This is the first book about the relationship between the development of forensic science in the nineteenth century and the new literary genre of detective fiction in Britain and America--from Poe, Dickens and Hawthorne through Twain and Conan Doyle to Hammett, Chandler and Christie. Ronald R. Thomas is especially concerned with the authority the literary detective manages to secure through the "devices"--fingerprinting, photography, lie detectors--and the way in which those devices relate to broader questions of cultural authority at decisive moments in the history of the genre.

This is the first book about the relationship between the development of forensic science in the nineteenth century and the new literary genre of detective fiction in Britain and America--from Poe, Dickens and Hawthorne through Twain and Conan Doyle to Hammett, Chandler and Christie. Ronald R. Thomas is especially concerned with the authority the literary detective manages to secure through the "devices"--fingerprinting, photography, lie detectors--and the way in which those devices relate to broader questions of cultural authority at decisive moments in the history of the genre.