Books: Keeping Up with the Bones

THE CENTURY OF THE DETECTIVE by Jurgen Thorwald. 500 pages. Harcourt, Brace & World. $8.95.

On June 19, 1892, in a sleepy little fishing village in Argentina, two small children were found in bed with their heads bashed in. The news traveled slowly, and three weeks passed before the provincial police inspector, a man named Alvarez, arrived at the scene of the crime. Clueless after a search of several hours, he turned to leave the hut—and saw on the door, dramatized by a splash of sunlight, the blood-brown print of a human thumb. Alvarez promptly recalled some reports he had heard of a new method of identification based on fingerprints, and within an hour, assisted only by an ink pad and a magnifying glass, he had triumphantly identified the killer of the children: their mother.

Unconsciously, Alvarez had done something far more significant. The double murder in the fishing village was the first capital crime ever solved by the comparison of fingerprints, and that solution constituted a major breakthrough for the infant science of criminology. In less than a century, that science has developed from rule of thumb into an enormously intricate medico-legal discipline, and the story of its development, as described by Jurgen Thorwald (The Century of the Surgeon) with impressive literary and scientific competence, is a tale of blood and bloodhounds, wills and pills, pathologists and psychopaths. For sheer suspense and wallowing aceldama, it is worth a hundred whodunits.

Author Thorwald considers his sub ject in four tidy divisions. ∙ CRIMINAL IDENTIFICATION, the funda mental problem of detection, began to be a science in 1879, when Alphonse Bertillon introduced a system of anthropometry involving some eleven bodily measurements of each criminal. Fingerprinting, long a form of signature in the Orient, was introduced to Europe by Britain’s William Herschel, and it had to compete with anthropometry until 1904, when two prisoners at Fort Leavenworth were found to have identi cal features, practically identical anthropometric measurements and identical names: Will West. Only their fingerprints were different, and within seven years only fingerprints were accepted in civilized communities as the ineradicable mark of criminal identification.

They still are—with reservations. Fingerprints, says Thorwald, can readily be altered by skin grafting, and the age of microbiology may well produce new possibilities of papillary imposture.∙ FORENSIC BALLISTICS was largely developed by an idealistic American named Charles Waite, who, until late middle age, could hardly tell a Colt from a filly. In 1917, while holding a minor post in the office of the New York State prosecutor, Waite got interested in the case of a man condemned to death on the evidence of a phony ballistics expert. With the help of a New York City detective, Waite demonstrated that the prisoner was innocent and ballistics (as then practiced) was baloney. With admirable zeal, he set out to create a science from scratch. Be tween 1919 and 1923 he acquired data on almost every rifle, shotgun and side arm of recent manufacture, and simultaneously developed microscopic devices for examining gun barrels and comparing projectiles. Waite’s methods were vindicated at the Sacco-Vanzetti trial, where the new instruments demonstrated irrefutably that a bullet from the gun Nicola Sacco was carrying had killed the payroll guard,∙ FORENSIC MEDICINE, a science that had languished since the Renaissance, came on with a rush in the 19th century when Germany’s Rudolf Virchow and his followers began to study human tissue under the microscope. For most of the century, the profession was widely regarded as legalized ghouling, but in 1889 a French pathologist named Alexandre Lacassagne cracked the celebrated case of the Millery Corpse—a grisly mess of rotting flesh and jumbled bones that, after an autopsy lasting eleven days, was identified largely by study of the hair and bones as the mortal remains of a smalltime Paris playboy. The public was profoundly impressed, and the golden age of forensic medicine began.

At about the same time, a pathologist named Langreuter scooped the brains out of corpses and, throwing a strong light down the throat from above, made definitive studies of strangulation. In 1900, Germany’s Paul Uhlenhuth solved a problem that had vexed the authorities since the days of Joseph’s coat: he discovered a chemical means of discrim-inating human from animal blood. The mysteries of blood coagulation were then elucidated—the blood of a person who dies suddenly, it was discovered, coagulates rapidly, but then, for no known reason reliquefies. The pathology of rape was explored—semen, somebody noted, emits a pale blue glow under ultraviolet light. And some brilliant solutions were provided for a major medico-legal problem: How to detect murder disguised as suicide.

Dead men tell surprising tales. If the victim is hanged after death, the blood vessels in the neck show a special pattern of rupture. If the victim is set on fire after death, the tendons, which are destroyed quite readily when a man is burned alive, for unknown reasons resist incineration. If the victim is thrown into water after death, the water will not reach the heart and there deposit algae, as it does whenever a man is actually drowned.

∙ FORENSIC TOXICOLOGY, says Thorwald, is the most troubled of the detective disciplines. The principal problem: chemists have developed new poisons more rapidly than toxicologists have developed methods of detecting them. At the beginning of the 19th century, the big bugaboo was arsenous oxide (also known as “inheritance powder”), a poison that caused symptoms indistinguishable from those of cholera. In 1832, a simple method was developed to detect the arsenic in a cadaver. But by then the chemists had discovered the vegetable alkaloids—morphine, strychnine, cocaine, nicotine, quinine and so on. These poisons seemed to dissolve without a trace in the body of the victim, and for several decades all attempts to demonstrate their presence destroyed both the tissue and the poison. When toxicologists at last learned to detect them, a new problem had appeared with the synthetic alkaloids—Demerol, Dolantin, Pethidine and other modern sedatives. All of them are deadly poisons, and many of them cannot be detected by the tests that work for natural alkaloids.

Since World War II, says Thorwald, the problem of poisons has gotten dangerously out of hand. Hundreds of toxic agents are now available to millions as pesticides, cleansers, barbiturates and tranquilizers, and many cannot at present be detected in a cadaver. The mod ern world, in Thorwald’s opinion, has become a poisoner’s paradise in which do-it-yourself-death is on sale at the nearest supermarket—in the handy-dandy family size.