![]() He was almost a national hero in France, where it was almost entirely due to his efforts that the crime rate was reduced by 40% between 18. If he lacked anything it was certainly not his gift for self-promotion. It was not until 1850 that Alan Pinkerton set up his private detective agency in Chicago.īy 1841, when Poe referred to him in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” Vidocq’s name was well known throughout the English-speaking world. The success of these agencies encouraged Britain’s Scotland Yard to create the Criminal Investigation Department in 1842. He was instrumental in establishing the first detective bureau in the world, the Brigade de la Sûreté, in 1812, and opened the world’s first private detective agency, Le Bureau des Renseignements, in 1834. It is not only detective fiction that owes much to the work of François Eugène Vidocq, but the world of professional investigation as well. As for Poe, Julian Symons went so far as to say, “He had read Vidocq, and it is right to say that if the Mémoires had never been published Poe would never have created his amateur detective. Vidocq, like Holmes, was a master of disguise and used the network of the underworld to seek out his clues. ![]() He had only one thing to recommend him, and that was his energy.” Yet, despite their disparaging remarks about him, both writers drew on Vidocq’s character and activities in developing their own detectives. ![]() But, without educated thought, he erred continually by the very intensity of his investigations.” Through the voice of Sherlock Holmes in A Study in Scarlet, Conan Doyle states of Lecoq (a fictional detective created by Emile Gaboriau-based largely on Vidocq), “Lecoq was a miserable bungler. ![]() “Vidocq,” Poe wrote in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “was a good guesser, and a persevering man. If you were to go by either Edgar Allan Poe or Arthur Conan Doyle you might think that François Eugène Vidocq, the world’s first real life private detective, was an irrelevance. In this article from issue 4, Mike Ashley looks at the life of Vidocq, a thief turned turned detective who was to prove the inspiration for many great fictional detectives. ![]()
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