Criminal Profiling in Literature
- Atenea
- Nov 5, 2021
- 2 min read
No doubt, at some point in our lives, we have all read adventure and mystery books, and of course, most of us know the famous British detective, Sherlock Holmes, who owes his creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle hundreds of adventures alongside his loyal friend John Watson. This famous detective, who used his prodigious and brilliant mind to solve crimes, is not the only one in literature; there are also a couple more, named Hercule Poirot, to whom the writer Agatha Christie endowed with great skills and incredible cunning, and let’s not forget Auguste Dupin, a character created by Edgar Allan Poe who, like the previous ones, is also a clever detective.
But what does this have to do with criminal profiling? Well, it’s simple: these characters were ahead of their time, since science and technology were not as advanced as what we know today. So, putting it in context, these characters were ahead by taking the future of criminal investigation to new levels, where they argued that crimes could be studied using human behavior as a basis. Theories that probably inspired hundreds of police officers to investigate how useful it would be to employ and apply the methods suggested by literature.
Now, if we put it this way, criminal profiling begins in these pages, where the investigators/characters used their methods to solve the crime or mystery, aided by their skills, which, although fictional, were very accurate in the books; I do not doubt that these have been a source of inspiration for what we now call criminal profilers.
Like the characters in these books, criminal profilers must be characterized by a certain level of skepticism, meaning that everything must be scientifically proven and corroborated before issuing a judgment; a fact not to be overlooked is that these analyses began in the fields of psychology, not law and evidently not criminology. Therefore, criminology students go through these subjects that will provide tools that could be very useful in assisting justice in the future. These merely curious facts help us visualize the vast field that criminal profiling has to offer and that continues to be modified and evolved over the years.
