Thumbster is celebrating a birthday. In July 1858 the English first began using fingerprints in July of 1858, when Sir William Herschel, Chief Magistrate of the Hooghly district in Jungipoor, India, first used fingerprints on native contracts. On a whim, and with no thought toward personal identification, Herschel had a local businessman, impress his hand print on a contract. Although I've seen the date as both July 17th and July 28, we'll choose the former since we have another important date to celebrate on the 28th.
Also on this date, Erle Stanley Gardner was born in Malden, Massachusetts. He's best-known, of course, for creating quite possibly the world's most famous fictional lawyer, Perry Mason, although he also penned many other crime fiction novels and mysteries, including the dozens of characters he created in a slew of pulp stories. As The Thrilling Detective indicates, "The last year that he wrote exclusively for the pulps, 1932, saw Gardner earning around 20,000 bucks, and that's at a few cents a word! Maybe not a fortune these days, but this was the Depression. To put it in perspective, those are Stephen King-like numbers." At the height of his popularity Gardner was selling an average of 26,000 copies of his novels a day. His other most popular novel series featured protagonist Doug Selby, a newly elected District Attorney in the fictional of Madison City, California; Sheriff Bill Eldon; and the oddball private detective team Cool and Lam.
