D. J. Donaldson

• Born: 1941
• Place of Birth: Sylvania, Ohio

Contribution

D. J. Donaldson is distinguished as one of the first authors to use a forensic scientist as a primary character in a mystery series. Despite his attention to forensic detail in his works, they are not grotesque and include just enough violence and criminal intent to have some of the elements of a hard-boiled detective novel. Additionally, the main characters, Andy Broussard and Kit Franklyn—the traditional, experienced forensic scientist and the younger, more expressive psychologist—are accessible to a broad audience.

Donaldson’s Broussard and Franklyn series is notable for its setting in New Orleans. He makes the city virtually a character in and of itself. The incidents in the novels take place all over the city, in front of its singular urban backdrops and the bayous with alligators and fishing shacks. Donaldson liberally peppers his novels with details about the city’s history and culture to lend credence to the milieu, which is also enhanced by recurring characters with a strong cultural flavor down to their accents.

After writing six novels in the Broussard and Franklyn series, Donaldson began to write psychological/medical thrillers, employing his expertise in neurology and anatomy. Written by Don Donaldson and David Best, these works all take place in medical or psychological settings and have the same underlying theme of scientific discovery taking precedence over ethical concerns such as patients’ rights. Another prevalent theme is the struggle of the primary character, who is always a woman, to achieve confidence and recognition in her chosen, usually male-dominated profession.

Biography

Donald Jay Donaldson grew up in Sylvania, Ohio, and married his wife, June, in Florida in February 1961. He received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Toledo and returned to Sylvania to become a teacher of ninth-grade general science. This lasted only six months until Donaldson began pursuing a doctorate in human anatomy.

Donaldson relocated to New Orleans and spent five years at Tulane University working on his doctorate. He has admitted that New Orleans did not impress him while he was there. It was not until he began writing fiction that he came to appreciate all that New Orleans had to offer, saying that there was only one place he wanted to write about, “mysterious, sleazy, beautiful New Orleans.”

After finishing his degree, Donaldson moved again, this time to Tennessee, where he became a professor of anatomy and neurobiology at the University of Tennessee Medical School, teaching microscopic anatomy. Although he enjoyed teaching, he felt something was missing and decided to try his hand at writing fiction.

To prepare for writing what would ultimately become the Broussard and Franklyn series, Donaldson spent time at the county forensic center with medical examiner Jim Bell. He attributed much of his first novel, including the inspiration for his primary character, to Bell:

Unfortunately, Jim died unexpectedly after falling into a diabetic coma a few months before the first book was published. Though he was an avid reader, he never got to see a word of the book he helped me with. In many ways, Jim lives on as Broussard. Broussard’s brilliant mind, his weight problem, his appreciation of fine food and antiques, his love for Louis L’Amour novels . . . that was Jim Bell.

Analysis

D. J. Donaldson’s Andy Broussard and Kit Franklyn series is in the seductive and seedy setting of New Orleans and centers on a medical examiner and his newly hired suicide investigator/psychologist. Their relationship is very hierarchical, both in professional terms because Broussard is Franklyn’s boss and in emotional terms because he is her mentor and her protector in a world that is both male-dominated and violence driven. Their relationship develops over the six novels: Broussard goes beyond the role of a mentor, becoming more parental and protective, and Franklyn suffers “growing pains” when she faces violence, death, and evil intent and struggles to make sense of it all in the world of law enforcement.

Like the authors of many forensic science novels, Donaldson strives to remain true to the science and stoicism of police work. He focuses on the evidence, specifically the physical and corporal detail, using it not only to determine the cause of death but also to infer means and motive. Periodically, however, Donaldson takes a morbid turn when he writes “a dreadful array of bone and blood, sinew and skin. Through the gore, a displaced eye could be seen dangling like a spent flower.” This gruesome imagery is as much a part of the Donaldson formula as is his interest in having characters die of exotic causes and then providing detailed descriptions of the diseases’ effects.

This formula carries through to the novels written later under the names of Don Donaldson and David Best. They also have common themes that exploit the ethical and political issues that seem to be inherent in the practice of medicine and medical research, areas with which the author is professionally familiar.

Cajun Nights

Cajun Nights (1988) is the first book in the Andy Broussard and Kit Franklyn series and definitely has one of the more intriguing plots, focusing as it does on the connection between nursery rhymes and classic cars. The modern-day mystery is interwoven with the tale of a man who was hanged in Louisiana in 1738. His dying words are repeated by one of the characters as if to explain some mysterious deaths:

One day I will return and right this wrong as I did the other. And the streets of this city will run with blood as friend slays friend, fathers slay their children and rampant suicide sends the souls of men by the hundreds to everlasting hell. . . . beware the songs you loved in youth.

What seems at first to be a couple of unrelated murder-suicides are revealed as more nefarious after Franklyn investigates. Both victims owned the same rare classic car model, and both were observed to be acting strangely and singing nursery songs right before they murdered their families and then killed themselves. The story plays on the mystic past of New Orleans and creates some memorable characters in the city’s residents, but it is the investigative science that uncovers an insane legacy of revenge.

Other Broussard and Franklyn Novels

Franklyn’s expertise and maturity develop throughout the succeeding novels, with Broussard standing by to help guide her, providing sage advice and lemon drops for comfort. Blood on the Bayou (1991) exploits the legend of the loup-garou, or lycanthrope, against the backdrop of a southern plantation. It also introduces Franklyn to Teddy Labiche, who comes to play a larger role in her life in subsequent novels. No Mardi Gras for the Dead (1992) employs the unlikely weapon of a rose as a mood-altering instrument, with a would-be suitor literally falling dead at Franklyn’s feet. New Orleans Requiem (1994) draws Franklyn and Broussard into a gruesome game of scrabble with letters left on the mutilated chests of corpses. A further-reaching and insidious killer is introduced in Louisiana Fever (1996) with an ebola-like virus as a byproduct of a smuggling ring. In Sleeping with the Crawfish (1997), Franklyn and Broussard face down a ruthless scientist, uncover a crooked police officer, and bring down a governor. The book ends with an affirmation from Broussard—“There’s no one who can do your job better. Please come back. Andy.”—which persuades Franklyn, who had been contemplating a more mundane career, to return to fighting the good fight with Broussard. After a nearly twenty-year gap, Broussard and Franklyn continued with Bad Karma In the Big Easy (2015), as the duo discovered a murder following Hurricane Katrina. Next, in 2017, Donaldson published Assassination at Bayou Sauvage (2017), which describes the mystery of Andy Broussard's uncle's murder and the family secrets that are uncovered in the subsequent investigation.

Do No Harm

Do No Harm is somewhat different from the novels in Donaldson’s initial series in that the violence is recounted as it occurs rather than recreated from an examination of what is left at the scene as Franklyn and Broussard habitually do. This introduces an element of impending danger, speeds up the pace, and underscores the malevolence of the plot, which is a twist on the story of a doctor “playing God” with an experimental treatment on unaware and uninformed patients. The reader is introduced to the villain at the beginning of the story; the motive and method are kept a mystery, and it is the means and the science behind the motive that are revealed a bit at a time.

Sarchi Seminoux, a pediatric resident, is drawn into the plot when her nephew has a sudden, unexplained neurological attack. After some angst, her nephew is miraculously cured by neurosurgeon Dr. Latham, but with some inexplicable side effects. Seminoux investigates, researches neurological disorders, consults specialists, and interviews Latham’s former patients. All of this leads her to suspect him of some improper conduct or malpractice. Dr. Latham, a respected neurosurgeon, has been using the database of the Cord Blood Repository to match healthy children from that database to patients in his own clinic with Huntington’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and similar neurological disorders.

Seminoux does nothing to hide her suspicions, assuming instead that drawing the attention of the appropriate authorities will resolve the issue. She does not anticipate the politics involved in medicine or that Latham is willing to go to great lengths to protect his own interests. Latham employs several suspicious characters to set her up and “gaslight” Seminoux, in an effort to distract her, make her doubt her findings, and discredit her with her colleagues.

In Do No Harm, as in the Broussard and Franklyn novels, the heroine is gothic in her naïveté, bordering on trite in her inability to take charge of a situation at least in the beginning. Donaldson depicts a woman, really an ingénue, in a male-dominated profession who is tested throughout the events of the novel through violence, malice, and death. She comes through these events forever changed but stronger for the struggle.

Dr. Koesler, a counterpoint for Seminoux and playing the same role of a superior man as Broussard, sums it up in the last pages of Do No Harm with this statement:

We live in a soft country where things come easily and people can get along fine without backbone if they’re bright enough. You were once that way. . . . You don’t work with me there unless you’re a fine doctor and have the fiber to stand straight under fire. After what you’ve done in the last few weeks, you, Dr. Seminoux, are just such a person.

It underscores this theme of trial by fire, whether it is just the age-old story of innocence meeting adversity and maturing to triumph or seeking to underscore the struggle that female doctors and scientists face professionally.

Amnesia

Under the pen name David Best, Donaldson again looks at the perversion of medicine in Amnesia, epitomized in the opening thoughts of the villain:

The logical next step in his research unfolded in his mind like the birth of something hideously deformed. And he found it appalling. But even as he stood there, marshaling all the reasons it couldn’t . . . shouldn’t be done, he knew it was only a matter of time before he gave in.

The story starts at a medical conference where a disagreement ensues about the possibility of “making movies of memory.” When the speaker, Oren Quinn, an administrator at Gibson State Mental Hospital, picks Marti Segerson out of the audience and asks her opinion, Segerson acknowledges the possibility. Soon, the reader discovers Segerson had contacted Quinn to secure a position in his hospital.

Segerson is a psychiatrist who sees an opportunity to resolve personal issues and questions by taking a position in the mental hospital that houses the serial killer who confessed to murdering her sister. Oddly enough, the “eccentric” administrator of the hospital is as sociopathic as the serial killer, performing experiments on memory and recall on patients and medical staff alike and surgically implanting a device that can revise memories as well as record them, all in the name of scientific advancement. He uses one of his patients, a serial killer, as he might a rat in a maze, implanting certain instructions or giving him orders and setting him free to stalk a new victim. As Segerson continues to investigate and discover these abnormal experiments, she becomes the doctor’s next subject.

The novel concludes with an explanation of what has transpired. As Segerson prepares to forget and move on, she is asked a riddle by a “wise” patient with whom she had developed a friendship, “When is the most progress made with the fewest steps?” She comes to a sudden, life-changing realization that it is “when it is right in front of you,” and with that, she commits to staying to help the patients in the asylum.

Donaldson’s work accurately depicts forensic science and the investigative process, with a little added drama to further the plot. His characters are likable and engaging if somewhat contrived and superficial, but his depiction of New Orleans—its glamour, its seamy side, its rich southern history, and natural beauty—is accurate.

As David Best, Donaldson also published The Judas Virus (2003), a suspenseful medical thriller about the dangers of experimental surgeries, as well as The Killing Harvest (2013), The Lethal Helix (2013), and The Blood Betrayal (2014).

Principal Series Characters:

• Andy Broussard is a well-seasoned, expansive, and self-indulgent medical examiner in New Orleans. He thrives on the challenge of finding answers and the truth, but he never loses sight of the effect that death has on the living. He is an eclectic mix of the sophisticated and down-to-earth regular guy, having a fondness for opera, Louis L’Amour novels, and lemon drops.
• Kit Franklyn, a psychologist who works as a suicide investigator in the coroner’s office, is a perfect foil to Broussard as she focuses on the emotional and psychological aspects, particularly motive, rather than the physical facts. Her personality, too, is the opposite of his. She is idealistic and inexperienced, with a natural caution tempered by some curiosity and a tendency to find herself in awkward and dangerous situations.

Bibliography

Anderson, Patrick. The Triumph of the Thriller: How Cops, Crooks, and Cannibals Captured Popular Fiction. Random House, 2013.

Burch, Peggy. “A Turn Toward Fresh Thrills: Medical Novelist Finds Change the Best Tonic for Career.” Commercial Appeal, 1 Oct. 1999.

Conlee, Lynn. “Murder, He Wrote.” Agenda, July/Aug., 1998.

Donaldson, D. J. "New Orleans Forensic Mysteries." Don Donaldson, dondonaldson.com/new-orleans-forensic-mysteries. Accessed 20 July 2024.

Genge, Ngaire. The Forensic Casebook: The Science of Crime Scene Investigation. Ballantine Books, 2015.

Thomas, Ronald R. Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.