Popular histories of forensics in the English context have tended to portray the pathologist Sir Bernard Spilsbury as the father of crime scene investigation (widely known as CSI): not only a master of the mortuary, but also a visionary pioneer of trace-based forensics, whom both contemporaries and historians have lionized as a real-life Sherlock Holmes or the English equivalent of France's Edmond Locard. Conscious of how entrenched this origin story has become, in Murder and the Making of English CSI, historians Ian Burney and Neil Pemberton set out to denaturalize readers’ views of the crime scene and to challenge their understandings of the emergence of crime scene investigation in England. Locating the roots of CSI in a handbook written by an obscure Austrian judge named Hans Gross, the authors maintain that the development of the modern forensics of homicide investigation in England resulted from the efforts, not of high-profile figures like Spilsbury, but of largely unknown reformers, such as the chemist G. T. Tryhorn and the Home Office officials Arthur Dixon and C. T. Symons, who campaigned for the adoption of Gross's systematic approach to the crime scene during the interwar period. While Burney and Pemberton give less credit to Spilsbury than he has received elsewhere, their book is by no means an attempt to banish forensic pathology from the story of CSI; rather, it is a careful, almost forensic, examination of the shifting relationship between trace-based and body-centered forensics in England during the twentieth century.

Early chapters of Murder and the Making of English CSI illuminate the transformation of the scene of crime into the modern crime scene, the latter a realm governed by the precise cognitive and physical practices of the trained investigator that enable the harvest and laboratory examination not only of bodies and blood but also of the barely visible vestiges of crime—what contemporaries like Gross and Locard referred to as dust. While these practices soon became common to murder investigations on the Continent, where legally trained officials were guided by explicit procedural rules, Burney and Pemberton reveal that in England, Grossian forensics, the merits of which were recognized by some commentators in the wake of the handbook's translation into English in 1906, were largely regarded as unsuited to the English system of investigation. Growing pressure to alter this view of CSI came not from English medico-legalists, whose textbooks tended only to exhibit interest in the crime scene for what it might reveal about the cause or time of death, but from detective fiction, which modeled cutting-edge forensic investigation through the exploits of characters like Richard Austin Freeman's Dr. John Evelyn Thorndyke.

In the third and fourth chapters of the book, Burney and Pemberton reconstruct the process by which Spilsbury became a celebrity pathologist and apparent champion of trace-based forensics. Using the 1924 Patrick Mahon case (revolving around the so-called “Crumbles murder” of Emily Kaye and her unborn fetus), they are able to show that Spilsbury's reputation as the progenitor of English CSI is unfounded and that his actual activity at the Crumbles was in line with the body-centered practices of his medico-legal predecessors. The reputation that attached to Spilsbury at this time and subsequently, the authors’ argue, was a construction of the press, which, schooled in the techniques of Holmes and Thorndyke, interpreted the pathologist's investigation at the Crumbles in the language of continental CSI.

Later chapters demonstrate that it was, in fact, the work of reformers like Dixon, Tryhorn, and Symons that introduced Grossian techniques to English murder investigation, the institutional fortunes of forensic pathology apparently declining as a network of regional forensic science laboratories developed during the interwar period and procedures for ensuring the integrity of the chain of evidence between the crime scene and the laboratory became standard practice. As Burney and Pemberton reveal, however, following the Second World War, a new generation of forensic pathologists, who self-consciously rejected the model of individual virtuosity embodied by Spilsbury, managed to reposition themselves within the system of team-driven crime scene and laboratory investigation that was evident by mid-century. As the authors’ investigation of the 1953 Christie case shows in its focus on the role of the pathologist Francis Camps, a new theatrics of homicide forensics had come into existence in which pathology and science were portrayed by both practitioners and the press as mutually dependent. As the ultimate fate of Camps’ findings in the Christie case and the media-created myth of Spilsbury indicate, however, forensic practitioners have not always been able to control the reception of their forensic regimes.

In providing this richly textured and sophisticated analysis of the development of crime scene investigation in the English context, Burney and Pemberton have made a major contribution to the growing historiography of forensics. This will undoubtedly be a landmark work that will inspire others to delve more deeply into the forensic past that preceded current DNA-centrism. While the emphasis on Grossian ways of knowing that permeates this book could be argued to run the risk of obscuring other contemporary approaches to crime, in much the same way that a focus on Lombrosian criminal anthropology did, the myriad of sources for English CSI explored by Burney and Pemberton, and their interest in the shifting relationship and eventual partnership of body and trace-centered forensics, largely avoids this pitfall.