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The Good Guesser
An essay by Louis Bayard about The Black Tower, an historical mystery set
in the early 19th century
Five years ago, I'm embarrassed to say,
I didn't know who Eugène François Vidocq
was. It took Edgar Allan Poe to bring us
together.
In the course of researching The Pale
Blue Eye, I reread Poe's "The Murders in
the Rue Morgue," which is widely regarded
as the world's first detective story. But is it?
Turns out that Poe's great sleuth, Dupin, in
the course of describing his methodology,
makes a glancing—and slighting—
reference to a gentleman named Vidocq,
whom he immediately dismisses as "a good
guesser" lacking "educated thought" and
constantly erring "by the very intensity
of his investigations."
Two things struck me right off. First, Dupin considered it important to get
a leg up on his predecessor (much as
Sherlock Holmes would feel compelled
to do with Dupin). And second, this
particular predecessor needed no
introduction to the general reader.
In fact, by 1841, when Poe's story was
published, Vidocq was a household name
on both sides of the Atlantic, a figure who
could be cited by Dickens and Melville
without any explanatory glossing. We can
attribute Vidocq's fame in large part to his
gift for self-promotion. Specifically, he was
the author of four bestselling volumes of
memoirs. These books were at least partly
fictional; two were unauthorized; all were
ghostwritten. But taken together they
represent perhaps the first sustained
detective narrative in any language,
and Vidocq himself stands as our first
modern detective.
Before Vidocq, solving crime was an
administrative matter; after Vidocq, it
became a field of endeavor in which a man
(or woman) could apply the full dint of his
talent and intellect and call on the latest
developments in both art and science. So
it was that Vidocq was the first policeman
to use ballistics evidence, the first to take
plaster-of-Paris impressions of footprints,
one of the very first to recognize the
potential of fingerprints (decades before
that potential would be realized). He was a
master of disguise and surveillance, he held
patents for invisible ink and unalterable
bond paper, and when he left public
service—under a cloud, as always—he
founded the world's first private detective
agency, the Bureau des Renseignements,
which was the template for Allan Pinkerton's
agency a quarter century later.
But to Vidocq's contemporaries—foes
and allies alike—he was above all a convict.
Initially imprisoned for a slight offense,
Vidocq managed to escape from virtually
all of France's penal institutions, each
escape only adding more years to his
next sentence. Eventually, he worked
his way back to Paris, where, after being
blackmailed by former confederates (one
of them his ex-wife), he decided a change
was in order. So he volunteered his services
as a police spy.
In this capacity, he proved so invaluable
to the Prefecture of Police that he was
able to ascend the chain of command at a
remarkable clip, and in 1812 he cofounded
the Brigade de la Sûreté, one of the very
first plainclothes police divisions. This
was a controversial proposition in its day,
especially because Vidocq insisted on
staffing it with ex-convicts like himself,
reasoning that they were the ones best
suited to infiltrating criminal milieus.
And he was right. Thanks to the Sûreté's
aggressive and creative policing, Paris's
crime rate declined markedly, and Vidocq
became a folk hero to the local populace.
As comfortable as he was in working-class
districts, he could play the other side of the
street, too. He was an exotically menacing
figure for the high-society hostesses of
the Faubourg Saint-Germain, and his
comrades included the likes of Balzac
and Dumas.
If some of the outlines of Vidocq's
life sound familiar, it's because they were
appropriated by another author, Victor
Hugo, for his masterwork Les Misérables.
Hugo essentially split Vidocq in two,
channeling the embattled convict years
into Jean Valjean and transforming the
fearsome servant of justice into Inspector
Javert. I can't think of a better tribute to
a man's significance than that he must
be halved in order to be sufficiently
understood.
Vidocq, I soon learned, was everything
a novelist dotes on: robust, contrary,
appetitive, and a good man to have in a
brawl. If anybody could solve the mystery
surrounding the Lost Dauphin, I knew it
would be the baker's son from Arras. The
life Vidocq contrived for himself was itself
a kind of enduring fiction, and more than
a hundred and fifty years after his death,
he is still winking at us—and still shaping
how we think and talk about crime and
punishment.
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