A topic I keep coming back to is the changing focus of detective fiction. Murders on the Rue Morgue (generally held to be the start of the genre) was, in the original sense of the term, empirical. That is, Dupin reasoned to the solution only from the direct evidence of his senses. By the time of Sherlock Holmes, though, when the genre really comes alive, Holmes uses all manner of scientific investigation to supplement the evidence of his senses.

Starting only fifteen years later and still very much in the early days of the golden age of detective stories, Dr. Thorndyke barely looks at things except through a microscope or camera. Most of his analyses are chemical analyses. He was wildly popular and his whole shtick was being on the cutting edge of technology.

Even where this was pushed back against, as it would start to be in the 1910s, the alternatives were still presented as something new. Father Brown did not use a microscope, but he used human psychology in a way no one had before. Poirot did not get down on all fours with a magnifying glass, but he emphasized order and method as no one had yet done.

I’ve heard the claim often enough I’m willing to believe it that part of the detective craze of the late 1800s was a series of highly publicized failures by the police in the early and mid-1800s. Scotland Yard was founded in 1829. (More accurately, the Metropolitan Police were; they only expanded their buildings to address on Scotland Yard and thus gained the name later on.) While they, like the Sûreté they were based on, reduced crime, they far from got rid of it. Being organized for that purpose, their failures would be all the more noticeable. Another possible factor is the rise of newspapers. Already popular in the 1700s, in the 1800s technological progress made them cheaper and easier to run than ever, as well as cheaper to distribute. I don’t have hard facts, so take this with a grain of salt, but I believe that newspapers proliferated and became more popular throughout the 1800s. Newspapers hungered for news, the more sensational the better, and were not shy of publicizing police failures.

A history of prominent police failure produced an appetite for stories of people with greater abilities. This worked together with the improvements of technology (in which I include greater availability) such as magnifying lenses and refined chemicals for chemical analysis to produce a hope for improvements.

In this environment, detective stories emerged with fictional accounts of people who used new methods of logic and deduction as well as the latest advances in forensic science. This makes sense; it also makes sense of how little interest there seems to be at present for fictional depictions of people using the latest technology to catch criminals. Thrill as the police detective sends a sample off to the lab for the latest and most advanced test and waits for a month for the results to come back!

I do not know who could thrill to that.

Which puts us, now, in the curious position of the art of detection being something of a throwback, or even an anti-technological genre. In the twenty first century, what is interesting about detection is what anyone can do with the resources of an ordinary person. This does not exclude technology, but if a modern detective takes a photograph and zooms in on it to show a detail, the interesting part is the detail that they noticed, not the photograph itself. In the days of Dr. Thorndyke, the photograph fascinated readers and the loving care with which he set up the apparatus and took the photographs was the focus of the tale. In court, he provided transparent photographs of footprints to be super-imposed over each other to show that they could not match; this was described in detail. He then mentioned off-handedly that the number of nails in the two footprints was different, though the patterns of the nail was indeed similar. In a modern detective story, this kind of attention to detail is far more interesting than the fact of photographs.

I don’t think that this is primarily about relatability, though. The most interesting part of the detective story is not the clues, but the investigation. A detective solving a puzzle in complete isolation would really just be the story of a lab technician doing his job, even if he does it creatively. The investigation involves the people principally concerned in the crime. For these people, the crime, until it is solved, creates a strange, liminal state. The investigation takes advantage of this liminal state and exposes it, allowing the revelation of character and human nature that would stay veiled under normal circumstances. Modern technology can be used to create this, though only by its conclusions. It is not interesting to discuss a detective taking dozens of samples with q-tips and carefully putting them into sterile plastic bags. It is not interesting to discuss a lab technician unsealing the plastic bags and swirling the q-tip in a solvent, adding reagents, then putting it on a shelf with a label for the next day to look at it, or placing it in a PCR machine and hitting the “start” button. But it is interesting when the results come back and it shows that the DNA of someone descended from the victim was found at the scene of the crime. (As long as there’s more than one person descended from the victim, or the only person who is has an unbreakable alibi, or the detective is convinced that the only person known to be descended from the victim is innocent.) They’re interesting because they create a liminal space where things can’t go on as they had (someone is going to get hanged or go to jail) but we don’t know what’s on the other side of that threshold and it’s important to find out.

There is, however, a genre, or perhaps a sub-genre, or perhaps it would be better to say a thread, of detective fiction which is definitely anti-technological. I think that this is mostly accidental, but one of the great sins of modern technology, or more accurately modern man’s use of modern technology, is hubris. Modern forensic technology is claimed to be infallible, or at least is generally regarded as infallible. Modern science is often spelled with a capital ‘S’ and claims unquestioning authority. More often, people who are not scientists and who are doing no science spell it with the capital ‘S’, say that it must be unquestioningly believed, and also state firmly that it says whatever it is they want it to say. Against this hubris, sane people have an instinct to rebel and one such outlet is in detective stories. Teams of experts come in with their fancy machines and high tech laboratories an a human being using nothing but the eyes and wits God gave him is able to figure out what they missed. It’s only one kind of detective story, but if you want to see the proud humbled, detective fiction is eminently fit for the purpose.