If you ask West Virginia University Assistant Professor of Journalism John Temple the common theme that he found in the stories of four people who worked in Pittsburgh’s coroner’s office, he has to think about it.

“I don’t know if I ever definitely found out,”he says at first. But then he thinks again.

“No matter how veteran these people are, when it (death) hits home, they have the same reaction as everyone else,”he says. And then he tells the story of a woman who had to investigate a murder in her neighborhood and a week later arraigned the suspecta man who attended her high school.

After nearly four years of researching, rewriting and polishing, the University Press of Mississippi will publish Temple’s creative nonfiction book,”Deadhouse,”in spring 2005. He’s hoping that the book will take off amidst the new forensics craze that has fueled such television shows as”C.S.I.”and”Crossing Jordan”and has boosted forensic program enrollments at WVU .

The book follows four main characters: two veterans, an intern and a 21-year-old. It contrasts their experiences. For instance, Ed Strimlan is a doctor who never got to practice medicine, so instead he diagnoses how people die, while Tiffani Hunt, a 21-year-old single mother, questions whether she wants to spend her nights around dead bodies.

Temple found these characters and his idea for the book while working on his MFA at the University of Pittsburgh.

“When I was a reporter at the Trib ( Pittsburgh Tribune-Review ) I covered coroner’s inquests and death scenes,”he said.”When I came back to Pitt, we were trying to come up with an idea for this kind of book. I thought the thing that would be cool about doing a book about the coroner’s office is that on any given day you are going to get a case of some kind.”

Temple decided to focus his book on the people who work in the coroner’s office instead of on any one case.

“A lot of books about forensics are about �€~Look at this cool case and see how investigators solved this case’,”he said.”The main focus of this book is how does someone do this job and what effect does it have on them.”

Temple runs the news-editorial sequence in the School of Journalism and teaches Advanced Reporting and the Creating a News Bureau course, in which senior students report for the Charleston Daily Mail .

He also directed and edited”Cancer Stories: Lessons in Love, Loss and Hope,”a student-produced book about a group of cancer patients.

Temple worked in the newspaper business for six years. He was the health/education reporter for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review , a general assignment reporter for the News&Record in Greensboro, N.C., and a government and politics reporter for the Tampa Tribune in Tampa, Fla.

As”Deadhouse”is being readied for publication, Temple is already starting to think about new book ideas. He will travel in May to Durham, N.C., to do research on a group of attorneys who defend death row clients.

Temple will bring lessons learned from writing”Deadhouse”into his next project.

“If you are really into doing a long-term project, your instinct as a newspaper reporter is to go in and figure it out right awayfind an angle,”he said.

But for a project of the magnitude of his book, Temple said he learned to be more patient, to research and to accept that much of what he reported would never make it into the project.

“Even a lot of really good stuff you’re not going to use,”he said.