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 first three chapters of the book therefore examine Thai and European elites’ adaptation and application of the Western scientific investigatory tools like fingerprinting, photography, report-writing, statistics, and mapping to enhance their understanding of criminal acts in Thai urban and rural settings. The first gap that Lim's work bridges in these chapters is a conventionally assumed asymmetric and/or antagonistic relationship between the impulsive Western modernity and receptive Eastern traditionalism. Be they aggressive Westerners or passive Easterners, they all eventually submitted to the hegemony of modern investigative methods. More important, the process of adapting Western policing technology did not meet much opposition from Thai elites. The second gap that Lim's book overcomes is a “politico-historical temporality” divided into the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’ colonial rules and the twentieth century's Cold War. Thanks to the increasing volumes of research on Thailand's semicoloniality set against the popular myth that Thailand was never colonized and could evade Western colonial influences, Lim presents uninterrupted continuity between Thailand's semicolonial and Cold War pasts by articulating how Thai ruling elites successfully “localized” Western technology to legitimize their superior, separate status in the midst of ever-broadening public space in Thailand. A detailed explanation between chapters 1 and 3 of how the Thai elites and the newly emerged national security forces like the police utilized and manipulated Western cutting-edge knowledge and techniques to represent their superiority and legitimacy is not only informative but thought-provoking.
The real drama begins in chapter 4, a prize for readers who have long waited to see how historical, political, social, and cultural entanglements unravel in the process of adapting and applying Western techniques in Thai policing. In this chapter, Lim fills in the gap between the literati aristocrat and the less-educated commoner by interrogating how modern policing techniques were widely consumed and responded to. This chapter follows the “popularization” of Thai policing through visualization for the mass public who wanted to play some role in modernizing state rules. The outcome is well revealed in Lim's concluding statement of chapter 5: “Today, everyone is a detective” (p. 142).
In his discussion of the Sherry Ann Duncan murder case in 1986 and a historical narrative on the development of modern policing techniques through visualization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Lim embarks on a significant departure from elite-centered perceptions of Western modernity, and he highlights the less-educated commoner's response to state operations through mass consumption of police culture. His work provides a new perspective not only on the police and state surveillance, and national security studies that have heavily relied on policy and legal enforcement analysis, but also on cultural studies that have focused on interpretative and analysis-based approaches to visual cultures. By cleverly connecting the Thai masses’ consumption and interpretation of the statist approach to national security issues, Siam's New Detectives addresses extant gaps in the East-West geo-cultural modernity, colonial versus Cold War politico-historical temporality, and the sociocultural classes between the aristocratic elite and less-educated commoners, thereby stretching the intellectual parameters of this historical analysis into criminology as well as social, cultural, and political studies of Southeast Asia.
Still, some questions linger. While bridging sociocultural class gaps and analyzing the roles of crime reenactment and its outcomes, Lim states that “it is clear that the central government did in fact see knowledge, or at least information, as a critical aspect of society worth controlling as part of its bid to consolidate authority over the kingdom” (p. 153). Then what was the purpose of visualizing crime investigation processes using modern technology for the Thai police force itself? The Thai police remained more or less a secondary national security force subjugated to military rule throughout the twentieth century. Lim points out that “policing became more performative” (p. 103) as the twentieth century progressed, and that the crime reenactments have allowed the public “the opportunity to participate in the criminal justice process” (p. 111). As shown in the case of a taxi driver killing a Chinese woman and her son in 2009 (pp. 103–5), it could be also argued that visualization has been a medium that conveys public distrust towards the Thai judiciary and legal enforcement systems on the one hand, and the police's desperate yearning for more public and state recognition of their raison d’ être on the other.
This brings us to the final chapter on the history of conspiracy. Indeed, the rise of Phao Siyanon as the director-general of the Thai National Police Department and the US government's exorbitant financial and technical aid for the Thai police have had a significant impact on the popularization of conspiracy theory in the second half of the twentieth century (pp. 115–18). It should be also noted, however, that Phao, with American support, concentrated on making the police his political power base to compete with other military politicians. Indeed, Phao's efforts resulted in a dramatic but brief rise in the status of the police in the first half of the 1950s. In this context, what remains unclear in this chapter is whether Thai police officers did make real progress by actively engaging in the visualization process to the extent that they could overcome the traditional power dynamics between the military and their organization. In hindsight, the Thai police force failed to retrieve its short-lived heyday under the patronage of Phao and the United States, which was abruptly ended by Sarit Thanarat's coup in 1957. Since then, the Thai police force has remained subservient to military rule.
The new Sherlock can freely trespass in the gaps between classes, chains of command, and politics because he is an aristocratic elite who can quickly adapt to the newest technology and a consulting detective who can choose a case. The Thai police force has not had that kind of luxury. It might have endeavored to raise itself up to an independent national security force by adapting modern technologies and seeking more public attention through visualization, but the twentieth century did not witness it escaping the confines of military-centered politics. As such, for the Thai police, progress seems to be still desirable but at the same time disappointing.
