Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science featured in New York Times

The following article on Trinity Professor of English Ronald R. Thomas' most recent book, Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science, appeared in the Metro section of the New York Times on March 4, 2000. The Times requires the following reminder: "except for one-time personal use, no part of any New York Times material may be reproduced by any mechanical, photographic, electronic process, or in the form of phonographic recording, nor may it be stored in a retrieval system, transmitted or otherwise copied for public or private use without written permission of the New York Times permissions department."

Saturday, March 4, 2000

Arts & Ideas
Shelf Life

A Case for Sherlock: The Double Helix of Crime Fiction and Science

By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN

The accumulated evidence is shocking: a severed thumb, a pornographic photograph, a poison-dart, a tell-tale heart. The villainy is exotic: a pigmy warrior, a crazed orangutan, a vengeful Mormon, a Levantine art collector. Contemplating this melange of the forbidden, the horrifying and the foreign, is the detective: neurasthenic or cynical or corpulent -- a stranger in a strange land. What sort of a weird fictional universe is this, constructed with such peculiar ingredients?

Somewhere in the knotty history of the detective story -- beginning with Edgar Allan Poe's "Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1842) -- must be buried clues to more than just our notions of crime and punishment. Why the eccentric detective? The elaborate masquerade of the criminal? The ornate trappings? The racial allusions that stain the genre? Trollope thought detective stories had plots that were too complex and characters that were too simple. But that just makes their power more intriguing.

In recent years many literary investigators have been on the case. The detective story has become a touchstone for academic criticism, raising issues that have become cultural obsessions. There have been examinations of the detective as skilled reader of cryptic texts and of the detective novel as a bourgeois morality tale. Walter Benjamin has turned up as a witness: the German critic alluded to detective stories when describing the mysterious traces left by bodies moving through 19th century urban crowds. So has the French philosopher Michel Foucault: his detective would be an unknowing agent of the state's bureaucratic power, banishing the foreign and the eccentric, branding them crazy or criminal, and imposing an unyielding order.

It would be foolish to ignore such testimony even if, by now, it does seem to round up the usual suspects. The detective story really is partly a tale about race and nationality, imperialism and bourgeois life: Sherlock Holmes' villains are from the far corners of the British Empire (including the barely civilized United States); Poe's villain in "Rue Morgue" is not even human. So preoccupations with these political themes also run through this dense, smart book as well.

But Ronald R. Thomas, professor of English at Trinity College in Hartford, also steps back from the crime scene, following tracks left by Poe and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, Joseph Conrad and Mark Twain, scrutinizing how the development of forensic science was intertwined with the evolution of the detective story.

"The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes" appeared during the 1890s, for example, when the lie detector was first invented and a systematic examination of fingerprints was published. In "The Hound of the Baskervilles" a character praises Holmes as a master comparable to Alfonse Bertillon, who first used the art of photography to catalog criminals using mug shots. One early French forensic scientist urged his students to read "A Study in Scarlet" to see how brilliantly Holmes could deduce facts from slight physical traces.

Thomas suggests that in the 19th century, the detective anticipated and reflected three major forensic tools: the lie detector, the deciphering of fingerprints and the camera. The detective too is a nearly inhuman machine able to separate truth from falsehood. He too reconstructs the criminal body from knowing its most subtle whorls. He too possesses an all-seeing eye with nearly photographic powers.

Photography may even have been detective fiction's most avid collaborator. The arts were born simultaneously. Poe wrote about photography in the same magazine that published "Rue Morgue." Doyle, who became an ophthalmologist and first wrote about his famous "private eye" while waiting for patients, later sold his medical equipment to take up photography.

Meanwhile, the camera had become a forensic tool that not only captured the criminal's image but was also used to catalog it. Photographs were studied in an attempt to discover physiological characteristics of the criminal's body.

"In general," wrote one forensic pioneer, "born criminals have projecting ears, thick hair, a thin beard, projecting front eminences, enormous jaws."

The photograph as a form of unquestioned truth also played an important role within detective stories. In Dickens' "Bleak House," a photograph and an oil painting are used to solve a mystery. In Hawthorne's "House of the Seven Gables" a daguerreotype used for a political campaign also displays the villain.

In the very first Holmes story, "A Scandal in Bohemia," a photograph is used for blackmail; another photograph becomes Holmes' reward. One of Philip Marlowe's famous cases also begins with a search for a photograph. But by the 1930s, when Chandler was writing, the photograph was not an unambiguous source of truth but just another sign of a corrupt world in which "everyone is a suspect and no one can be conclusively identified or fully trusted" .

A literary detective of limited powers might simply gather these kinds of clues and consider his case complete. There are times when Thomas seems tempted, settling into academic discussions of "textuality." Professional eccentricities -- like Holmes' cocaine addiction -- come with the territory, and Thomas' meticulous readings are otherwise compelling and sometimes brilliant.

The word forensics and the word forum have similar origins: both imply a gathering in which something is proved. This is the primal scene of the detective story as well. Though the case is still incomplete (what about, for example, detectives currently at large?) there is more than enough here to think about. Yes, the detective story is about politics and race and identity, but it is also about how we come to know, how we come to prove what we know and what difference it might all make.

Copyright © 2000 by The New York Times Company. Reprinted by permission.

 

DETECTIVE FICTION AND THE RISE OF FORENSIC SCIENCE
By Ronald R. Thomas

Illustrated. 341 pages.
Cambridge University Press. $59.95