Murder will out

Once upon a time, a storyteller named Geoffrey Chaucer had one of his pilgrims proclaim, ‘Murder will out, certain, it will not fail.’1 In this tale of his, the Prioress asserts that God will not suffer a crime to remain forever concealed. Later in the story divine intervention, a miracle of the Virgin, produces the discovery of the corpse and provides a narrative of its violent death. Chaucer’s tale locates the oft-repeated maxim, murder will out, within a medieval and ecclesiastical view of justice and morality. In modern and secular times, this ‘certain’ moral maxim began to turn into an intriguing and dramatic plot device, central to a new specialist genre of detective fiction. ‘Undiscovered crimes’, the problem of impunity and criminal detection practices were an important feature of the modern mediated spectacle of punishment, and they remain so to this day. Nevertheless, their significance has been overlooked by scholars of penality. The first chapter of this book argues that the history of criminal detection technologies, with which there has always been great popular fascination, does not accord with the established account of penal modernity. The conventional account has scant interest in matters of mediated spectacle. In it, modern penality is depicted as centred on correctional technologies, on a disciplinary form of punishment working through surveillance practices and normative judgement. The picture of disciplinary penal modernity is based in a reading of the work of Michel Foucault. This chapter looks at the story told by Foucault in Discipline and Punish, and shows that another story is equally persuasive, that of spectacle, retributive penality, and juridical forms of power.