When his body was buried in the Old Melbourne Gaol cemetery, rumours emerged of Kelly's skull being separated and used as a paperweight or trophy by staff, for a time displayed at the gaol museum, and eventually stolen in 1978.

His body also went missing. After being dug up in 1929 and transferred to a graveyard at Pentridge Prison, its exact location became unknown until 2002, when the bones of prisoners were uncovered at the Pentridge site during redevelopment. This triggered a larger excavation that, in 2009, uncovered many more coffins. One of them was likely to be Ned Kelly's body.

Publicity around the search to identify his body led to the return of the skull – and a long scientific process to try to identify and reunite Ned Kelly's remains.

Ned Kelly Under the Microscope details what was involved in the 20-month scientific process of identifying the remains of Ned Kelly, with chapters contributed by experts on anthropology, odontology, DNA studies, metallurgical analysis of the Kelly gang's armour, and archaeological digs at Pentridge Prison and Glenrowan. It also includes medical analysis of Ned's wounds which all lead to the final challenging conclusions that while the body of Ned Kelly was identified, the skull was not.

"I wanted to gather together everyone who had undertaken valid scientific research into some aspect of Ned Kelly," Cormick says.

"There are traditionally a lot of barriers to the general public getting access to scientific research that might have only been published in journals, or wrapped up tightly in scientific language that is not easy to comprehend," he says, adding that shaping science-speak into readable prose is often challenging.

"Some of the chapters in this book had to be beaten into shape with as much vigour as the Kelly gang beat those plough blades into shape to make their armour," Cormick says, "but the researchers were generally a good lot to work with and mostly understood the need to sometimes simplify scientific explanations to make something more comprehensible."

Fans of forensic science will appreciate the unravelling of long-held beliefs about certain Kelly artefacts through DNA analysis, detailing how DNA taken from the bones believed to be Kelly were matched with that of a living descendant, , Leigh Olver of Melbourne, the great-grandson of Kelly's sister, Ellen.

DNA evidence also disproved the legitimacy of the "Ned Kelly skull", and the book outlines the long process of matching the skull with other death masks and the premise that it may have belonged to Frederick Deeming – a mass murderer who was buried alongside Ned Kelly at the Old Melbourne Gaol. When the graves were opened in 1929 it is likely that the remains of the two men were confused. I'll let readers buy the book to discover the real identity of the Kelly skull.

The book is illustrated throughout with photographs taken during the forensic investigation and supplemented with historical images, and Cormick has penned throughout breakout boxes of little-known facts about Ned Kelly, such as his half-brother, Jack, who became a policeman.

My sisters and their husbands are all police officers, and they don't share the public romantic vision of Kelly, seeing him instead as a cop-killer, and I mention this to Cormick.

"The book also includes the police perspectives on Ned Kelly, and I think it's important to recognise that different people have very different takes on Ned," he says.

"I sometimes talk to people I meet who have a black Ned Kelly T-shirt on, and generally a lot of mean attitude, and ask them what they think of Ned Kelly," Cormick says.

"They pretty quickly tell you he's their hero, but it often turns out they know very, very little about his life."

"One of the reasons Ned Kelly appeals to so many people, I think, without the armour he and the gang would be just another bunch of bushrangers, but that dark eye slit in the armour allows people to put their own ideas and beliefs onto the man in there, recreating them in the shape they imagine him to be."

It's been a busy year for the Canberra author and science communicator. Not only did he win this year's Australian Science Communicator's Unsung Hero of Science Communication award, but Ned Kelly Under the Microscope is just one of four books Cormick has had published this year.

Cormick has seen his alternative Renaissance history The Shadow Master published in the United Kingdom and the United States. Alternative history is a sub-genre often to be found in the fantasy section of your local bookshop.

The Shadow Master is a speculative fiction tale of alternative history, conflict, romance and magic set in an alternative reality Renaissance Florence, with tones of Romeo and Juliet, Assassin's Creed and some steam punk.

Cormick launched his book at a science-fiction convention in Minneapolis earlier this year and says the audience questions were "every bit as tough as any literary writer's festivals, more so in many ways."

"Readers of speculative fiction have very high standards and expectations and really let you know if it a book fails to meet those," he says.

His other publications are the children's book Benji the Buccaneer, and a satirical alternate history that re-imagines Adolf Hitler living on the south coast of New South Wales during the Falkland's war – Uncle Adolf.

Set in the year 1982, Hitler has been in hiding in Australia for 30 years and receives a visit from his old comrade Martin Bormann. As the Falkland's Battle rages on television and in the newspapers, the old men wait for the British defeat, but meanwhile Hitler has much bigger battles to wage, with the local council and his neighbours who want him to stop him making weapons of minor destruction in the bunker under his garage.

Uncle Adolf is wonderfully written and at times very funny.

"I wrote it because I felt I needed to try and tackle the darkness of evil, the sometimes small town banality of it, and show that we allow such things to happen," Cormick says.

"One of the things I love about alternative histories is that you can take well-known incidents and move your lens a bit and ask, What if? And through that provide some deeper insight into how we understand the original historical stories."

Cormick has now published "somewhere over 20 books," winning himself the ACT Book of the Year Award in 1999, and a Queensland Premier's Literature Award in 2006, working across a range of genres.

"I'm a bit genre-challenged," Cormick says.

"It's all just writing to me and I go where the ideas take me."

Craig Cormick discusses Ned Kelly Under the Microscope 5pm Wednesday November 19 at CSIRO Discovery Centre. Free admission. Register at csiro.au/discovery

Article references: The Shadow MasterNed Kelly Under the MicroscopeBenji the BuccaneerUncle Adolf