The Anthropometric Detective and His Racial Clues

A complex pattern is capable of suggesting various readings, as the figuring on a wall-paper may suggest a variety of forms and faces to those who have such fancies. — Francis Galton, Finger Prints, 1892

By the time Arthur Conan Doyle published “The Adventure of the Norwood Builder” in The Strand Magazine in 1903, the reputation of the fingerprint as a powerful and “self-evident” forensic technology — one that could be used in a court of law to prove a suspect’s guilt — was on the rise. In 1902, a fingerprint was accepted in an English court as evidence for a burglar’s presence at the scene of the crime. By 1904, Scotland Yard was processing as many as three hundred fingerprint cards every week. Precisely because the fingerprint’s authoritative status was taken for granted, Conan Doyle’s fictional detective Sherlock Holmes sought to undermine it. In “Norwood Builder”, Holmes discovers that the fingerprint in question does not belong to the suspect, but is, instead, a forged print used to frame him.

Although Holmes published on fingerprints in the anthropological...