A killer of a book

Paul Trembling writes crime novels – and has an unusual advantage in doing so: he knows what happens when a body is discovered. He is a CSI – (Crime Scene Investigator) – formerly known as SOCOs. He is the one with the camera, picking up the tiny bits of evidence, armed with gloves.

How did you get into that? Were you a police officer already?

There was a time when most SOCO’s (Scenes of Crime Officers) were ex-police officers, or ex-Forces. Often, they’d been photographers in the RAF or Navy. But I found a different route in. I was already working for the police as an Admin Assistant when they opened up a few posts to internal transfers. These were for Assistant SOCOs, with the limited remit of examining vehicles only – they didn’t have enough fully trained SOCOs to deal with all the low-level vehicle crime which was taking place then, so they created this post specifically to deal with it. I ended up staying in the job for fifteen years and eventually worked my way up to full S...