By: Sophie Butchers,
on 12/5/2015
From Law and Order to True Detective, the role of the Crime Scene Investigator—at least, as portrayed on the screen—has captivated audiences around the world.
The post Could you be a Crime Scene Investigator? [quiz] appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Alice,
on 9/9/2013
Between Edgar Allan Poe’s invention of the detective story with The Murders in the Rue Morgue in 1841 and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s first Sherlock Holmes story A Study in Scarlet in 1887, chance and coincidence played a large part in crime fiction. Nevertheless, Conan Doyle resolved that his detective would solve his cases using reason. He modeled Holmes on Poe’s Dupin and made Sherlock Holmes a man of science and an innovator of forensic methods. Holmes is so much at the forefront of detection that he has authored several monographs on crime-solving techniques. In most cases the well-read Conan Doyle has Holmes use methods years before the official police forces in both Britain and America get around to them. The result was 60 stories in which logic, deduction, and science dominate the scene.
Sherlock Holmes was quick to realize the value of fingerprint evidence. The first case in which fingerprints are mentioned is The Sign of Four, published in 1890, and he’s still using them 36 years later in the 55th story, The Three Gables (1926). Scotland Yard did not begin to use fingerprints until 1901.
It is interesting to note that Conan Doyle chose to have Holmes use fingerprints but not bertillonage (also called anthropometry), the system of identification by measuring twelve characteristics of the body. That system was originated by Alphonse Bertillon in Paris. The two methods competed for forensic ascendancy for many years. The astute Conan Doyle picked the eventual winner.
As the author of a monograph entitled “The Typewriter and its Relation to Crime,” Holmes was of course an innovator in the analysis of typewritten documents. In the one case involving a typewriter, A Case of Identity (1891), only Holmes realized the importance of the fact that all the letters received by Mary Sutherland from Hosmer Angel were typewritten — even his name is typed and no signature is applied. This observation leads Holmes to the culprit. By obtaining a typewritten note from his suspect, Holmes brilliantly analyses the idiosyncrasies of the man’s typewriter. In the United States, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) started a Document Section soon after its crime lab opened in 1932. Holmes’s work preceded this by forty years.
Conan Doyle, a true believer in handwriting analysis, exaggerates Holmes’s abilities to interpret documents. Holmes is able to tell gender, make deductions about the character of the writer, and even compare two samples of writing and deduce whether the persons are related. This is another area where Holmes has written a monograph (on the dating of documents). Handwritten documents figure in nine stories. In The Reigate Squires, Holmes observes that two related people wrote the incriminating note jointly. This allows him to quickly deduce that the Cunninghams, father and son, are the guilty parties. In The Norwood Builder, Holmes can tell that Jonas Oldacre has written his will while riding on a train. Reasoning that no one would write such an important document on a train, Holmes is persuaded that the will is fraudulent. So immediately at the beginning of the case he is hot on the trail of the culprit.
Holmes also uses footprint analysis to identify culprits throughout his fictional career, from the very first story to the 57th story (The Lion’s Mane published in 1926). Fully 29 of the 60 stories include footprint evidence. The Boscombe Valley Mystery is solved almost entirely by footprint analysis. Holmes analyses footprints on quite a variety of surfaces: clay soil, snow, carpet, dust, mud, blood, ashes, and even a curtain. Yet another one of Sherlock Holmes’s monographs is on the topic (“The tracing of footsteps, with some remarks upon the uses of Plaster of Paris as a preserver of impresses”).
Sherlock Holmes solves a variety of ciphers. In The “Gloria Scott” he deduces that in the message that frightens Old Trevor every third word is to be read. A similar system was used in the American Civil War. It was also how young listeners of the Captain Midnight radio show in the 1940s used their decoder rings to get information about upcoming programs. In The Valley of Fear Holmes has a man planted inside Professor Moriarty’s organization. When he receives an encoded message Holmes must first realize that the cipher uses a book. After deducing which book he is able to retrieve the message. This is exactly how Benedict Arnold sent information to the British about General George Washington’s troop movements. Holmes’s most successful use of cryptology occurs in The Dancing Men. His analysis of the stick figure men left as messages is done by frequency analysis, starting with “e” as the most common letter. Conan Doyle is again following Poe who earlier used the same idea in The Gold Bug (1843). Holmes’s monograph on cryptology analyses 160 separate ciphers.
Conan Doyle provides us with an interesting array of dog stories and analyses. The most famous line in all the sixty stories, spoken by Inspector Gregory in Silver Blaze, is “The dog did nothing in the night-time.” When Holmes directs Gregory’s attention to “the curious incident of the dog in the night-time,” Gregory is puzzled by this enigmatic clue. Only Holmes seems to realize that the dog should have done something. Why did the dog make no noise when the horse, Silver Blaze, was led out of the stable in the dead of night? Inspector Gregory may be slow to catch on, but Sherlock Holmes is immediately suspicious of the horse’s trainer, John Straker. In Shoscombe Old Place we find exactly the opposite behavior by a dog. Lady Beatrice Falder’s dog snarled when he should not have. This time the dog doing something was the key to the solution. When Holmes took the dog near his mistress’s carriage, the dog knew that someone was impersonating his mistress. In two other cases Holmes employs dogs to follow the movements of people. In The Sign of Four, Toby initially fails to follow the odor of creosote to find Tonga, the pygmy from the Andaman Islands. In The Missing Three Quarter the dog Pompey successfully tracks Godfrey Staunton by the smell of aniseed. And of course, Holmes mentions yet another monograph on the use of dogs in detective work.
James O’Brien is the author of The Scientific Sherlock Holmes. He will be signing books at the OUP booth 524 at the American Chemical Society conference in Indiana on 9 September 2013 at 2:00 p.m. He is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Missouri State University. A lifelong fan of Holmes, O’Brien presented his paper “What Kind of Chemist Was Sherlock Holmes” at the 1992 national American Chemical Society meeting, which resulted in an invitation to write a chapter on Holmes the chemist in the book Chemistry and Science Fiction. He has since given over 120 lectures on Holmes and science. Read his previous blog post “Sherlock Holmes knew chemistry.”
Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only science and medicine articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Image credit: (1) From “The Adventure of the Dancing Men” Sherlock Holmes story. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. (2) Sherlock Holmes in “The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter.” Illustration by Sidney Paget. Strand Magazine, 1904. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
The post Six methods of detection in Sherlock Holmes appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Jennie,
on 4/29/2013
We're almost done looking at the long list for YALSA's Award for Excellence in Nonfiction for Young Adults. Sally Walker had two books on the list this year-- big congratulations to her!
Like her Written in Bone: Buried Lives of Jamestown and Colonial Maryland, Walker looks at the history and science and significance of several sets of remains. This time, she focuses on the oldest skeletons found in the Americas.
The book mostly focuses on 9,000 years-old Kennewick Man, how we was discovered on a riverbank in 1996 and how much we have discovered about where we came from.
I'm a huge fan of Bones and so I love of Walker shows us how the reconstruction and renderings work in real life. I find such things fascinating. I also like how Walker looks at a range of finds and how they all relate to each other in forming a unified theory of early human life in the Americas. I hope Walker continues to write books on using forensic science and history-- wonderful stuff.
Today's Nonfiction Monday round up is over at Stacking Books. Be sure to check it out!
Book Provided by... the publisher for awards consideration.
Links to Amazon are an affiliate link. You can help support Biblio File by purchasing any item (not just the one linked to!) through these links. Read my full disclosure statement.
By: Henry the Elder,
on 5/24/2010
By: Jennie,
on 5/3/2010
I'm still working through my stack of Cybils books. All of them were read last fall, but in trying to get them all read in time, I didn't get around to formally reviewing them all yet. But here are two of the nominees, both about space!
Chaikin, who also wrote A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts writes a kid's version, detailing all of the manned Apollo missions, from the first deadly one to the final one--the last time anyone has set foot on the moon.
There are several pull-out informational pages and great photography, but the best part is the paintings. Alan Bean, who walked on the moon as part of Apollo 12, turned to painting full-time after retiring from NASA. Many of his paintings, along with paragraph-long captions written by him, show moments that weren't captured on film, and ones that try to capture the emotion of the scene instead of just the visual facts. There's also a great section on how he creates his paintings-- including bits of moon dust and scuffing his work with replicas of his lunar boots.
But Jennie! Painting instead of photos is one of your biggest complaints about We Are the Ship! Why is it a feature here and a detriment there?
Simple-- because of how they're treated. Many of the paintings aren't mere replicas of photographs, however masterfully rendered. Also, the paintings are treated as works of art, making this almost a combination space book and art book. Each painting also has Bean's commentary-- what he was trying to capture and why he made the artistic choices that he did. They range from almost photo-realistic to fairly abstract. They also aren't the only visual elements in the book-- there are many, many photographs.
In addition to the paintings, my second favorite part of the book is the back flap, which shows a picture of Chaikin and Bean-- taken when Chaiken was 12 years old and Bean was training for Apollo 12. What a wonderful story-behind-the-story, that a boy meeting one of his heroes would grow up and create something so awesome with that same person.
Book Provided by... the publisher, for Cybils consideration
By: Jennie,
on 1/11/2010
It has been argued that television shows that deal with crime and forensic science; shows like CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, or CSI: Miami etc. give food for thought to criminals or wannabe criminals. There is of course a degree of truth in this. But television programmes and movies about crimes, detectives and police investigations have been around for ever. Let alone the books, magazines and articles about the subject. Classic figures like Sherlock Holmes and Hercules Poirot may seem out of date, but they would give an insight to police investigations at their time.
But another affect of these programmes, was the exponential increase of forensic science degrees offered by universities around the world. Recently it was stated by a Scottish university academic, that before CSI, they could hardly have enough students in chemistry or biology to keep the course running. Add the word forensics in the title of the degree, and the next day your course is overbooked.
British universities (that is where my experience derives from, although I assume that the same goes for USA and other countries) now offer Bachelors and Masters in any possible discipline that can have the word “forensics” fit in its title. Biology and forensics, Chemistry and forensics, forensic accounting, forensic engineering, computer forensics, forensic informatics, forensic linguistics, forensic archaeology … you name it. There is a forensic title for ..everything.
The question occured to me during my studies, when during a career orientation class, I suggested that if not all of us find a job with law enforcement or the government upon our graduation, we might as well become the “perfect criminals”. The answer of one of the participating professors surprised me. He said that they do not joke about it, as they believed it was a matter of time to see one of their graduates arrested by Interpol at the 8 o’clock news. Another added that if the student was a good one, he would not get arrested in the first place. And then I realised that studying forensics, the first thing you must do is to start thinking like criminal.
In our course we had a lot of theory and labs in identifying fingerprints, blood, other bodily fluids, examine papers and tool-marks, footwear prints and blood stains. We learned what the police protocols are in a crime scene. We even had a large scale crime scene exercise to practice our new skills. During our theory and practical labs, we also learned what you need to clean a crime scene from blood, how not to leave DNA evidence and how to break a window without having any glass traces on our clothes.
In the rest of the course, in computer forensics, we learned how we can avoid leaving digital evidence, destroy traces of our activities and make sure we are not identified.
In a sense, we were trained to become the perfect “crime mind”. We know the police protocols, and we even know how to plant evidence or even how to make things “look like an accident”!!!
Sounds funny when we discuss it with friends, but it is not a funny story at all. This means that people with the right skills can pull off more careful plans and execute them with scientific precision, leaving the law enforcement trying to put the pieces together with a very little probability of success.
On the other hand of course, a forensic scientist can understand the risks of certain illegal activities, and this understanding can keep him/her away from trouble.
What can be done, is a rather philosophical question. You can not stop offering forensics courses in the universities, and you can not make it a secretive in-house thing for the police. The industry will collapse and the research will simply cease to exist.
A few years ago, in Athens, the terrorist group “17 November” was dismantled, after one of its members was injured trying to place a bomb. The group were the “untouchables” of European terrorism for more than 25 years. The Greek police was helped by the FBI, Scotland Yard and even the MI5 (according to some sources), but they managed to do absolutely nothing for a quarter of a century. It turned out that the group consisted of very few individuals, highly trained and very well educated; one of the head figures being an academic. It is this kind of hi-tech crime that forensic scientists can be involved in.
The issue needs to be addressed, but only at an academic level at this stage.
Education can not be controlled and barred to certain people, in our society. There may be safety measures as to who gets access to crime related education, but then again a lot of other disciplines will have to start imposing restrictions. It is also almost senseless to check criminal records, as an 18 year olds student is not likely to have any criminal record, or in some cases some cautions for being drunk or breaking the peace.
There is no proof that forensic scientists become “Godfathers”, but the truth remains that they can, if they wish. A new breed of hi-tech criminals that would be faster, smarter and more up-to-date then their police counterparts, can be a scary prospect for the future.
But this is just the theory. There are black sheep in every family … so there are bound to be some bad ones in forensics. But truth be told, most of us have a good sense of justice, and are getting satisfaction by contributing to the fight against crime.
As for the law enforcement agencies, it is their responsibility to train their people, update their procedures, hire “new blood” with new ideas and modern training, and keep one step ahead from the criminals.
I haven't read any of Walker's books. But your review has intrigued me. We recently attended a Museum Exhibit on evolution and DD has shown some interest in the area. Must try to see how I can read this to her. Thanks for sharing at NF Monday!
-Reshama
www.stackingbooks.com
I'm a big fan of Sally's work and am looking forward to this title. Thanks for the review!
Best,
Loree
www.loreeburns.com