Forensics in the Golden Age of Crime

Behind the fiction of the Classic Age of Crime enshrined in the novels of Agatha Christie et al, forensic science was steadily making its way. The cases are familiar to all of us – the wife-murderer Crippen, the Brides in the Bath killer Smith, the cop-killers Browne and Kennedy, the thrill-killers Leopold and Loeb, the Lindbergh baby kidnap, the vampire murderer Haigh, wartime atrocities and the multiple murderer John Christie. What is less well-known is the forensics of each case – the immaculate work of Bernard Spilsbury, the breakthroughs of Brash and Glaister, the ‘three musketeers’ Simpson, Camps and Teare. In Forensics in the Golden Age of Crime we see them crouching over corpses in dingy hotel rooms, lonely country lanes, creepy woodlands and abandoned property lots. We see them in their laboratories, cutting up cadavers, weighing body parts, carrying out chemical analyses. We see them clashing with counsel in courtrooms, from the oak-panelled Old Bailey to the showbiz razzmatazz of Los Angeles. In the Golden Age, forensics came of age, established itself and hanged men and women. Fingerprints, ballistics, ligatures, poisons and all the rest came under the microscope as never before and it took a while for criminals and the police to catch up. Such was the insatiable thirst for ‘juicy murders’ by press and public alike, that detectives and pathologists became household names. This had never happened before and would never happen again.