Criminal Investigation: a Practical Handbook for Magistrates, Police Officers and Lawyers, Volume 2

Long before forensics became a science, Hans Gross compiled the first systematic guide to hunting criminals. Written by an Austrian examining magistrate who helped shape modern criminal investigation, this volume charts the intellectual terrain where detective work transformed from intuition into methodology. Gross instructs investigators on how to evaluate witnesses, deploy expert witnesses effectively, analyze the psychology of criminals, and interpret the physical traces left behind at crime scenes. The text wrestles with questions that still define investigative work today: How do you separate reliable testimony from fabrication? What can footprints, bloodstains, and tool marks reveal? How do criminals think, and how can that knowledge be turned against them? Some passages transport us to colonial India, where Gross observes how caste identity could be concealed or performed. This is not merely a historical artifact but a window into the birth of systematic criminal investigation, a discipline that would eventually produce fingerprinting, blood analysis, and the entire forensic apparatus of modern justice.