ABSTRACT
I like to think that Detective Constable William Henry Hoyle of Exeter was an optimistic man, maybe going about his business dressed in a brown derby hat, and with a bristling moustache. We don’t actually know what he looked like because the staff records of detectives were not as detailed as the records of the offenders they sought. 1 Nevertheless he seemed a man of boundless energy who vigorously employed the three investigative options available to police officers at the start of the twentieth century: rounding up ‘the usual suspects’ and anyone else who was new in town, sending off fingerprint or other forensic evidence to New Scotland Yard, and tracking offenders (sometimes internationally) through the network of bureaucratic record keeping that developed from the 1870s.
