27 Dec 2011 04:50:46
One of the things early Victorian Britain most prided itself on as a nation was its lack of detectives. They were a nasty French phenomenon – donning "plain clothes" to hide their real identities, spying on people, intruding into private lives – and distinctly un-British. Times change, and national identities with them. By 1914 detective branches were not only well established over most of England, but had become the stuff of popular fiction and reportage.Did the latter have something to do with the former? Were people's initial doubts about detective policing allayed by press and fictional accounts of it? Haia Shpayer-Makov's new book should provide the answer. The first part is about the growth of the detective branches themselves (especially in London), and the way they were recruited and run. In broad outline this will be pretty familiar stuff to police historians, but is wonderfully amplified here. It misses some tricks, I think: in particular the influence of Anglo-Irish and colonial police methods on detective work in England, through transfers of personnel. The second part is more original, and deals with the way detectives were presented to the public in newspapers, in their own memoirs – a new and remarkably numerous genre in the 1890s and 1900s – and in novels.
There can be no doubt that this often helped. Shpayer-Makov credits Charles Dickens, for example, with boosting the image of detectives almost single-handedly with a series of flattering pieces he wrote about them, based on interviews and having accompanied them on their investigations, for his magazine Household Words in the 1850s. Given Dickens's fame and popularity, I'm sure she's right. The police were aware of this advantage of co-operating with writers, as well as of others – like getting kick-backs for feeding information to journalists. But it wasn't dependable. The Dickens effect, for example, was undermined when the Metropolitan Police's detectives – almost the whole department – were convicted of complicity in a betting scandal they were supposed to be investigating in 1877. That led to a fundamental reorganisation (and a new name: the CID), but not to any permanent restoration of its reputation. Events could be of use: moral panics, for example, terrorist threats, and the occasional sensational arrest, such as Dr Crippen's by DCI Walter Dew in 1910. Police detectives such as Dew achieved celebrity status in some newspapers, and of course in their own memoirs. But this was by no means universal.
Doubts remained, both about the basic principle of detective policing, and about the detectives' capacities. The old "British" objection to this form of policing survived mainly in radical circles; understandably, in view of what Shpayer-Makov confirms was its concentration on working-class offenders and neglect of "white-collar" ones, even in a period when "ordinary" crime was declining and "white-collar" offences – banking scams and so on – were on the increase. (Plus ça change.) But then crime at this time was mainly identified with the working classes; as were threats to "public order", against which it was the police's other leading role to guard. Secondly, reports of police corruption and shady methods kept surfacing – political espionage, agent-provocateuring, planting evidence, lying in court – further undermining trust. (Recent Guardian revelations are nothing new. This sort of thing may be endemic.) Lastly, the detective police found it difficult to live down some of its most high-profile failures, the worst of which of course was the failure to nab Jack the Ripper in 1888. But what could you expect, some argued, of men recruited from the working classes, often from rural areas with "bumpkin brains", no better educated than the rest of their class, poorly paid, and forced to pound the beat, mind-deadeningly, before being allowed into the detective élite? It would take a lot to counter this image. Ex-Inspector Herbert Fitch tried to in his memoir, writing of "the merciless activity of brains keener than Sherlock Holmes's", including his own, in pursuit of anarchists. But it was scarcely convincing, in an age that usually associated intelligence with superior class.
Holmes, in fact, was the official detectives' great bugbear. In the Arthur Conan Doyle stories the latter mainly served as a foil to his hero's superior intelligence. Inspector Lestrade of the CID is made to say "We're not jealous of you at Scotland Yard. No, sir, we are very proud of you," but that was not so in reality. Genuine detectives – judging from their memoirs – resented him greatly. Nearly all British fictional detective heroes right through to the 1940s, in fact, were private, and even after that most police detective characters – Appleby, Morse, Dalgliesh, Lynley (an eighth earl, no less) – can hardly have been taken to be typical. Certainly before 1914, novels could have done almost nothing to boost the official detective's reputation for intelligence and sagacity. The best they, and the press, could have done was to get people used to the idea of a detective police, and so drawn its sting. But that might have been enough.
In fact the perceived stupidity of the real detective police might even have been reassuring, in a way. It wouldn't do for them to be brighter than the middle classes. That was seen as one of the problems with the French system, leading a number of commentators to prefer their own plods, however many murders they failed to solve, to the more "cunning" European sort. (It was also why Holmes needed the dimmer Watson, and Poirot his Hastings – to make them more palatable to readers.) The English detective might be "a little obtuse", wrote the Times at the height of the Fenian bombing campaign of 1883-5; but it was "precisely because" of this "that his mild sway is undisputed". Even his shady dealings were somehow more tolerable if they were flat-footed. This could be another reason for the remarkable transition described in this fine and eminently readable book, from one set of patriotic values to another. If you had to have mouchards, then better they be dull, solid English ones.
