San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
“American Sherlock” should satisfy murderinos.
In the late 1800s, before the advent of what we now consider common investigative techniques and evidence gathering, police in the U.S. made arrests and juries convicted the accused based on hunches and assumptions.
You were entitled to a trial, sure, but if you were a known creep, drunk or just in the wrong place at the wrong time, you might be arrested and then convicted on nothing more than an imagined motive the police constructed around you.
Perhaps you’d been recently jilted or fired. That was reason enough to assign guilt. In 1933 in Palo Alto, a husband was convicted of gruesomely murdering his wife. The police case depended on the idea that he was driven to kill her because she had denied him sex the night before.
There was no more evidence than that. Until the American Sherlock showed up.
“American Sherlock: Murder, Forensics, and the Birth of American CSI” — written by journalist and former Bay Area TV news reporter Kate Winkler Dawson — is the story of Berkeley forensic scientist Edward Oscar Heinrich, a oncefamous investigator responsible for many of the crimesolving techniques we now take for granted.
An egomaniacal genius, Heinrich either invented or refined a bunch of our crimescene investigation favorites — ballistics, fingerprinting and entomological and mineral forensics, for example. His focus and attention to detail were a part of his genius. This is a man who left behind millions of case notes when he died.
But his powers of deduction were what really set him apart. Dawson belabors the similarities between the very real
Heinrich and the fictional Sherlock Holmes throughout the book, but the parallel is undeniable, and getting a peek into the mind of someone with such a preternatural knack for the intricacies of crime is just as satisfying as reading Arthur Conan Doyle reconstruct a misdeed like a puzzle.
“American Sherlock” capitalizes on our current “CSI,” “My Favorite Murder” and “Forensic Files” truecrime obsessions, and the book delivers on its promise of gruesome murders, huge manhunts and the pleasures of clue gathering.
In seven stories of violence and mayhem — including some famous ones involving Hollywood star Fatty Arbuckle and a train heist in Oregon — Dawson details cases in which Heinrich was able to use his brilliant mind and his unparalleled analysis of evidence to figure out not only the time and place of a crime, but also the occupation, stature and personality of the criminal.
This type of profiling is now standard, but in the 1920s, it almost seemed like magic.
Dawson’s writing can be repetitive, but she tells a good story, and when she details a crime, the book satisfies all of our morbid, rubbernecking tendencies. Bay Area readers will get a particular reward from the retelling of early20th century crimes involving the Fairmont Hotel, Alameda and Bay Farm Island, and Salada Beach in Pacifica.
The book bogs down when it veers into a biography of Heinrich, a dour, anxious egoist who was not nearly as interesting as his profession. He was undoubtedly a genius, but he was also a bit of a drag, living proof that not all geniuses make interesting subjects.
I liked him when he was solving crimes, not so much when he was exchanging stilted letters with his friend or worrying about his finances. My husband and I have a shorthand for nonfiction books of this type: We call them “magazine books.” That term describes erudite and interesting books that started out as magazine stories, earned the writer a book contract and were then stretched out for another 250 pages.
In most cases, they were better off at 5,000 words (or several magazine pages), and the books end up feeling padded and flabby, like someone going on long after you get the gist of what they are trying to say.
Even though “American Sherlock” did not start out as a magazine piece, within 30 pages, I had the feeling it was a magazine book — wellwritten, certainly wellresearched but ultimately too much of a mishmash — part biography, part history of forensics, part true crime — to be truly satisfying. I would have loved it at 5,000 words.
The book bogs down when it veers into a biography of “American Sherlock” Edward Oscar Heinrich, a dour, anxious egoist.