From Publishers Weekly
Beavan's lively debut explores developments in criminal forensics that culminated in the first prosecution based on fingerprint evidence, in London in 1905. He opens his narrative with the wanton double murder of the elderly Farrows and the crude initial investigation. Beavan, a writer for Esquire and other magazines, examines at length the slow scientific inroads into 19th-century law enforcement. Following the sharp decline in hanging offenses, European societies were swept by hysteria regarding multi-aliased career criminals. Officials reluctantly explored ways of confirming identities of repeat offenders, notably Alphonse Bertillon's anthropometric system, which posited that "criminal" body types could be identified by minute bodily measurements. Several British bureaucrats had experimented with inked fingerprints for identification, but Henry Faulds, an impoverished Scottish medical missionary in Japan, definitively claimed that fingerprints' particular qualities were ideal for criminal prosecution. Faulds's early publications spawned fingerprint science; unfortunately, his thunder was stolen by the ambitious, better-positioned Francis Galton (Darwin's cousin), whom Beavan portrays as an effete plagiarist. Police in South America and India ventured into this terra incognita, but Scotland Yard fiercely resisted. Only tragic anthropometric and eyewitness misidentifications led grudging officials to use the Farrows trial as a test case. The embittered Faulds served as a defense witness, contending that single-digit identification, the basis for this ultimately successful prosecution, was unreliable. This entertaining and balanced work centers less on academic precepts than does Simon Cole's Suspect Identities (see review below). Beavan's effortless prose, firm grasp of his subject and vividly drawn characters will delight history buffs and armchair criminologists. Photos and illus. (May)Forecast: This is a charmer that, with good reviews and effective promotion, could catch on outside the true-crime crowd. There will also be online promotion at the Web site www.fingerprintbook.com.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Loops, whorls, arches, or tents--scrutinize your fingertips and you'll see these basic designs. A collection of characters made the same examination a century ago, and from their disputes has descended the modern fingerprint system. Yet a competing system of identification vied with fingerprinting, as this book interestingly points out. In the rapidly urbanizing societies of the late nineteenth century, where personal recognition was the fallible means of identification, imposture was easy for habitual criminals and frustrating to police and victims. The search for unique, and hence identifying, characteristics of the human body inspired eventually the fingerprinting system and a competitor called "anthropometry."
Beavan courses through this subject in lively, true-crime story telling fashion, opening with a murder scene and closing with the 1905 hanging of the two British brothers convicted on the basis of a thumbprint. Within those brackets, Beavan introduces several men who independently came to believe that a person's fingerprints were unique, his hero being one Henry Faulds, a Scottish doctor whose wrangles with William Herschel and Francis Galton, famous in their day, lend Beavan his dramatic material. Meanwhile, in the musty archives of the Paris police, clerk Alphonse Bertillon chafed at the uselessness of his records for identifying recidivists; his reform of physically measuring criminals and systematizing their classification--anthropometry--was used by many police organizations until the 1920s. In recounting the cases that displaced bertillonage, Beavan adopts an appealing human-interest approach that chimes with popularity Gilbert Taylor
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