The five novels in my Victorian San Francisco mystery series primarily feature Annie Fuller, a young woman who runs a boarding house, and Nate Dawson, a San Francisco lawyer who helps her solve crimes. However, I frequently publish short stories and novellas to let the minor characters in my novels become major actors for awhile. (Yes, characters do seem to have an opinion about this, and no, authors aren’t crazy to see their characters as having minds of their own.)
For example, my short story, Dandy Detects, didn’t just let the young Boston Terrier pup from my first book, Maids of Misfortune, strut his stuff, but this story began to flesh out the past histories of two other characters, the school teacher Barbara Hewitt and her son, histories that in time would become crucial parts of the plot in my third novel, Bloody Lessons.
Perhaps even more importantly, these shorter works also let me go into more detail about historical tidbits about San Francisco, something that can get in the way of good pacing in the longer, more conventional mystery novels. Much as my two dressmakers, Miss Minnie and Miss Millie, lend notes of humor to all my books, it was only when I gave them their own short story, The Misses Moffet Mend a Marriage, that I had the time to go into specifics about how skilled dressmakers could make their living in nineteenth century San Francisco. And, in Mr. Wong Rights a Wrong, I was able to reintroduce a character people loved from Maids of Misfortune and write a story that provided historical detail on Chinese immigration, anti-Chinese sentiment, and the charities that tried to help Chinese women in San Francisco.
In my most recent novella, Kathleen Catches a Killer, Annie’s boarding house maid, Kathleen Hennessey, has the opportunity to solve her own mystery, but I was also able to use this story to describe some of the methods used by the San Francisco police force because Kathleen’s beau, Patrick McGee, is a patrolman who is working hard to become one of the city’s plain-clothes detectives.
All of us are familiar with the main elements of modern police detection. When a burglary, robbery, or murder is committed, the forensic team arrives to collect evidence while the detectives ask questions of the people involved. Then DNA and fingerprints (and increasingly facial recognition technology) are used to search data bases for “known offenders.” Meanwhile, eyewitnesses are asked to review mug shots and view line-ups to see if they can identify someone they saw connected with the crime. In addition, if there is a murder, an autopsy is performed to provide information on time of death, cause of death, and to pick up any evidence that would help connect an accused person to the crime. How all this evidence is collected and maintained often is crucial to whether or not a person is caught, and then successfully convicted for a crime.
What I was surprised to learn as I started doing research for my mystery series was the numerous ways in which police forces in larger cities like San Francisco were already following many of these procedures, including the use of modern autopsies. For example, unlike many smaller towns, all San Francisco autopsies were performed medical doctors, and in both the legal and the medical colleges of the University of California, medical jurisprudence was one of the major fields of study.
The techniques of modern detecting, including painstaking gathering of evidence, and keeping detailed records, are generally considered to be innovations made early in the nineteenth century by Francois Eugene Vidocq, an ex-criminal who became the founder of the French Surete. In time, Scotland Yard began to copy many of these techniques, as did American city police departments.
While all these police forces lacked the benefits of twentieth century technology, that didn’t mean they didn’t use what was at hand. For example, even though fingerprints weren’t used to identify criminals until the 1890s, and DNA wasn’t used in criminal cases until the 1980s, facial recognition was an important part of finding criminals in the Victorian era, greatly aided by the new technology of photography.
The French Surete and police forces in Belgium started adding photographs of arrested criminals as early as the 1840s. The St. Louis police force, which is often credited as the first police force to do so, followed suit in 1857, as did the New York City force a month later. New York City’s decision to hang these photographs in a room in the police department so the public could see them seems to be where the term Rogues’ Gallery originated.
However, William Secrest, the author of Dark and Tangled Threads of Crime, a history of Isaiah W. Lees, who served as a San Francisco police officer between 1852 and 1900, primarily as the Captain of the Detective department, argues that the San Francisco police had been keeping photographs and detailed descriptions of criminals since at least 1852.
At first, individual police detectives, like Lees, kept notebooks describing the men and women they arrested with accompanying daguerreotypes, paying out of their own pockets to have the photographs made. Then Lees found a photographer from Hong Kong who would make inexpensive photographs for $5, and by 1860, when the department began to pay for these photographs, Lees had already amassed several large albums. (Interestingly, early criminals understood the need for a subject to stay very still to get a decent photo so they often squirmed around to blur the image.)
By 1872, the records and books of photographs (what would be called mug shots by the mid twentieth century) had become so voluminous that the department hired a full-time records clerk to be in charge of the material, greatly aiding the efficiency of the force.
Secrests’ stories of important cases solved by Lees and his officers are filled with examples of how these photographs helped them to get eye witnesses to identify criminals and how they were particularly helpful in tracking down persons who went under numerous aliases and used the rapidly expanding national transportation system to escape the city after a robbery, assault, or murder.
Time after time, Lees was able to compare a description by a witness to a mug shot photograph, which would be annotated with information on past criminal convictions, known associates, and last known address, all facilitating the eventual apprehension of that criminal.
One of these cases, a 1879 stagecoach robbery, exemplifies how far the police detectives were willing to go–and how important these modern methods of police detection were—to bring criminals to justice. In this case (which was the model for the crime Kathleen’s beau is investigating in Kathleen Catches a Killer), Detective Lees used photographs and handwriting analysis to track down one of the robbers who was living Indiana three years after the robbery, hiding behind an alias and a respectable career as a lumber businessman.
What these clever policemen also did was provide me with a lot more possible plots for further San Francisco mysteries, and for that I am quite thankful.
M. Louisa Locke, March 19, 2018
