Which famous author was the first to utilize fingerprint evidence solve a fictional crime?

The first famous author to utilize fingerprint evidence to solve a fictional crime is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in his Sherlock Holmes story "The Adventure of the Five Orange Pips" (1891).

While the story doesn't explicitly mention the word "fingerprint," Sherlock Holmes utilizes a set of bloody fingerprints on a letter to identify the perpetrator. This pre-dates the formal development of fingerprint analysis as a forensic technique, but it still represents a key moment in its fictional representation.