A hankie used to be enough to remove traces of a person's presence from a crime scene. Now scientists have come up with an ingenious way to recover latent prints – but will it work?

We all know the scene in the movies where the criminal wipes his gun and the door handles with his hankie so as not to leave any trace of his presence. Now scientists claim to have invented a method that could identify his fingerprints, regardless of how much wiping has taken place. So how much of a difference will it make?

"We used to say: 'Make sure you've got your turtles on so you don't leave any dabs*'," says a (now retired) north London thief of the news of the breakthrough. "But, let's face it, any professional would always be wearing gloves anyway, so I think it's only really going to catch the opportunist or the amateur."

The technique has been developed by scientists from Leicester university, the ISIS research centre in Oxford and the Institut Laue-Langevin in France, and field trials could start this year.

According to Science Daily, they believe that lifting fingerprints from crime scenes using colour-changing fluorescent films could help capture latent or hidden prints on knives, guns, bullet casings and other metal surfaces. Findings were being presented this week at the Royal Society of Chemistry's Faraday discussion in Durham.

The finger normally leaves behind a deposit of sweat and natural oil that traces the lines on your fingertips. The chances of identical prints are about 64 billion to one, hence their value as evidence. Now, only around 10% of fingerprints from crime scenes are of good enough quality for court use, so the hope is that the new techniques will widen the scope.

"The biggest breakthrough for the police in the past," says the retired thief, "was when they finally computerised fingerprints. They were rubbing their hands because they didn't have to go through them one by one any more. But, as I say, you learned very early on to keep your gloves on and if you didn't have any with you, you'd take your socks off because the basic rule was never ever to leave any fingerprints behind."

* Of course you will already know that "turtle doves" is rhyming slang for gloves and "dabs" are fingerprints.