Fingerprints:
By Colin Beavan
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REVIEW BY MICHAEL SIMS
In his first book, Fingerprints, Colin Beavan takes a seemingly dry (and largely overlooked) topic and creates a fascinating history that reads like a novel. Finding the human drama behind the dry facts, Beavan starts with a brutal murder that occurred in England in 1905. In a quick-moving 200 pages, using newspaper accounts and courtroom transcripts to great effect, Beavan follows the investigation and the trial that ensues. One minute his book is like a Sherlock Holmes story, the next more reminiscent of Perry Mason. The story is suspenseful, the characters convincing. Although both virtues were inherent in the story, it takes a good writer to bring them alive in this way. There are enough ironies and plot twists in the narrative to satisfy any mystery fan. Henry Faulds, a Scottish medical missionary, began promoting fingerprints as a form of identification in 1880. However, the idea received scant attention until Francis Galton, a well-connected member of society and the founder of eugenics, became interested and began usurping the role of Faulds. By the time of Beaven's story, there was still considerable opposition to the idea that those barely visible marks on the fingertips could prove identity beyond a shadow of a doubt -- and Faulds was still fighting for credit. Colin Beaven triumphs in several ways, not least in the dramatization of the murder trial -- a strategic case that tilted scientific and popular opinion in favor of the identifying virtues of fingerprints. More important for the drama in this story -- and part of why a reader can't stop turning pages -- is that the trial also brought Henry Faulds, one of the most important people in the history of fingerprints, into court as a witness for the defense. Michael Sims writes about fingerprints (and the rest of the body) in Adam's Navel, forthcoming from Viking.
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