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It is great fun writing a late Victorian sleuth, who has only few technological tricks up their sleeve. Sherlock Holmes had the forensic mindset – and he probably encouraged its development – but he didn’t have the toolkit.

“Victorians” spanned over six decades of rapid technical and social change. They largely invented a scientific view of crime and started the thorough scientific analysis of the dead body. However, clearly they were in the dark compared with the modern detective. Holmes used fingerprints in a 1890 story, well before Scotland Yard, which used the inferior Bertillon system of body measurements.

I’m all for the amazing technology that lets you solve a crime, even years after the event. But as a writer, a lower tech era throws you back on the basics – means, motive, opportunity and observation.

In the The Crooked Medium’s Guide to Murder, my lead investigator, spiritualist fraud Mrs Ashton, clashes with Chief Inspector Bullfinch, an energetic, thorough and incorruptible detective who hates her. (He knows she stole the Westmacott emeralds three years ago but to his humiliation, he cannot prove it.)

Brief translation, “The Paris Police Laboratory”, Ferdinand Gueldry, via artvee. (1887) Cropped to remove the empty third of the room.

Science at the scene of death

Imagine that you are an 1880s detective at the murder scene.

You have no CCTV cameras to check in the middle of the night. Hansom cabs had number-plates but no other vehicles did. No computers to hunt through camera evidence to find a specific vehicle’s movements. You are thrown back on the happenstance presence of human witnesses, who are remarkably fallible.

However, you and your men (and they would be men *) would look for footprints, cart tracks, pieces torn from clothes, and the like. Taking Plaster of Paris impressions of marks on the ground started in the 1880s. The Moonstone has a vital clue in a small smudge of paint.

You find a blood-stained weapon. The boffins might distinguish between human and animal blood, but that’s it. In 1880, you can only look for a stain on a suspect’s hands or clothes, or signs of guilty washing. No DNA testing.

Hunting down a suspect

Since I was a teen, we have entered an extraordinary high-tech surveillance state.

If a 2025 suspect flees, today’s police can track their phone, get into their call history and probably search that vast mass of personal and business correspondence – emails. Today the state can ask to see most financial transactions.

I carry seven or eight pieces of ID, one of which has a photo, and it would be two if I had a driving licence. One reason bigamy flourished in Victorian times was that you could just move away from anyone who might know you.

Yet things were better for 1880s police than fifty years before. The telegraph meant a description could be widely circulated, and a telegram could get ahead of a fleeing suspect. A self-styled Quaker poisoner was so caught in 1845. The Victorian newspapers loved crime, and helping the police, which was good for sales. At this stage, it was more likely they would carry a sketch of suspects rather than a photo. The press could also be a stern rod for the police’s back if a crime seemed to be taking too long to solve.

Don’t lick the wallpaper

I guess most people know that the Victorians were surrounded by poison. Arsenic was used in medicines, wallpaper, and book covers. You could buy any quantity of opium the pharmacist would sell you. The three common and easily obtained poisons – arsenic, cyanides, and strychnine – weren’t hard to detect. Arsenic was easily found by a chemical test. Both cyanide and strychnine had distinctive and rapid symptoms.

Bodies could be exhumed. Early Victorians tasted and smelt stomach contents or fed them to animals to test for poison, or sedatives. Ewww.

Victorians got particularly worked up about women using poison to settle scores.

I enjoy these constraints

Mrs Ashton, Braddie and Maisie are thrown back on the basics of detective work. Keen observation, an understanding of human nature, asking the right questions, and a mental reconstruction of the crime. If you don’t have an expertise, calling on someone who does. For me, and I hope for the reader, this leads to great stories.

Mrs Ashton has her extraordinary gift, when it works. Opening minds can reveal deeply hidden truths, although it can also fail, or blind her with migraines. She needs to keep it secret – only Braddie knows. Mrs Ashton’s gift presents her with that most awful dilemma.

You know someone committed a deadly crime but you have literally no proof. You know they may kill again. Yet to reveal you can sometimes read minds would make you a plaything of powerful men.

Lt-Colonel Henderson, the Commissioner of Police for London, and Bullfinch’s boss. (artvee)

Re the lab picture: Undoubtedly some of these tests will be the Marsh test for arsenic poisoning.

*Women were private detectives, store detectives, and Pinkertons in the US had a Female Division under pioneer Kate Warne, who helped prevent an early attempt to murder President Lincoln. As Kate Warne said to Pinkerton “I can go where a man can not.” We suspect that female ‘searchers’ in British police stations, informants etc did more police work than was credited.