Kate Winkler Dawson's new book is American Sherlock: Murder, Forensics, and the Birth of American CSI. From her Q&A with Deborah Kalb:Q: You note that you first learned of Edward Oscar Heinrich while looking through an encyclopedia of crime. What made you decide to write his biography?--Marshal Zeringue
A: I’ve never really been interested in biographies, I’m interested in events, but with American Sherlock, when I read about his train robbery case and his moniker “American Sherlock,” how could you not be fascinated by this?
I have a checklist—first, is this somebody people have heard of before? He didn’t have a Wikipedia page. Is he important? Is what he studied important now? How did he make history?
It has to be a cool time period for me, the older the better. I really like the 1800s and 1900-1950. The cases in his heyday fit in with the period I’m interested in.
One of the biggest challenges was, What is his archive like? Theodore Heinrich, his son, became famous and had an incredible archive. His Watson had an archive. That amount of information was really important to me. It took a long time to...[read on]