Our Environment in Miniature: Dust and the Early Twentieth-Century Forensic Imagination

2013/01/01 by Ian Burney
Arts and Humanities · #Crime and Detective Fiction Studies

paper · doi:10.1525/rep.2013.121.1.31

openalex publication_date 2013/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

This article explores the articulation of the crime scene as a distinct space of theory and practice in the early twentieth century. In particular it focuses on the evidentiary hopes invested in what would at first seem an unpromising forensic object: dust. Ubiquitous and, to the uninitiated, characterless, dust nevertheless featured as an exemplary object of cutting-edge forensic analysis in two contemporary domains: writings of criminologists and works of detective fiction. The article considers how in these texts dust came to mark the furthest reach of a new forensic capacity they were promoting, one that drew freely upon the imagination to invest crime scene traces with meaning.

Related

• From crime scenes to digital spaces
• In Crime's Archive: The Cultural Afterlife of Criminal Evidence
• A Counter-Forensic Audit Trail: Disassembling the Case of The Hateful Eight
• Practising crime scene investigation: trace and contamination in routine work
• “From the Top of Newgate to the Bottom”: An Album of Victorian Murderers