Sexual whodunits and evolutionary psychology: the shaping of three novels.

Whodunit novels always used to be about crime, usually murder. One of their appeals was that after all the clues and " red herrings " the author could use some device or other at the end of the book–usually a confession–to reveal who really was the culprit. By comparison, a whodunit revolving around mistaken or confused paternity suffers because there can never be a convincing revelation at the end. A blood-test can be engineered that proves who wasn't the father—but there can be no test to prove beyond doubt who is. Any " confession " is dissatisfying because the reader knows that neither the father nor even, as we shall see later, the mother can be certain of the truth anyway. Then along comes DNA testing and everything changes. Uncertainties about paternity and the sexual events that led up to that paternity can suddenly be resolved. I became hooked on thinking up scenarios, an obsession I owe to my evolutionary past. and in the final decade of that tenure my main research interest was the sexual biology of humans and other animals. My approach was evolutionary and hovered somewhere between biology and psychology. Several scientific papers came from my lab during this time, and just before the members of my group went their separate ways, I also published an academic book, Human Sperm Competition, which I co-wrote with my former student, Mark Bellis. Then in 1996 I went my own way too, leaving academia to indulge a lifelong passion for writing. But I couldn't abandon my evolutionary past—not that I tried—and found myself trying to bring the evolutionary approach to a wider audience than I had managed as a scientist. My first non-academic book, Sperm Wars (1996), combined fiction and science and was essentially a popularization of my earlier co-authored tome. Now translated into 26 different languages—the latest being Turkish, giving the book its first primarily Islamic audience—Sperm Wars made the bestseller lists in countries as different as Britain, Germany, Poland, China and Japan. All of which seems to show that an evolutionary