Tangled Web UK Review March 2003
Imprint of the Raj by
Chandak Sengoopta
hbk out March 03
Published by Macmillan
at £15.99
This is the second history of the development of detection by fingerprinting to have
come my way in recent months. The first, Colin Beavan's readable account of the
subject, might have been thought to have exhausted its potential. But now Chandak
Sengoopta has come along and, by giving his material a distinctive slant, has made a
worthwhile contribution to understanding of the subject. Even those who have read
the Beavan book (not mentioned in the extensive section on 'further reading',
presumably because it appeared after this work went to press) are likely to find
something of interest here.
The sub-title of Sengoopta's book – 'how fingerprinting was born in colonial India' -
indicates its main focus, even though the introductory section opens with the 1902
case at the Old Bailey in which fingerprint evidence first came to the fore. The author
is a native of India and makes good use of his knowledge and understanding of the
country in which William James Herschel (an official based in Bengal) developed a
system of fingerprint identification some forty years earlier. The minutiae of crime
investigation is a subject of perennial interest and this book is a useful addition to the
specialist studies of one aspect of detective work that continues to play a vital role in
the unravelling of crime.
(
Martin Edwards
- author of the highly acclaimed Harry Devlin Mysteries)
New Books by Chandak Sengoopta at Amazon.co.uk
Secondhand and Out of Print Books by Chandak Sengoopta at Alibris.com
