Historicizing CSI and its Effect(s): The Real and the Representational in American Scientific Detective Fiction and Print News Media, 1902–1935

Over the past decade, CBS's hit television show CSI: Crime Scene Investigation has been characterized as novel and innovative, as one of the first times forensic science was made palatable to a popular audience. Because of its subject matter and its popularity, the show has also sparked debates about the effects of scientific representations. In this essay, I contend that both CSI and its potential effects would be better understood as part of a longer genealogy, one that accounts for debates concerning the real and the representational in American scientific detective fiction. Using a mixed methods approach from literature and science studies, I contextualize CSI via several other cultural 'texts': American scientific detective fiction (1909-1919) and a historical newspaper archive concerning anxieties about fictional portrayals of scientific detective work (1894-1935). By triangulating CSI and its effects with earlier representations of scientific detective work and their uptake in print news media, I draw attention to similarities between historical and contemporary debates: the relative worth of the real and the representational, the role of the media in identifying and/or constructing American anxiety about forensic science and detective work, the relative authority of (forensic) science and the police, and the differing standards of judgment for science and law.