The Fingerprint of the Foreigner: Colonizing the Criminal Body in 1890s Detective Fiction and Criminal Anthropology

Abstract

In December of 1892, Arthur Conan Doyle began publishing Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, the second in his great series of detective stories that took the reading public of England by storm during the last decade of the nineteenth century. Among the first of Memoirs to appear in Strand Magazine were The Adventure of the Cardboard Box and The Adventure of the Yellow Face. True to form, both cases required Holmes to identify someone: in the first, a presumed murder victim and in the second a presumed blackmailer. The Cardboard Box presents Holmes with a singular piece of evidence: a package received by his client containing only two human ears. In one of the most remarkable demonstrations of his interpretive powers, Holmes accurately reads in those ears the identity of two murder victims and the man who murdered them. The Yellow Face tells rather a different story. It is one of the rare cases in which the usually infallible Holmes erred, Watson tells us, in his effort to determine the identity of the person in question. In what would seem a less daunting interpretive challenge than the previous one, the detective fails to properly identify the strange figure with the uncanny yellow face, the mysterious someone who appears at the window of a house visited in secret by the wife of Holmes's anxious client. And yet, despite the detective's failure, Watson assures us, 'the truth was still discovered as a result of Holmes's intervention.' Together, these two cases chart the impressive reach of Holmes's powers to read the criminal body and map his limits as well. But they also do much more. Like the flood of scientific writing on criminology that appeared in England during the 1890s, these fictions of criminality link questions of personal identity and physiology with questions of national identity and security in ways that redefine the relation of an individual's body with the body politic.