The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana

by Jess Nevins

The Great Detective

copyright © Jess Nevins 2022

The Great Detective, the eccentric, nearly omniscient amateur investigator who uses rationality, logic, and a superb intellect to solve crimes which mystify the police, is one of the two most familiar detective character types, thanks to the worldwide popularity of the Sherlock Holmes Mysteries. But the origins of the Great Detective character type predate Holmes by decades.

In 1809 Eugène François Vidocq (1775-1857), a soldier who had spent time in jail for various crimes, volunteered himself to the police as a plainclothes agent. By 1811 Vidocq was training new agents, and in 1812 he was put in command of the Brigade de La Sûreté, the security police of Paris. By 1824 Vidocq commanded dozens of detectives, and was responsible for several important reforms in French police work. His work for the police gained him a reputation in France, but in 1828 and 1829 he published his “autobiography,” Memoirs of Vidocq (original: Mémoires de Vidocq), also known as Vidocq, the Police Spy, which gained him international fame. Memoirs of Vidocq is at least partially fictional and is greatly exaggerated, but despite (or perhaps because) of this it was hugely successful. Vidocq presents himself as the all-knowing master of every situation intimately familiar with the customs of the underworld and surrounded by fools but nonetheless triumphing over criminals and seeing that justice is done. Vidocq’s character in the Memoirs is self-congratulatory, boastful, and vain, but the French public was eager to believe that the Vidocq of the Memoirs was real, and Vidocq’s name quickly became synonymous with brilliant police-work (and later, after Vidocq’s background was revealed, with the brilliant crook posing as a policeman).

The idea of the brilliant crime-fighter was soon adopted by writers. Honoré de Balzac modeled Monsieur Vautrin on Vidocq in the books of the Comédie Humaine, beginning with Father Goriot (1834-5). Edgar Allan Poe followed the news from France and was familiar with Vidocq’s achievements, and Poe’s Chevalier Dupin (see: The C. Auguste Dupin Mysteries) is based in part on Vidocq as well as on Baron Pierre Charles François Dupin (1784-1883), a well-known French mathematician and politician. But Dupin is far more than a simple copy of Vidocq, and it is Poe’s contributions to the Great Detective–his personality and his methods–which made the character so influential.

Like Vidocq, Dupin is brilliant. But where the Vidocq of the Memoirs is the daydream of a bored functionary, the Dupin of Poe’s stories is a figure of essentially juvenile wish-fulfillment. He is an aristocrat, calmly sure of his own superiority. Those who know him (his friends and the Prefect of Police) are in awe of him. Dupin is free of responsibilities: he has no family, no job, and (despite apparent poverty) no worries about bills. Dupin keeps his own hours and is free to voice his opinions without worrying about the consequences. He solves the hardest, most puzzling crimes with ease. Dupin could be an honored member of society but has voluntarily withdrawn from human contact. (Vidocq was involved in his surroundings and interacted daily with both police and criminals). In Dupin’s world, Dupin is the most important person. Later writers added to these qualities, humanizing the Great Detective character and making him more realistic, but the character patterns established by Poe have for the most part been maintained.

Poe’s mysteries were not widely read until after his death, but once they were, they were influential. Before Poe’s death the Great Detective character developed separately in England, France, and the United States. English writers took the concept but not the personality of the Great Detective from Vidocq and created genteel, typically English Great Detectives (see: Bleak House, The Woman in White). These characters were partially modeled on the historical figure Inspector Charles Field (1805-1874), who, thanks to Charles Dickens’ “On Duty with Inspector Field” (see: Detectives), was seen as a real life and much more moral Vidocq. French writers were more directly influenced by Vidocq, and Great Detectives drawn on Vidocq appeared in the work of Eugène Sue (see: The Mysteries of Paris), Victor Hugo (Inspector Javert, in Les Misérables), and Émile Gaboriau (see: The Lerouge Affair). One exception was Henri Cauvain’s Maximilien Heller (see: Maximilien Heller), who was created after Baudelaire’s translation of Poe (1856-1865) and clearly modeled on Dupin and Vidocq.

American writers followed the example of English writers and used the concept of Vidocq for their characters while omitting Vidocq’s less savory aspects. The early dime novel detectives (see: The Old Sleuth Mysteries) were imitations of Vidocq, but moral enough to be deemed acceptable to the American audience by publishers. In the 1870s the Pinkerton Detective Agency gained national fame for its role in disrupting strikes (and gained notoriety for its brutal treatment of strikers). During the decade the founder of the agency, Allan Pinkerton (1810-1884), published The Gypsies and the Detectives (1872), a collection of fictionalized accounts of cases Pinkerton had been involved in, and The Expressman and the Detective (1874), a non-fiction collection of cases the Pinkertons had been involved in. (Both books had the same level of self-aggrandizement and the same distance from reality as Vidocq’s Memoirs). The books helped propagate the image of the detectives of the Pinkerton agency–the “Pinkertons”–as ultra-efficient detectives and of Pinkerton himself as a real-life Great Detective. By the 1890s “Pinkerton” had become another word for “detective.” Following these books American mystery writers modeled their Great Detectives on Pinkerton, as English writers had modeled theirs on Charles Field. In the 1880s a similar phenomenon occurred with Thomas Byrnes (see: The Thomas Byrnes Mysteries).

It was not until Sherlock Holmes debuted in 1887 that the two streams of development merged. The Sherlock Holmes stories were immediately popular, and by mid-1890 he had become the archetypal Great Detective, widely imitated by other writers in England (see: The Sexton Blake Mysteries, The Martin Hewitt Mysteries), on the Continent (see: The Joseph Müller Mysteries), in the United States (see: The Nick Carter Mysteries), and even in Asia. In Japan stories about “Soroku Komuro” were popular. In China the figure of Judge Bao (see: The Three Heroes and Five Sworn Brothers) was identified with Holmes, and numerous unauthorized sequels to Holmes’ stories were published. By 1919 Holmes was the most widely imitated character in fiction.

Although the Great Detective character type has become much less popular with both mystery writers and mystery readers–the character’s essential implausibility is no longer easy to deny, and the character is hard to credit in the twenty-first century, with the overwhelming flood of information everyone is constantly exposed to–it still appears on occasion, and no doubt will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. As it was with Dupin, so it continues to be: a wish-fulfillment character for those who long to be untouchable and infallible, and for those who crave that justice will unerringly be done.