Tag: detective

Sherlock Holmes Comes to Paris: True Crime and Private Detection in the Belle Époque

What’s the appeal of true crime? There’s the mystery to solve and the lure of thinking about violence from a safe distance. There’s also the desire to see justice done: one of the staples of true crime is a botched or mishandled police investigation. There are those who say they are wrongfully accused (Adnan Syed… Read more →

Fictional Detectives and Real-Life Forensic Science

On April 10, 1935, Lord Hugh Montague Trenchard, the Commissioner of London’s Metropolitan Police, invited policemen and politicians to celebrate the opening of the new Metropolitan Police Laboratory (MPL). The attendees, wrote a Times correspondent, “have been invited not just to see a collection of microscopes and test tubes, but to open the door to… Read more →