The story of how fingerprints came to play a key role in the detection of crime is fascinating. Three key British players were William Herschel, a colonial administrator, Henry Faulds, a missionary who worked in Japan, and Charles Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton. While they were contributing to the science originally known as 'dactylography', on the continent, Alphonse Bertillon was devising a different and complex system based on measurements of different parts of the body.
Colin Beavan seeks to embellish his account by focusing on the race between the pioneers in the field of criminal identification and this gives his book a pacy if somewhat unduly breathless quality. Faulds, he writes, 'was like a prize racehorse stuck in his starting box while his competitors galloped ahead. At every turn, some new problem frustrated his attempts to promote his fingerprint system, giving Bertillon's anthopometry a huge head start.' The core of the book is a double murder in Deptford in 1905, a case which clearly established the value of fingerprinting evidence, but Beavan covers a great deal of ground, both geographically and chronologically, in a largely successful attempt to convey the dedication of those who developed fingerprinting, a science of continuing international significance given that so far no two people have ever been found to possess precisely identical fingerprints.