There certainly is some justification in his argument. In 2013, historian Ian Burney, a professor at the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester, wrote in his research paper that French criminologist Edmond Locard and Austrian criminal jurist Hans Gross, two founding fathers of crime scene investigation, were influenced by British writers Arthur Conan Doyle and R. Austen Freeman, the creators of fictional detectives Sherlock Holmes and Dr Thorndyke, respectively. “The stories showcased new methods of CSI: protecting the crime scene from contamination; preserving and recording the relationships between all objects in the scene, even the most trivial; and submitting minute trace evidence to scientific scrutiny. So it’s fair to say that Conan Doyle and Freeman helped investigators to systemise their methods to make the invisible, visible and the inconsequential, consequential,” Burney said.