'Our Environment in Miniature':: Dust and the Early 20th-Century Forensic Imagination

The high-tech world of crime scene investigation has captured the public imagination. Stimulated in large part by the introduction of DNA profiling in the mid-1980s, and repeatedly reinforced through heroic representations in newspapers, crime novels and highly-rated television show, we are fully aware of the contours of this investigative landscape: its iconography – the white-suits of anonymous scene of crime officers; its challenges – hyper-vigilance against material contamination; and its spaces – especially the highly disciplined crime scene and its promise of yielding bio-trace evidence.

But what do we know about its history? In today's talk I want to take us back to the time when two of the core principles for modern "CSI" were first articulated: first, the need to suspend the crime scene in time and space; second, the systematic "excavation" of crime scene as an archaeological/ecological site. These twin imperatives featured prominently in the writings of the most prominent early twentieth-century theorists of the crime scene – Hans Gross (1847-1915) and Edmond Locard (1877–1966). For both Gross and Locard, crime scene investigation centered on the disciplined search for minute, and ostensibly insignificant, trace evidence – blood, hair, fibre and – most evocatively – what they called "dust." Ubiquitous and, to the uninitiated, characterless, dust represented the exemplary object of a modern forensic analytic. For them dust symbolized the furthest reach of the new forensic capacity that they were championing, one that – like the mixed representational sources underpinning our own understanding of a world of infinitesimal evidentiary traces – could legitimately draw upon contemporaneous imaginative discourses which invested dust with meaning.

Dust's place in the making of the modern crime scene, I will argue, was indeed suspended in interesting ways between fact and fiction, its status in practitioner manuals supplemented by its circulation in the plots of contemporary crime novels. To follow this analytical path I will focus on Richard Austin Freeman's (1862-1943) "scientific" detective, Dr John Thorndyke. It was in the Thorndyke stories that dust enjoyed its most systematic, and unencumbered, exposition, and, explicitly positioned at the intersection of public education and public entertainment, brought to a wide reading public the powers and possibilities of modern crime scene investigation.

Speaker: Ian Burney, University of Manchester

Room 470