‘… some men come up’— the Detective appears

Abstract

At the centre of modern crime fiction stands an investigating agent—an amateur detective, a professional but private investigator, a single policemen, a police force acting together. Specially skilled people discover the cause of a crime, restore order and bring the criminal to account. This function has been so important in recent crime stories that two well-known analysts sought the history of the genre in detection from the past. Régis Messac goes back to the classics and the bible for his earlier examples in his enormous book Le (Detective Novel’ et Vinfluence de la pensée scientifique. Dorothy Sayers does the same in her first Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horror. Both writers take detective fiction to be the same as crime fiction. But before the detective appeared there were stories that suggested how crime could be controlled. Most would have been oral, and many of those that were written down were evanescent, in pamphlet form. Yet enough material has survived to establish the nature and ideology of crime fiction without detectives. The Newgate Calendar is a convenient source for such a study. This will make it possible to see clearly the patterns of meaning established through the persona of the detective. These begin to emerge in The Adventures of Caleb Williams and Les Mémoires de Vidocq, which will also be examined in this chapter. The full, confident deployment of the detective in recognisably modern ways takes place in the texts discussed in later chapters.