Sherlock, a renowned British crime drama broadcast since 2010, presents a twenty-first-century version of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, who is still in a traditional overcoat and a hat, but looks at his smartphone to Google from time to time. An amalgamation of the late nineteenth-century aristocratic elite investigator and the twenty-first-century consulting detective—but still aristocratic—invokes viewers’ desire as well as disappointment. The seemingly irreconcilable gaps between traditional and modern policing in this popular television series are what Samson Lim's Siam's New Detectives fills by bringing new attention to a history of the visualization of policing and crime in Thailand from the end of the nineteenth to the end of the twentieth century.
Lim states the book is a study of “the visual culture of policing” and “an epistemological history of how people, as actors … make visible a specific category of action called crime” (p. 2). The...
