When reading or watching a crime story we know there is always someone who investigates the crime and, at the very end, solves it. We follow that person’s investigation and sometimes we try to solve the crime before the character. After all, there are clues scattered around and the idea is to build the puzzle piece by piece until we get the big picture. Real police investigations are like that: they follow certain procedures that have been proven to be the best ones to solve the crime. In this case, they also need to gather evidence to put the criminal in jail.

Academic investigation, also known as research, follows certain procedures in order to find new knowledge. In this case, the procedures are different because the purpose is different. Well, sometimes it also involves dead people, if it is an historical or medical research. In pathology, the dead person could have been the victim of a microbe. These microscopic creatures can be truly serial killers.

According to the Cambridge Dictionary, an investigation is “the act or process of examining a crime, problem, statement, etc. carefully, especially to discover the truth”. There are two main components at play here: it implies a process and it aims to uncover the truth. Research, according to The Britannica Dictionary, is “careful study that is done to find and report new knowledge about something”. The difference is very thin, but it does exist.

Apparently, the first police department was set by an Egyptian pharaoh in 3000 BCE, but murder is as old as humans. As society evolved, the police methods, forensic science and research methods (especially the scientific method) also evolved and they gradually became the norm to all forms of investigation. We hear that a company is opening an investigation on some wrongdoing, crashes (airplanes, trains, boats) are also being investigated, and banks are investigating financial frauds.

Sometimes, common people do their own little investigations in order to find out the truth in their lives. For example: who ate all the butter? If you don’t have guests in the house, the culprit must be one member of the family. So, you start to gather evidence and ask questions. You establish the timeline of everyone to discover who was the last person to leave the kitchen… Sadly, scientifically identifying the fingertips on the knife is too expensive, so you can only apply empirical methods…

Maybe inspired by this, British crime writers, like Agatha Christie, created a very peculiar sub-genre: cosy mysteries. These stories are characterized to have an amateur detective (or sleuth), who is minding his/her own business until a crime occurs in his/her little village and it’s up to him/her to find out who the culprit is. The main character doesn’t have access to forensics, so he/she only has his/her brains to figure out the solution. In the case of Agatha Christie, she invented a sweet old lady called Miss Marple who is nosy, but lovely.