and Textual Clues

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

In Reacher Said Nothing, his account of following bestselling thriller author Lee Child around while Child writes one of his Jack Reacher novels, the academic and author Andy Martin reveals that Child (with his daughter) was working on a script for a TV pilot in which a forensic linguist solves crimes by focusing on verbal and linguistic clues.

Sadly, that crime drama pilot never made it to air, and it appears the TV show never materialised. And there have been relatively few crime novels, either, which focus on forensic linguistics as a way of solving a murder.

But there have been a few. Not all of the detectives in the following books are professional forensic linguists – some of them are regular police officers, or else literary critics – but the crime novels introduced below all feature the solving of textual, verbal, or linguistic clues as a key component of their plots.

So, if you’re ready to start reading closely, let’s begin …

Marr Colver, Message at Midnight.

This novel is available for free on Kindle Unlimited, as well as in paperback, and might be described as a ‘plate-glass Morse’: set in the new city of Milton Keynes in central England, it features a young crime blogger, Chloe Tyson, teaming up with a disillusioned but brilliant academic at the local university to solve the mystery of what happened to a young student from the city.

The police are convinced Ella Reed ran away. But could Ella’s social media, and her life as a prominent BookToker reviewing dark romance novels, hold the key to her disappearance?

Chloe finds herself turning to one of Ella’s tutors, Dr Matthew Konquist, for help in solving the trail of textual and linguistic clues Ella has left behind. Konquist is a literary critic and English Literature lecturer with training in forensic linguistics. Can the two of them solve the mystery of what happened to Ella on the night she seemingly vanished into thin air?

This book contains a series of textual and linguistic clues – Ella’s last text message to her housemate, a password-protected diary, and even a strange riddle – which Konquist and Chloe need to solve …

Brianna Labuskes, The Lies You Wrote.

This novel features a forensic linguist working for the FBI, so we get plenty of linguistic trails to follow: Raisa Susanto must read ‘between the lines’ of a suicide note and confession a quarter of a century old, to try to figure out the relationship between the double murder of a married couple and a murder-suicide that occurred 25 years ago. But the perpetrator of that decades-old crime is dead; so what’s going on?

Labuskes doesn’t shy away from detail when showing how a professional forensic linguist goes to work trying to solve a crime. But although it’s heavy on research, the novel wears this lightly, and the book is gripping and well-written. Labuskes has written another book featuring Susanto, The Truth You Told.

Stella Sands, Wordhunter.

Maggie Moore is capable of solving any linguistic puzzle she’s presented with. The police enlist her help in trying to figure out who is behind a series of nasty notes being left by a local criminal in the Florida town she calls home, but when they ask her to help them figure out who’s abducted the local mayor’s daughter, Moore finds herself facing an altogether tougher case.

The book’s plot isn’t quite as fast-paced as one might want from a thriller, but the series of verbal and textual clues (emails and text messages, among others) which pepper the narrative make it more than worth a read if you’re after a crime novel featuring forensic linguistics.

Susie Dent, Guilty by Definition.

The lexicographer and author well-known in the UK for her regular appearances on the daytime game show Countdown has turned novelist in this debut, featuring the staff of the fictional Clarendon English Dictionary in Oxford.

Fans of Colin Dexter’s Morse novels set in that city may enjoy this tale of murder amidst the dreaming spires, but Dent puts her own stamp on the micro-genre of the epigraph here, opting to begin her chapters, not with literary quotations (as Dexter liked to do) but with strange and unusual words and their definitions.

The actual mystery in the book is less striking than this stylistic innovation, but it’s a decent enough plot, which involves a young lexicographer’s quest to discover what happened to her sister, who went missing years ago in mysterious circumstances. And then the Clarendon English Dictionary begin to receive anonymous riddling letters claiming to know the truth …

Colin Dexter, The Way Through the Woods.

Dexter’s creation, Chief Inspector Morse, appeared in 13 novels and a collection of short stories between 1975 and 1999, and inspired the hugely popular TV series Inspector Morse. Dexter – a cruciverbalist or crossword-lover – named his two famous detectives, Morse and Lewis, after famous crossword-setters (Jeremy Morse was an Oxford academic and chairman of Lloyds Bank who also set cryptic crosswords).

The Morse books feature plenty of literary allusions – The Way Through the Woods is even a nod to a Rudyard Kipling poem with that title – and frequently feature crossword clues woven into the mysteries Morse and Lewis are investigating.

But Dexter was also fond of hidden messages in letters, cryptic textual clues, and other linguistic details which point the way to the solution of the crime. In this novel from 1992 – widely considered one of Dexter’s best – a poem plays an important role in the investigation involving a young Swedish woman who has gone missing.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Complete Sherlock Holmes.

Sherlock Holmes may not be a professional linguist, but in the 56 short stories and four novels he wrote featuring the great consulting detective, we find a number of tales where textual riddles and clues have to be solved: a message written in cipher which must be decoded by finding the correct book (The Valley of Fear); a series of stick figures spelling out strange messages (‘The Dancing Men’); and one of my favourites, a newspaper advertisement with a suggestive spelling of ‘plow’ which even rouses Dr Watson’s suspicions (‘The Three Garridebs’).

Bonus non-fiction read: John Olsson, Wordcrime.

The best non-fiction book about forensic linguistics is probably this one, by a leading forensic linguist who has helped the police on a number of cases (some of which he discusses in this book). It’s a fascinating read, and Olsson doesn’t overwhelm the reader with charts and data, instead cutting to the telltale verbal or textual clues which enabled a crime to be solved. A highly informative book, as is More Wordcrime, the follow-up Olsson wrote.