Pudd'nhead Wilson — Mark Twain

Long before DNA testing or CCTV, a court had to decide a murder case on the strength of a piece of evidence nobody in the room had ever seen used before: fingerprints. Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson stages exactly that moment, and it remains one of the earliest and most vivid depictions of forensic evidence changing the outcome of a trial in fiction.

In two minutes

David Wilson, dismissed for years as the town fool of Dawson's Landing, wins the murder trial of the Italian twins Luigi and Angelo Capello and exposes a lifelong identity switch by using fingerprint evidence — a novel making an early, striking case for forensic science over appearance and prejudice.

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