This reputation as “America’s Sherlock Holmes” also led to his being consulted on the establishment of the first “full service” public American crime laboratory at Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois, and on a crime laboratory for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
When May began, few people, anywhere, used scientific tools to investigate crime. Except for a couple of minimal installations in Europe, there were no crime labs. So to solve his cases – criminal and civil – May improved or invented techniques in every area of forensic science in the era before public crime laboratories. Along the way, he exchanged ideas with many other well-known crime fighting pioneers.
Exemplifying “The American Dream”
Born on a Nebraska farm in 1892, Luke S. May rose from the proverbial “humble beginnings” to become one of the most famous detectives of his day. Hard times forced his ancestors out of Ireland, and then Canada, to seek a better life in the United States. But even that faltered when a severe drought sent his father back to life as an itinerant carpenter.
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| May, About 18 Years Old |
Then, young “Lukie” experienced a pivotal moment: He read Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s adventures of Sherlock Holmes. The boy decided that scientific criminology would be his life’s work. Luckily, a building boom in Salt Lake City drew the family there and Luke found the resources needed to pursue his dream. Detective May was not yet eighteen years old when clues he spotted solved his first publicized case, a murder during a daytime burglary. As his reputation grew, he moved his base first to Pocatello, Idaho and then to Seattle, Washington. He remained there for the rest of his life, handling well over two thousand cases.
Between the two World Wars, May logged – as a private criminologist – an average of one death case every month. Around 80 percent of those were murders. Since roughly two-thirds of the death cases involved firearms, he became an expert in firearms and bullet analysis, with a huge gun collection. He had racks holding thousands of test-fired bullets, and could “read” them to identify every commonly-used firearm in the world.
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| A Few of May's Guns |
May’s other cases ran the full gamut: routine background checks, cattle rustling, questioned documents (most often wills), accident investigations, and on and on.
But perhaps his most visible contribution to the field involved “tool marks.” The most telling marks are the microscopic scratches (striations) that can identify a specific implement (knife, screwdriver, etc.) used to commit a crime. One of his cases set the legal precedent for the use of such evidence, an important factor in the later conviction of Bruno Hauptmann for the murder of young Charles Lindbergh, Jr.
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| Tool Mark Comparison |
American Sherlock is based on extensive research in the Luke S. May Papers, archived at the University of Washington, along with material from over two thousand other sources (mostly newspaper articles about May and his cases). For readers with further interest in the topic, the book contains an extensive endnotes section and a considerable bibliography.
[Note: All photos are from the May-Reid papers and are used with permission.]
Reviews
Well researched and engagingly written, American Sherlock rediscovers Luke S. May, a largely forgotten pioneer in early twentieth-century scientific crime fighting. In recounting May’s colorful career and most remarkable cases, Evan E. Filby traces the development of forensic science in the United States and offers a fast-paced narrative that will be particularly interesting to true-crime aficionados.
— Jeffrey S. Adler, professor of history and criminology at the University of Florida, author of Murder in New Orleans: The Creation of Jim Crow Policing (2019) and First in Violence, Deepest in Dirt: Homicide in Chicago, 1875-1920 (2006)
With Evan E. Filby’s American Sherlock we have, for the first time, a detailed assessment of the life and career of Luke S. May. May was a highly influential figure in the development of forensic science and scientific detection in North America in the first half of the twentieth century, yet he is surprisingly hardly remembered. Filby’s book accurately reinstates him in his rightful place in the history of scientific detection. Clearly and accessibly written, with a wealth of detail on May’s life and work, American Sherlock appeals to a wide audience including fans of true crime writing and those with an interest in the development of scientific detection.
— Alison Adam, professor of Science, Technology and Society at Sheffield Hallam University, UK; author of A History of Forensic Science: British Beginnings in the Twentieth Century (2015).
In 1910, a family friend asked 17-year-old Luke S. May, the subject of this admiring biography from first-time author Filby, to help find who fatally shot a 14-year-old boy in Salt Lake City. Thanks to May’s keen observation skills, the killer was caught and punished, and so began a lifetime of detective work for May. By the time he was 18, he had his own private detective agency, and in his heyday, in the 1920s and ’30s, May was known as the American Sherlock Holmes, a pioneer of fingerprint analysis and profiling who designed equipment such as a fingerprint camera, a sound recorder, and a microscope he used for handwriting and hair analysis. As a private criminologist, he was sought after by law enforcement agencies across the nation. In 1933, he was appointed chief of detectives of the Seattle Police Department, which he subsequently reorganized and modernized. During World WWII, May was on active duty with the Navy, though much of his work was classified. After the war, his business wound down as police departments and law enforcement agencies had their own labs and forensic specialists on staff. He died in 1965, but his legacy as an early criminologist lives on. Filby writes with enthusiasm and verve. This is an important addition to the history of forensic science.
— Publishers Weekly
Many readers have thrilled to the tales of Sherlock Holmes and his powers of deduction, but deduction only goes so far. Filby details the life of Luke May, the “American Sherlock” who pioneered the field of forensics. A true scientist, May created case files focused almost solely on evidence, leaving out the context of the crimes. Acting like a detective himself, Filby here uses news accounts to fill in the details of May’s work, piecing together the cases in which the scientist refined methods in criminal investigation, such as using a special camera and film to capture fingerprints that had previously been missed; perfecting a sound recorder; analyzing bullet-trajectory and blood-spatter; and suspect profiling. May’s reputation was cemented in the 1910s, when handgun analysis helped solve a controversial case involving the Wobblies and WWI vets in Washington state. Over more than four decades, May, a man who liked “snappy hats,” logged several thousand cases, until close to his death in 1965. With exhaustive notes and bibliography, this could augment criminal justice curricula or allow true-crime buffs to geek out.
— Booklist
Ordering Information
Released at the end of July 2019, the book can be ordered from the publisher or from major online booksellers such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble. About 310 pages long in hardcover, the list price is $32.
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