Real Life Private Investigators
Cop shows abound, as we all know, because most of us watch them, on television (or in my case Netflix, as previously discussed). I've mentioned a few such series previously.
Shows about private eyes have come and gone, going back to Peter Gunn and Mr. Lucky in the '50's, a host of shows thereafter (one of my favorites was Stacy Keach in Mickey Spillane's classic Mike Hammer in the '80's. Spillane wrote that in the '40's, btw).
Private investigators, in some form or another--from solving a friend or family's crisis or issue, to solving murders or other capital or major fiscal crimes--go back to Biblical times. Always with deadlines and death involved. And most often these P.I.'s are brought in to correct an injustice the authorities ignore or refuse to address--familiar themes that still resound today, and which I myself have used extensively in my E.C. Ayres mystery/thrillers.
The first mention of espionage is in the Old Testament (Numbers), when God tells Moses to send some men to spy on Canaan. Each of the twelve spies sent were the respective leaders of the 12 Tribes on their Exodus from Egypt.
The first known Private Investigator was a man named Eugene Francois Vidocq, a French soldier, privateer and career criminal back well before Sir Arthur Conan Doyle penned his Sherlock Holmes detective stories. Growing up in a wealthy household, at the age of 13 he became a teenage thief, stealing silver from his parents to buy luxuries for himself. His father arranged for an arrest and ten day incarceration to teach him a lesson, but it didn't work. A year later he stole a large sum of money, again from his parents, and tried to flee to America. But he was himself robbed and wound up penniless, and too ashamed and afraid to return home. After a year or so of misadventures working for a band of gypsies, and another of entertainers, then another of puppeteers, he finally returned home, with his proverbial tail between his legs, and was welcomed with open arms by his mother, relieved to see him again.
In 1791, at the age of 16, he enlisted in Napoleon's Bourbon Regiment, where he excelled in fencing (having learned as a young thug, basically), unfortunately to a degree in which he was challenging older soldiers in his own regiment to duel, fought 15, and slew two. For these fatal incidents he was little more than reprimanded: two weeks in the lockup, from which he helped a fellow inmate escape. Even so, he was able to rejoin the ranks, and when Napoleon invaded Austria the following year, Vidocq fought well in two battles and was promoted to Corporal in the Grenadiers. But then he challenged an officer to a duel at his very promotion ceremony, and was angrily refused (officers don't duel below their rank). So Vidocq assaulted him, and could have been shot for that, but he escaped. Then, using a false name, he re-enlisted in another regiment, and fought in yet another battle before being recognized as a deserter and dishonorably discharged.
Returning home to Arras and France at the age of 18, Vidocq resumed his nefarious ways, seducing women, drinking wine, stealing and gambling. Often his womanizing led to duels, and he fought the wrong man, winding up in prison from which he eventually escaped. Twice.
Vidocq returned home once again to Arras in 1800, and hid out in his mother's house (his father had died the year before). only to be recognized as a fugitive and having to flee again. .
After several years of living in and out of prison, constantly in disrepute and often pursued, he decided the time had come for some self-reformation. So he offered his services to the Parisian police, and worked as a spy from within the prison system, thereby helping to prevent or solve crimes on the outside. He did this while serving his own sentence for 21 months, before finally being released.
In 1811 Vidocq put together a plainclothes detective unit called Le Brigade de Surete (the Security Brigade) thus creating the first plain-clothes detectives who could work underground, in part because many of them were ex-criminals like Vidocq. The Paris police recognized their value and converted them to an official police unit. Napoleon later incorporated this into the Sûreté Nationale.The Surete grew rapidly, from eight to twenty three officers by 1823, plus eight undercover agents who were paid with licenses for their own gambling halls.
In 1833 Vidocq formed an agency of his own, which would be the first successful company of private investigators. Eugene Francois Vidocq pioneered the craft of criminal forensics, and such techniques as the use of plaster casts of hand, foot, or shoe prints, as well as indelible ink and unalterable paper. His technique of anthropometrics (the study of the human body and it's movements) remains in use to this day by private investigators and police precincts worldwide.
Meanwhile, in the New World a Scotsman named Allan Pinkerton had emigrated from Glasgow to the U.S. to start a new life. He was self-educated, for the most part, but an avid reader, whose imagination was no doubt stimulated by tales of the American West. This was in 1841, well before the California Gold Rush, but we can be sure that he would become intrigued by that as well.
Pinkerton made his living as a cooper (barrel-maker) at a time when barrels were in high demand, from farmers to households to merchants to shippers. He'd been out in a nearby forest looking for wood for his cooperage, when he witnessed an interaction involving what was most likely the notorious gang of counterfeiters known as the Banditi of the Prairie. He followed the perpetrators and turned then in, which led to him becoming the first real-life police detective in the Chicago PD. That was in 1849. After a year of that, Pinkerton went private (better pay, potentially) and teamed up with Chicago attorney Edward Rucker to establish the Pinkerton Detective Agency, which continues today as Pinkerton Consulting and Investigations (more legal sounding?).
Pinkerton's company logo was an eye wide open with the subtitle: 'We never sleep.' Heading west in the mid '50's, he foiled a series of train robberies, which brought him to the attention of George McClellan, at the time VP of the Illinois Central RR. The company's lawyer was a young upstart named Abraham Lincoln.
Through those connections, Pinkerton became involved with a group of Abolitionists, led by John Brown and Frederick Douglass. Brown was planning his famous ill-fated raid on the army arsenal in Harper's Ferry, Virginia, to gather arms for a slave revolt. After successfully seizing the arsenal, a company of U.S. Marines, under Col. Robert E. Lee, were brought in to retake it, which they did. Among Lee's staff were Stonewall Jackson, and Jeb Stuart.
After supplying the failed Abolitionists, Pinkerton had returned to Chicago and thus evaded capture and execution.
The Civil War brought him a new opportunity. Moving to the nation's besieged Capitol, he was appointed by Lincoln, who knew him now, to head up the new Union Intelligence Service--the forerunner to the Secret Service, whose job was to protect the President. Pinkerton foiled an assassination plot in Baltimore, when Lincoln was passing through en-route to the Capital.
Not content to remain in the Capital, Pinkerton made the bold decision to go underground, assumed the alias of Major E.J. Allen--complete with appropriate uniform and insignia (perhaps acquired during one of the battles in the North--and headed into the Deep South for some espionage. In the Summer of 1861 he was able to infiltrate fortifications and access Confederate battle plans. His luck ran out in Memphis, however, on his way back north and he was barely able to escape.
.
Pinkerton returned west after the war to resumed his favored pursuit of train robbers, but his failure to apprehend Jesse James was his one great disappointment in his life. His opposition to labor unions and work to suppress a revolution by slaves in Cuba also stained his legacy.
That said, Like Eugene Vidocq, Alan Pinkerton was a trend-setter in real-life investigatory methods, whose methods are still in use today. The U.S. Army Counterintelligence Agency emerged from Pinkerton's vital under-cover work during the Civil War.
E.C.
Shows about private eyes have come and gone, going back to Peter Gunn and Mr. Lucky in the '50's, a host of shows thereafter (one of my favorites was Stacy Keach in Mickey Spillane's classic Mike Hammer in the '80's. Spillane wrote that in the '40's, btw).
Private investigators, in some form or another--from solving a friend or family's crisis or issue, to solving murders or other capital or major fiscal crimes--go back to Biblical times. Always with deadlines and death involved. And most often these P.I.'s are brought in to correct an injustice the authorities ignore or refuse to address--familiar themes that still resound today, and which I myself have used extensively in my E.C. Ayres mystery/thrillers.
The first mention of espionage is in the Old Testament (Numbers), when God tells Moses to send some men to spy on Canaan. Each of the twelve spies sent were the respective leaders of the 12 Tribes on their Exodus from Egypt.
The first known Private Investigator was a man named Eugene Francois Vidocq, a French soldier, privateer and career criminal back well before Sir Arthur Conan Doyle penned his Sherlock Holmes detective stories. Growing up in a wealthy household, at the age of 13 he became a teenage thief, stealing silver from his parents to buy luxuries for himself. His father arranged for an arrest and ten day incarceration to teach him a lesson, but it didn't work. A year later he stole a large sum of money, again from his parents, and tried to flee to America. But he was himself robbed and wound up penniless, and too ashamed and afraid to return home. After a year or so of misadventures working for a band of gypsies, and another of entertainers, then another of puppeteers, he finally returned home, with his proverbial tail between his legs, and was welcomed with open arms by his mother, relieved to see him again.
In 1791, at the age of 16, he enlisted in Napoleon's Bourbon Regiment, where he excelled in fencing (having learned as a young thug, basically), unfortunately to a degree in which he was challenging older soldiers in his own regiment to duel, fought 15, and slew two. For these fatal incidents he was little more than reprimanded: two weeks in the lockup, from which he helped a fellow inmate escape. Even so, he was able to rejoin the ranks, and when Napoleon invaded Austria the following year, Vidocq fought well in two battles and was promoted to Corporal in the Grenadiers. But then he challenged an officer to a duel at his very promotion ceremony, and was angrily refused (officers don't duel below their rank). So Vidocq assaulted him, and could have been shot for that, but he escaped. Then, using a false name, he re-enlisted in another regiment, and fought in yet another battle before being recognized as a deserter and dishonorably discharged.
Returning home to Arras and France at the age of 18, Vidocq resumed his nefarious ways, seducing women, drinking wine, stealing and gambling. Often his womanizing led to duels, and he fought the wrong man, winding up in prison from which he eventually escaped. Twice.
Vidocq returned home once again to Arras in 1800, and hid out in his mother's house (his father had died the year before). only to be recognized as a fugitive and having to flee again. .
After several years of living in and out of prison, constantly in disrepute and often pursued, he decided the time had come for some self-reformation. So he offered his services to the Parisian police, and worked as a spy from within the prison system, thereby helping to prevent or solve crimes on the outside. He did this while serving his own sentence for 21 months, before finally being released.
In 1811 Vidocq put together a plainclothes detective unit called Le Brigade de Surete (the Security Brigade) thus creating the first plain-clothes detectives who could work underground, in part because many of them were ex-criminals like Vidocq. The Paris police recognized their value and converted them to an official police unit. Napoleon later incorporated this into the Sûreté Nationale.The Surete grew rapidly, from eight to twenty three officers by 1823, plus eight undercover agents who were paid with licenses for their own gambling halls.
In 1833 Vidocq formed an agency of his own, which would be the first successful company of private investigators. Eugene Francois Vidocq pioneered the craft of criminal forensics, and such techniques as the use of plaster casts of hand, foot, or shoe prints, as well as indelible ink and unalterable paper. His technique of anthropometrics (the study of the human body and it's movements) remains in use to this day by private investigators and police precincts worldwide.
Meanwhile, in the New World a Scotsman named Allan Pinkerton had emigrated from Glasgow to the U.S. to start a new life. He was self-educated, for the most part, but an avid reader, whose imagination was no doubt stimulated by tales of the American West. This was in 1841, well before the California Gold Rush, but we can be sure that he would become intrigued by that as well.
Pinkerton made his living as a cooper (barrel-maker) at a time when barrels were in high demand, from farmers to households to merchants to shippers. He'd been out in a nearby forest looking for wood for his cooperage, when he witnessed an interaction involving what was most likely the notorious gang of counterfeiters known as the Banditi of the Prairie. He followed the perpetrators and turned then in, which led to him becoming the first real-life police detective in the Chicago PD. That was in 1849. After a year of that, Pinkerton went private (better pay, potentially) and teamed up with Chicago attorney Edward Rucker to establish the Pinkerton Detective Agency, which continues today as Pinkerton Consulting and Investigations (more legal sounding?).
Pinkerton's company logo was an eye wide open with the subtitle: 'We never sleep.' Heading west in the mid '50's, he foiled a series of train robberies, which brought him to the attention of George McClellan, at the time VP of the Illinois Central RR. The company's lawyer was a young upstart named Abraham Lincoln.
Through those connections, Pinkerton became involved with a group of Abolitionists, led by John Brown and Frederick Douglass. Brown was planning his famous ill-fated raid on the army arsenal in Harper's Ferry, Virginia, to gather arms for a slave revolt. After successfully seizing the arsenal, a company of U.S. Marines, under Col. Robert E. Lee, were brought in to retake it, which they did. Among Lee's staff were Stonewall Jackson, and Jeb Stuart.
After supplying the failed Abolitionists, Pinkerton had returned to Chicago and thus evaded capture and execution.
The Civil War brought him a new opportunity. Moving to the nation's besieged Capitol, he was appointed by Lincoln, who knew him now, to head up the new Union Intelligence Service--the forerunner to the Secret Service, whose job was to protect the President. Pinkerton foiled an assassination plot in Baltimore, when Lincoln was passing through en-route to the Capital.
Not content to remain in the Capital, Pinkerton made the bold decision to go underground, assumed the alias of Major E.J. Allen--complete with appropriate uniform and insignia (perhaps acquired during one of the battles in the North--and headed into the Deep South for some espionage. In the Summer of 1861 he was able to infiltrate fortifications and access Confederate battle plans. His luck ran out in Memphis, however, on his way back north and he was barely able to escape.
.
Pinkerton returned west after the war to resumed his favored pursuit of train robbers, but his failure to apprehend Jesse James was his one great disappointment in his life. His opposition to labor unions and work to suppress a revolution by slaves in Cuba also stained his legacy.
That said, Like Eugene Vidocq, Alan Pinkerton was a trend-setter in real-life investigatory methods, whose methods are still in use today. The U.S. Army Counterintelligence Agency emerged from Pinkerton's vital under-cover work during the Civil War.
E.C.
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