Vidocq is a real person, not a fictional character. After a decadent youth and poor army career, he was sent to prison at age 21. He often escaped but was captured each time. As a result, he became familiar with the ways of convicts and police. Vidocq offered his services to the head of the Paris police and was accepted.
At the time, in 1810, Paris was divided into districts, each with its own police chief. Since there was no central control, criminals moved among districts easily.
But Vidocq organized and led a group of agents, The Surete (The Security Force), to track down escaped convicts and to investigate robberies and other crimes. The regular police were resentful and suspicious about his power to make arrests, and jealous of his relationship to the chief.
His memoirs give details about how he investigated crimes. He was an acute observer of details. He understood how criminals think and talk, and he was able to masterfully disguise himself as a criminal, infiltrate their organizations and hide-outs and win their confidence. He often went weeks living with cons until he could make an arrest, recover the loot, and present enough evidence for trial. Many of his cases were later embellished by admirers and editors who explained all the steps of deduction.
He had a flair for publicity, built a strong reputation internationally for efficiency and elegance (well, he was French), and kept an opulent office nicer than any police station.
At age 50, he left the Surete to form his own agency, taking business clients for an annual fee. He was a frequent guest at fancy dinners, and famous people like Balzac came to call on him. The fact that the police disliked him and attacked him merely increased his popularity, for the public had disliked the police for generations.
He was popular in England, too. A play based on his life appeared in London in 1829, "Vidocq: The French Police Spy." In 1849, Vidocq opened a museum in London celebrating himself, with many items from his famous 'cases' on display. He would often appear in disguise to entertain visitors, then reveal himself, stripping away his masks, crying out, "I am Vidocq!" just like in his memoirs.
Vidocq established in the public mind the 'ideal detective' who was patient, enduring, skilled in disguise, with insight into the criminal mind, a unique intelligence, a devotion to detection as his sole occupation, a reputation for inevitable success with apparently un-solvable problems, and having grand moments of triumph over foes (and over the inept police, who resent a gifted amateur without whose aid they would not otherwise solve the case). These ideal qualities persisted in detective fiction even to the day when PIs and cops had a better working partnership in fiction, such as Ellery Queen and Lord Peter Whimsey.
Vidocq's writings also exposed terrible conditions in French prisons, giving the public added sympathy for him as a former convict, and high regard for him as the champion of the falsely accused.
Poe, a lover of all things French, read Vidocq. So it is no surprise that his character Auguste Dupin is inspired by Vidocq. Not surprisingly, a view persisted for a long time that 'detective fiction' was a French form. After all, crime and detection 'serial novels' had appeared in French newspapers through the 1840s, and Balzac had detectives in several of his novels. Even Alexander Dumas had D'Artagnan the Musketeer conduct a ballistics investigation to reconstruct a shooting.
Thus it is that the alleged father of the form, Edgar A. Poe,
No comments:
Post a Comment