Fingerprints 103: Mark Twain’s Prescience and Crime’s Penmen
By Dr. Lewis Preschel
June 6, 2011The first American writer to use fingerprints in solving crime was the famous Mark Twain in his perhaps-embellished memoir about life as a steamboat pilot, titled Life on the Mississippi, published in 1883. In chapter 31, “A Thumb-print and What Came of It,” he has a character, inspired by an old “French prison-keeper” use a…
