Fingerprints: Fifty Years of Scientific Crime Detection [Finger Prints]

260 pp. In addition to being a history of the comparatively modern science of fingerprinting, this book also reveals how an impressive number of apparently baffling murders, robberies and crimes of passion have been solved by fingerprint detection. Though the modern possibilites of fingerprint detection are quite new, the Chinese employed them a thousand years ago as an aid to criminal investigation. It was not until Scotland Yard successfully made use of a system of fingerprint identification that it began to play an important role in the annals of crime. The authors have assembled an impressive array of cases from English, French and American criminal records which yield a rich harvest of fascinating problems that were solved by fingerprint experts. There is even a chapter on notable fiction stories about fingerprinting in which a portion of Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi is cited as anticipating the methods used by police today in their detection work.