Ronald R. Thomas' Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science discusses British and American detective writing from the 1840's through the 1930's. The book analyzes how forensic science helped create a new literary form, contending that the technical devices belonging to the new science of detection find their ontological counterparts in the budding genre of detective fiction. In keeping with this premise, the book is divided into three parts, each devoted to fictional intimations or adaptations of a particular forensic technique. The first, "Tell-Tale Hearts," reads the invention of the lie detector across Poe's "Murders in the Rue Morgue," Collins' The Woman in White, Conan Doyle's "A Case of Identity," and Hammett's Red Harvest. The second, "Arresting Images," reads the mug shot across Dickens' Bleak House, Hawthorne's House of Seven Gables, Conan Doyle's "Scandal in Bohemia," and Chandler's The Big Sleep and Farewell, My Lovely. And the third, "Identifying Marks," reads fingerprinting across Conan Doyle's Study in Scarlet and Sign of Four, Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson, Hammett's Maltese Falcon and Christie's Murder on the Orient Express.

The technological bent of the book's three sections allows Thomas to showcase lots of intriguing information about the early history of forensics. Indeed, the best thing about the book is its equipment. Thomas shows us early stethoscopes morphing into the sphygmographs (or blood pressure recorders) that were the first lie detectors. He shows us photographic portraiture developing into mug shots, and composite photography establishing the criminal typology that enabled early police profiling. He gives us fingerprints, magnifying glasses, and forensic analyses of typewriting. And he refracts the whole through readings in detective fiction, the genre that shaped forensic science even as it was shaped by it. It's exciting stuff, a recipe for excellent scholarly work. But in the end, that's just the problem: Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science proceeds too often by archival and methodological rote, too seldom by the genuinely inspired synthetic thought that characterizes the best academic writing.

Frequently, Thomas finds himself on well-traveled ground. Photography's role in Victorian and modern modes of medical and juridical discipline, for example, has already been exhaustively and expertly described by Sander Gilman, Allan Sekula, John Tagg, and others. The literary detective as a figure for a panoptical society's disciplinary, diagnostic gaze has likewise come to be a critical commonplace. And fingerprinting's origin as an alternative to Bertillon's method of criminal cataloguing is well known to anyone familiar with the large body of recent work on late nineteenth-century eugenics, degeneration, and criminal anthropology. As I noted above, there is new and fascinating material in the book. But the overall feel is one of secondhand information.

Methodologically, the book feels similarly repetitive. Thomas' book opens with an epigraph from Foucault's Discipline and Punish, telegraphing its theoretical allegiances with a flourish that belies its own obviousness. In this book, as in so many others before it, the disciplined, docile body is the scene of a panoptical society's most profound control; it is through the body that guilt and innocence can be determined; the discipline of detection, with its attendant technologies of surveillance, wields its controlled, controlling power by forcing human flesh to yield up a truth it cannot, in the face of such knowledgeable power, conceal. The received quality of the book's analytical framework is palpable. The prose is peppered with the stock vocabulary of the cultural studies paradigms that Foucault did so much to legitimate when they were first framed over a decade ago. The "body," the "gaze," "subjectivity," "identity," "cultural authority," "text," "politics," "text as politics," "national identity": all the buzzwords are here, mobilized in the name of detective fiction. So, too, are outworn models for thinking literature in context: detective fiction "exposed" and "challenged the emerging culture of surveillance and the explanations of individual and collective identity it promulgated," Thomas informs us (6). Similar arguments have been made about domestic fiction, sensation fiction, gothic fiction, and even realist fiction. Thomas' model fails to do justice to his material.

The historical and geographical sweep of Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science does give the book a majesty that more narrowly conceived studies lack. It is rare to find a critical study that establishes such intriguing and consistent continuities among the usually too-separate fields of Victorian studies, nineteenth-century American studies, British and American modernism. But the book's scope finally does more to exacerbate its tendency to rehearse old arguments than it does to open up new possibilities for understanding either the history of forensics or the genre of detective fiction. In attempting to cover so much, Thomas is necessarily reduced at points to reading formulaically. Such is the downside to coverage: there is only so much room in which to do so many readings, and too often what drops out is the nuanced complexity that makes close reading worthwhile in the first place. As a good detective novel surprises, so should the story of the detective novel. Thomas' subject is rich and varied; one wishes, though, that it had figured in a less predictable plot.