Sir Arthur Conan Dolye: C.S.I. Pioneer

Sir Arthur Conan Dolye’s The Hound of the Baskervilles was my first literary foray into criminal mysteries. While reading Sir Arthur’s novel on the effects of superstition I became fascinated with the forensic pathology presented within. The book read like a hundred year old script for C.S.I.! From determining the presence of a certain person by the butt of a cigarette to revealing how a common hound was turned into a demonic phantom with the use of glowing chemicals, these ideas seemed so advanced for the age in which the novel was written.
Due to the fact that, like Jules Verne, Doyle seemed ahead of his time in the area of forensic pathology, I began to dig deeper into where his ideas were coming from. Was Sir Arthur acquainted with a detective using the latest tools in the arsenal of detecting? Was Sir Arthur himself a detective who wrote about his experiences through the eyes of his fictional Sherlock Holmes? It was in fact neither of these. Sir Arthur himself was the mastermind behind these groundbreaking forensic ideas!
Sir Arthur’s creation, Sherlock Holmes, employed the use of trace evidence, ballistics, fingerprints, handwriting analysis, and toxicological techniques in his investigations. Holmes also employed the use of psychology to determine the mental state and/or personality through the study of a person’s personal items. Sir Arthur, again through the character of Sherlock Holmes, would rail against the inefficiency of the common police investigation, concluding that they (the police) as the first ones on the scene, had contaminated the investigation almost beyond repair. The idea of preserving a crime scene wasn’t in common usage for years to come.
For those people who are addicted to the forensic pathology smothered television shows of our day, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles is a great book in which to observe the evolution of crime scene investigations.