The Private Detective in Literature – Part 2: From C. Auguste Dupin to Sherlock Holmes

The detectives of Kurtz Investigations Duisburg may stand firmly rooted in reality, yet there is probably not a single professional private investigator in the world who is not fascinated by the numerous role models that literature and film have produced over nearly two hundred years. Today, we therefore continue our journey through the history of the private detective in literature.

Edgar Allan Poe’s Proto-Detective Dupin Conquers Europe

As we saw in the previous part of our analysis, the classic detective story is often mistakenly attributed to the English. In truth, however, we owe it to Edgar Allan Poe, an icon of American literature. And as so often happens once a good idea has entered the world, it cannot be stopped, but inspires and invigorates others. Of course, since time immemorial there have been stories about people solving crimes — from the Bible to ancient legends and the literature of the Enlightenment and Romanticism. Voltaire’s Zadig ou la Destinée (1747) or E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Das Fräulein von Scuderi (1821) are merely two examples from the period before Poe’s detective tales and still lack many classic elements of the later detective story.

 

With the appearance of the stories about C. Auguste Dupin in 1841, however, the detective in the modern sense was established for the first time — the literary ancestor of today’s private investigators and commercial detectives in Duisburg. The success was enormous: early translations by Charles Baudelaire helped Poe achieve great fame in Europe; even in Russia he was widely read and admired. Fyodor Dostoevsky, openly admiring Poe, modelled the investigating magistrate Porfiry in Crime and Punishment (1866) on Dupin. Above all in France, Poe’s detective stories continued to receive immense appreciation even after his early death in 1849 — and thus the history of the private detective initially continued there.

Émile Gaboriau’s Detectives Lecoq and Père Tabaret

In L’Affaire Lerouge (1866) by Émile Gaboriau, a detective appears for the first time who, though far less well-known, deserves to be mentioned alongside Dupin and Sherlock Holmes: Monsieur Lecoq. He is not, strictly speaking, a private detective, but head of the Paris security authority, the Sûreté, and has a criminal past — a nod to the real-life figure Eugène François Vidocq, about whom we have previously reported in detail. Alongside him stands an amateur detective, Père Tabaret. Both solve their cases through the same analytical and deductive methods already employed by Dupin. Lecoq, however, differs in one important respect: he is a police officer. For him, criminal cases are not merely intellectual puzzles, but quite simply his profession.

 

It is therefore rather the figure of Père Tabaret who views the solving of cases as both challenge and pleasure, and thus more closely resembles the independent investigator embodied today by private detectives in Duisburg. Gaboriau describes the solving of criminal cases to a certain extent as a science, and what we now call forensic science — though not yet formally established as such at the time — is already presented by him as an essential means of reaching a solution. Later, Arthur Conan Doyle would adopt this approach for Sherlock Holmes, openly expressing his admiration not only for Poe but also for Gaboriau, whom he counted among his influences.

The First Female Detectives in Literature

From this point onwards, the detective story increasingly takes shape and certain framework conditions are established. The narrative no longer focuses on how the crime occurred — that would move it closer to the crime novel — but rather reconstructs the case retrospectively. The crime has already happened at the beginning of the story, and the task of the detective — and increasingly also of the reader — is to discover the perpetrator. Above all, “amateur detectives” begin to replace professional police investigators: Dupin was not a police officer, nor was Père Tabaret.

 

In Germany it was not a detective from Duisburg but an aristocratic globetrotter from Braunschweig, Hans von Solberg, whom Friedrich Gerstäcker had solve a crime in his serial novel Im Eckfenster. In the United States, however, in the stories of Anna Katharine Green (née Rohlfs), a police inspector initially again took centre stage: Ebenezer Gryce (from 1878 onwards). Later, however, he too was joined by someone outside the police service — one of the first female detectives in literature, Miss Amelia Butterworth — who became a second main character alongside the inspector.

From Police Investigation to the Private Investigator

Thus, the boundaries between professional police work and passionate private detection remain somewhat blurred for a long time. Writers were still hesitant fully to detach the detective figure from official police structures. One man, however, would change that decisively from 1892 onwards, relegating all police friends and helpers to supporting roles — a man who serves directly or indirectly as a model for all modern detectives, including those at Kurtz Investigations Duisburg. But we shall turn to Sherlock Holmes in the next instalment of our series Private Detectives in Literature.

Author: Gerrit Koehler

 

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