Fingerprints and Footsteps

The thrilling stories of criminal cases in literature symbolize the absurd pathology of crime and criminality. In the popular stories written by Edgar Allan Poe, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Georges Simenon, and other crime writers, the murders solved are not real but fictional. The non-reality of fictional crime turns into everyday reality for readers of detective novels. The hero, the detective, examines the scene of the crime to gather information from clues and thus discovers what really happened. The criminal investigation explores all kinds of signs, signals, and signatures. Its goal is to detect the paradoxes of the murder case in order to solve it.

The detective in the stories can be a covert sleuth, a public servant, or even a secret spy. He or she directs the legal investigation; at the end of the story, the detective appears to identify as the real perpetrator of the criminal act. The literary and cinematic characters of C. Auguste Dupin (in Edgar Allan Poe’s stories), Miss Marple and Hercules Poirot (Agatha Christie), Inspector Jules Maigret (Georges Simenon), James Bond (Ian Fleming), and other detectives are the protagonists of the famous crime stories. The crime stories are tales of mystery to imagine the detective’s struggle between good and evil, chaos and order. The crime stories present themselves to the reader or viewer through all types of media: novels, television, radio, comic strips, video games, and movies.

The vintage crime stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle followed the adventures and travels of the consulting detective Sherlock Holmes. By deciphering the signatures, marks, and other symbols left at the crime scene, the late-Victorian gentleman settled the cases presented to him without fear or anxiety. In the narrative of The Adventure of the Dancing Men (1903), Holmes received in his residence in Baker Street in London, Mr. Hilton Cubitt of Riding Thorpe Manor in Norfolk. Mr. Cubitt reported that his wife, Elsie, was frightened to death. She had received “a number of absurd little figures dancing across the paper upon which they are drawn.” Mr. Cubitt produced the notebook page with the markings done in pencil. The drawing showed figures of dancing men on the page. Holmes observed that there were two sets of men, one with and one without flags. He went about deciphering the semiotic code of the message: were the men holding a flag marking the last letters of the word? And why were the men dancing? Holmes’s logical mind solved the mystery as a forensic cryptographer does in unveiling a secret code.

The riddle of the criminal plan is solved through the detective’s guesswork in semiotics. The literary detective sharpened the algebraic mind at crucial moments in the investigative process to come up with the solution of the crime. In A Study in Scarlet (1887), Sherlock Holmes stated that “a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose.” In a conversation with his companion, Dr. Watson, Holmes confirms that his tool was the mental furniture, enabling him to reason through the special and coherent methodology. Holmes uncovers the mysteries of the unsolved crime, thus producing its solution. His crime stories popularized the Sherlockian phrase “Elementary, my dear Watson,” with Holmes applying the logical rules of deductive and inductive reasoning. Logical thought departs from specific facts and events to arrive at the conclusion of the case, which provides certainty in the final conclusion. Yet Sherlock Holmes’s mind moved away from the original mechanical or statistical reasoning of deduction and induction; the certainty was replaced by the uncertainty of abduction—the semiotic discovery of Charles S. Peirce. The real impulse of the criminal procedure stems from the detective’s intuitive sensing of the intriguing clues of the crime scene. The abductive guesswork concludes the case and acquires the reader’s applause.

Marcel Danesi’s textbook Signs of Crime excites the reader by offering old tools and turning them into new ones. Mystery and crime are...