IWhere it all began

In 1833 a man who had spent his youth in and out of French prisons opened an office in Paris. His name was Eugène-François Vidocq. He had escaped from jail several times, then changed sides, and for many years he ran the Sûreté, the plain-clothes police he had built himself. When he left, he founded Le bureau des renseignements, the Office of Information. It is considered the first private detective agency in the world.¹

Vidocq hired mostly former convicts, people who knew the hiding places and habits of criminals better than any policeman. His clients were businesspeople and private citizens, and his targets were swindlers, fraudsters and people who went bankrupt on purpose. His methods were not always legal.¹ That detail matters, and we will come back to it.

The trade spreads

In London, Charles Frederick Field retired in 1852 as head of the Detective Branch of the Metropolitan Police and set up as a private detective. Charles Dickens knew him well, and Field is best remembered as the model for Inspector Bucket in Bleak House.²

Around 1850, in Chicago, a Scottish-born barrel maker named Allan Pinkerton founded the agency that would carry his name. From the 1870s to the 1890s it was the largest private law enforcement organisation in the world. Its emblem was an open eye with the words “We never sleep”,³ and the phrase “private eye” is often traced back to it.

The tools have changed beyond recognition. The question clients bring has not.

The detective of fiction and the detective of fact

In 1887 Arthur Conan Doyle published A Study in Scarlet, the first story about Sherlock Holmes.⁴ Since then most of us have met detectives in books and films long before meeting one in life, and fiction has given them brilliant leaps of logic, chases and confessions in the last chapter.

The real work is quieter. An investigator spends most of the day reading registers and documents, comparing what people say with what the papers show, making careful notes and waiting. Many investigators work for lawyers, in civil and criminal cases.⁵ A good investigation is rarely one brilliant guess. It is a hundred small facts, each one checked, put in order and written down so clearly that someone else, a lawyer or a judge, can follow the reasoning and rely on it.

What has not changed

Vidocq’s clients wanted what our clients want: to know the truth about a person or a situation before taking a decision that matters. A marriage, a business partner, a relative who has disappeared, an employee who may be stealing. The tools have changed beyond recognition. The question has not. What has changed most is the law around the work, and that is the subject of the next chapter.