Recovering old fingerprints
And in other news...researchers at the University of Technology Sydney have found a way to lift previously unrecoverable fingerprints. Lovely news for crime fighters, not so good for crime writers. I suspect it's getting harder and harder to write a contemporary mystery in which the traditional puzzle predominates. It does however underline one of the basic rules of real crime: if you want to murder someone, it's very important to deny the police a crime scene.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
6 comments:
I wonder if that's one reason the whydunnits and howdunnits appear to be encroaching on the whodunnits?
Quite possibly. In a traditional mystery there's a crime scene complete with a dead body and all sorts of misleading clues, in a closed universe that limits the suspects and witnesses to a relatively small number of people, every one of which has an excellent motive to off the victim.
Real forensics is nowhere near as powerful as what you see on TV, but even so, if you called the police into that sort of situation these days it would all be over within a few hours.
Which is one of the reasons why I think historical mysteries can only become stronger.
It just show the importance setting alight to the crime scene before you leave, always worked well for me. . . .
It's no good setting the crime scene on fire if your crime was arson ;-)
I'm afraid most fire departments have experts who can analyze these things with astounding accuracy.
It's also possible to be incredibly unlucky. There was one Sydney gangster who fed his victim to a shark in the Pacific Ocean. You'd think that'd be perfect, wouldn't you?
That same shark was later captured and put in an aquarium, where in front of an audience it disgorged a human arm. Which unfortunately had a unique tattoo on it.
How unlucky can you get?
A descendant of Polycrates of Samos, perhaps?
Post a Comment