Behind the Book: Murder and the Making of English CSI

Several years ago my colleague Neil Pemberton asked me when police started using tape to protect crime scenes. Though I had written extensively on the history of forensics I had no ready answer. As we talked it through we realized that the history of crime scene investigation (CSI) as a technique had not been seriously considered and that it opened up a rich vein of questions about forensic theory and practice that could form the subject of a fascinating book.

Our research has now been written up in Murder and the Making of English CSI, published this fall with the Johns Hopkins University Press. Focused on the investigation of murder in the first half of the twentieth century, it traces the evolution and interactions between the century’s two principal regimes for producing forensic evidence. The first is a body-centered forensics, associated with the lone, ‘celebrity’ pathologist, his scalpel and the mortuary slab, in which the skilled observer autopsied a dead body. The second is a ‘forensics of things,’ focused on the analysis of trace evidence (hair, blood, fibers) harvested from meticulously managed crime scenes.

The book analyzes the shifting landscape of twentieth-century murder investigation by following the historical interplay between these two powerful forensic models. It highlights their developing relationship as they interacted at four principal sites: the mortuary, the laboratory, the crime scene and the courtroom.

With no systematic map to guide our research, we adopted the image of lightning bolts brightly but only briefly illuminating an otherwise darkened terrain. Our ‘flash moments’ were two twentieth-century murder investigations: the 1924 case of Emily Kaye, who was beaten and dismembered by her lover at a lonely beachfront holiday cottage, and the 1953 investigation into John Christie’s serial murders in his dingy terraced home in London’s West End.

These are both well-known cases that superficially look the same: chilling murders, bodies to be interpreted and scenes to be searched by detectives, medics, and scientists whose actions were eagerly watched and reported on by journalists. Yet by focusing on the details of the investigations themselves, and how they were represented and understood, we show how investigative theory and practice had subtly, but profoundly, shifted between the two cases.

The book’s primary aim is deceptively simple – to show readers that crime scenes have a history. This is not as straightforward as it seems because in a sense they have always been there: crimes, after all, have to occur somewhere. But it was only over the course of the last hundred years or so that the crime scene came to be understood as a new space, governed by explicit rules of practice and recognized as such by forensic investigators and the broader public alike.

Our further aim is to invite readers to take this recognition of CSI as a product of history as an opportunity to reflect on their understandings of how forensic investigation appears today. The high-tech world of modern forensics has captured the public imagination. With complex homicide investigations undertaken by crime scene officers and lab scientists as regular features of newspapers and highly-rated television dramas, forensic detection has never been as visible – or compelling. These images are so familiar that it is easy to dismiss as wrong or uninteresting past forms of forensic practice. Murder and the Making of English CSI challenges this assumption, by exploring earlier methods on their own terms, examining how they operated and their impact on how crime was investigated and evidence judged.

Drawing on material ranging from how-to investigator handbooks and detective novels to crime journalism, police case reports, and courtroom transcripts, the book shows readers how, over time, the focus of murder inquiries shifted from a primarily medical and autopsy-based interest in the victim’s body to one dominated by laboratory technicians laboring over minute trace evidence. In doing so, Murder and the Making of English CSI reveals the compelling and untold story of how one of the most iconic features of our present-day forensic landscape came into being. 

Ian Burney is the director of the University of Manchester’s Centre for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine (CHSTM). He is the author of Bodies of Evidence: Medicine and the Politics of the English Inquest, 1830–1926 and Poison, Detection, and the Victorian Imagination. Neil Pemberton is a senior Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellow at CHSTM. He is the coauthor of  Rabies in Britain: Dogs, Disease and Culture, 1830–2000 and Leech. Together they wrote Murder and the Making of English CSI.