The CSI Imaginary:: British Newspaper Coverage of the Beginnings of Modern Criminal Forensics and Trace Evidence

• Autores: Brian Carroll
• Localización: Journalism history, ISSN 0094-7679, Vol. 44, Nº. 3, 2018, págs. 126-137
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Primed by the popularity of detective fiction, British newspapers of the first part of the twentieth century supported the cultural acceptance of crime scenes and their emerging conventions. Fictional crime stories and true crime coverage often appeared in the same publication, sometimes even on the same page, serving to make crime scenes and crime scene investigation (CSI) a popular cultural form in the perceptual frame of readers. The popular conceptions of CSI that today seem obvious and normative can, therefore, be traced back to what were humble beginnings. The products of experience, error, and politics, the conventions of these symbolic spaces emerged over time and, as this study reveals, in part by newspapers devoting close attention to the application of science in criminal investigations and in the trials that followed. This historical study looks at how British newspapers played an important role in establishing the social norms of the crime scene as they have been portrayed and mythologized in television, novels, and film. This article also explores the origins of what has become a shared understanding of the geography of contemporary CSI by focusing on the crime scene as a symbolic artifice and text as it has been represented in British newspapers of the first three decades of the twentieth century. In particular, this article uses the accounts and descriptions in those newspapers to locate the emergence of conventions for and about crime scenes, and in particular for the lead “detective,” broadly understood, as well as to better understand what these newspapers identified as important by looking at the common attributes or themes of their crime reporting.