Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science (review)

Many scholars have tackled the fascinating question of why the detective story arose in the mid-nineteenth century and flourished in the twentieth. Some of the more recent are Gordon Kelly (Mystery Fiction and Modern Life, 1998), Jon Thompson (Fiction, Crime, and Empire: Clues to Modernity and Postmodernity, 1993), and Marcus Klein (Easterns, Westerns, and Private Eyes: American Matters, 1870–1900, 1994). Most of these studies argue that there is an important connection between the detective story as a genre and certain aspects of modernity. Ron Thomas takes essentially the same tack in his account of the rise of detective fiction, but he sees it as related to very different aspects of modernity than do these other studies.

What Thomas sees in the emergent detective story is a sort of debate over the concepts of the individual that was implicit in the rise of such forensic technologies as the lie detector, fingerprinting, and the use of photography for criminal identification. Developed concurrently with the detective story, these techniques and the ideologies of crime, identity, and citizenship they implied were an important part of the emergence of new means of social control and manipulation. Detective stories reflect the ambiguity people felt toward these new techniques and ideologies: at times, authors affirm the new conceptions, but in other cases, they criticize and attack them.

Thomas’s study seems to me one of the best of the books on mystery literature published in the past decade. Applying methods of literary and cultural analysis derived from cultural studies, Thomas relates the development of detective fiction to a substantial body of clearly relevant social and cultural material connected with the rise of forensic science. When he discusses how detective writers used such developments as fingerprinting, photography, and the lie detector in criminal investigation and then interprets the significance of these developments in terms of emergent ideologies of identity, nationality, citizenship, and crime, he is wonderfully interesting and highly useful. However, the further he gets from this specific relationship into broader speculations about the social meanings of the detective writers he has chosen to consider, the less convincing he becomes. One instance is his interpretation of Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon as a parable of post–World War I American capitalism and isolationism. One could also argue the opposite: that Sam Spade’s ultimate failure to establish any meaningful human relationships is a criticism of isolationism, while his dealings about the Maltese Falcon are a burlesque of capitalism. In fact, at the end of his discussion of Hammett’s classic, Thomas suggests that although The Maltese Falcon might seem to be “a defense of the ethos of American isolationism,” important elements of the narration, such as the “Flitcraft story,” actually caution “that it is not merely that” (269). The ambiguities in this conclusion nicely illustrate the difficulty inherent in the ideological interpretation of literary works of any complexity, even popular ones. But this is a very minor flaw in an otherwise deeply researched and brilliantly argued treatment of the detective genre.