Sherlock Holmes Splits Hairs

Work on the final volume of the 223B Casebook is still going on. All of the stories are in but one, and all but nine of them have their definitions written. We even have the last TwainLock story written (in fact, it was published in “The Casebook of Twain and Holmes”)

In the meantime, and to whet your whistle for the book, here’s a story from the upcoming volume which was published in 1925 in Collier’s magazine. The artwork and the footnotes will appear in volume 7.

Sherlock Holmes Splits Hairs

George C. Henderson

For some reason, author George C. Henderson (b. 1891) chose to write a news story for the Aug. 15 issue of Collier’s in the form of a pseudo-pastiche, perhaps as a way of conveying the amazing ways science was becoming useful in police work.

Capt. C.D. Lee of the Berkeley (Calif.) Police Department did exist. His work on classifying hair fibers was part of a broader effort under Police Chief August Vollmer (1876-1955) to improve policing. Vollmer was among the first to take advantage of new inventions, such as using motorcycles and cars, creating a school to train officers, requiring college degrees for officers, and hiring women as police officers.

Henderson was a West Coast newspaper reporter who also wrote seven novels, many of them Westerns. His sole non-fiction work Keys to Crookdom (1924), a dictionary of criminal slang that helped popularized words such as bootlegger, burglar, and bum steer.

“Oh, Watson,” cried my friend Sherlock Holmes as I entered the laboratory in Berkeley, Cal. “Come here a moment, will you?”

My friend’s manner showed more excitement than I had observed since our arrival in America.

“This is Capt. C. D. Lee. You remember, Watson, how I used to deduce a man’s residence and tastes from the ash of his Trichinopoly cigar? That was nothing, I assure you, Watson, to what Captain Lee has just done.”

Holmes has amused himself by studying American slang. Turning to the pleasant-faced, middle-aged man he said:

“Show him your stuff, Captain.”

“It is a science of hair identification,” Lee told me. “Mr. Holmes has been good enough to express his interest. I told him to bring me a hair — a single hair — of any sort he chose. He has brought me a hair from the head of a boy eight to fifteen years old of Scandinavian or German descent.”

“Absolutely right,” said Holmes crisply. “The son of that couple who came on from Denver on the train with us, Watson, and are now stopping at our hotel across the hall. What was their name — Larssen? Exactly.”

At Holmes’ suggestion I made a few notes from which I transcribe this account of Captain Lee’s methods — one of the most important of our contacts on this American tour.

Lee washes the hair with chemicals, removing all grease and dirt, and places it under a microscope that magnifies 750 diameters. He turns on a powerful light underneath the hair.

The hair is transparent, but there can be distinguished a saw-tooth edge marking the outer cuticle, then a mass of cells colored slightly with the granules of pigmentation, and finally, in the center, a pith.

No other animal has hair like man except the monkey. Even the monkey hair can be distinguished by its smaller diameter. Lee’s collection of scores of magnified photographs of various kinds of hair shows the marked differences. The hair of a deer has no well-defined pith. The hair of a sheep, a cat, a squirrel, or a mouse appears like a strip of backbone or line of vertebrae. A rabbit’s hair resembles an ear of corn. The hair of a dog has an effect of large dark splotches on a gray background.

The next step is to photograph the hair, much magnified.

Comparative size indicates the sex. The hair Holmes had brought for testing was larger than the hair of a girl of eight to fifteen years. The photograph showed that the pith had only begun to develop, indicating either youth or senile old age. The color and size together showed that it must be the hair of a boy, not a graybeard. By the size of the pith, the age could be checked as between eight and fifteen.

Determination of nationality is less sure. Lee is now working to reduce this to exactness. He was only able to tell us that slight variations in the cross sections of hairs are now being charted. These variations are marked between the races. A cross section of the hair of a North American Indian is round; of a Negro, elliptical.

Captain Lee told Holmes of three instances in which hair identification had been useful. I remember that it saved a man wrongly suspected of robbery of a street car and, in an another instance, verified a taxicab driver’s story that he had struck a man a fatal blow only in self-defense.

“Make a note, Watson,” said Holmes, as we took our departure, “that only the bald man is safe. And not he, if he uses hair tonic.”