Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science

by Ronald R. Thomas

• ISBN13: 9780521653039
• ISBN10: 0521653037
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2000-02-13
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This is a book about the relationship between the development of forensic science in the nineteenth century and the invention of the new literary genre of detective fiction in Britain and America. Ronald R. Thomas examines the criminal body as a site of interpretation and enforcement in a wide range of fictional examples, from Poe, Dickens and Hawthorne through Twain and Conan Doyle to Hammett, Chandler and Christie. He is especially concerned with the authority the literary detective manages to secure through the 'devices' - fingerprinting, photography, lie detectors - with which he discovers the truth and establishes his expertise, and the way in which those devices relate to broader questions of cultural authority at decisive moments in the history of the genre. This is an interdisciplinary project, framing readings of literary texts with an analysis of contemporaneous developments in criminology, the rules of evidence, and modern scientific accounts of identity.

Author Biography

Ronald R. Thomas is Professor of English and Vice President at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut

Table of Contents

List of illustrations	xiii
Acknowledgements	xvii
The devices of truth	1	(20)
PART I TELL-TALE HEARTS
The lie detector and the thinking machine	21	(19)
The unequal voice in ``The Murders in the Rue Morgue''	40	(17)
The letter of the law in The Woman in White	57	(18)
The criminal type in ``A Case of Identity''	75	(16)
The voice of America in Red Harvest	91	(20)
PART II ARRESTING IMAGES
The mug shot and the magnifying glass	111	(20)
Photographic memories in Bleak House	131	(19)
Double exposures in The House of the Seven Gables	150	(17)
Negative images in ``A Scandal in Bohemia''	167	(14)
Empty cameras in The Big Sleep and Farewell, My Lovely	181	(20)
PART III IDENTIFYING MARKS
The fingerprint and the map of crime	201	(19)
Foreign bodies in A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four	220	(20)
Accusing hands in Pudd'nhead Wilson	240	(17)
International plots in The Maltese Falcon and Murder on the Orient Express	257	(19)
Missing persons and secret agents	276	(15)
Notes	291	(32)
Selected works for further reading	323	(12)
Index	335