Discussion Post: The Retired Colourman
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sherlock60This week, the canon story we’re looking at is The Retired Colourman and the chosen topic is Private Detectives. (You may also like to look back at the Pinkerton Detective Agency discussion post.)
Must admit I couldn’t find much on this subject online but here’s what I got.
A few facts:
🔎 In 1833, Eugène François Vidocq… founded the first known private detective agency, "Le Bureau des Renseignements Universels pour le commerce et l'Industrie" ("The Office of Universal Information For Commerce and Industry") and hired ex-convicts. Official law enforcement tried many times to shut it down. In 1842, police arrested him in suspicion of unlawful imprisonment and taking money on false pretences after he had solved an embezzlement case. Vidocq later suspected that it had been a set-up. He was sentenced to five years and fined 3,000-francs, but the Court of Appeals released him. Vidocq is credited with having introduced record-keeping, criminology, and ballistics to criminal investigation. He made the first plaster casts of shoe impressions. He created indelible ink and unalterable bond paper with his printing company. His form of anthropometrics [measurements and proportions of the human body] is still partially used by French police…
After Vidocq, the industry was born… Much of what private investigators did in the early days was to act as the police in matters for which their clients felt the police were not equipped or willing to do. A larger role for this new private investigative industry was to assist companies in labor disputes. Some early private investigators provided armed guards to act as a private militia.
In the United Kingdom, Charles Frederick Field set up an enquiry office upon his retirement from the Metropolitan Police in 1852… In 1862, one of his employees, the Hungarian Ignatius Paul Pollaky, left him and set up a rival agency. Although little-remembered today, Pollaky's fame at the time was such that he was mentioned in various books of the 1870s and immortalized as "Paddington" Pollaky for his "keen penetration" in the 1881 comic opera, Patience.
In the United States, Allan Pinkerton established the Pinkerton National Detective Agency - a private detective agency - in 1850… [Wikipedia]
🔎 Charles Frederick Field, a veteran of the Met’s Detective Department, began his own “private Inquiry Office” in the City following his retirement in 1852. [Rachael Griffin] ...he got into trouble with his former superiors when, during his private detective work, he was referred to by the press as "Inspector Field," which gave the impression that he was falsely encouraging people to believe that he was still affiliated with the Metropolitan Police. This confusion may well have been inadvertent, but the issue gave Field some trouble, and his pension was even stopped for six months in reprisal… [Rhode Island College]
🔎 Ignatius Paul Pollaky (1828 – 25 February 1918) also known as "Paddington" Pollaky, born in Hungary, became one of the first and best-known professional private detectives in Britain… In 1862 he started an early private detective agency in Britain, Pollaky's Private Inquiry Office. One of his first commissions was from Henry Sanford who asked him to spy on Confederate agents in Britain who were purchasing supplies for the American Civil War. From 1865 until 1882 his office was located at 13 Paddington Green, hence his nickname. He often advertised in the personal section of The Times offering assistance in "election, divorce and libel cases" or "discreet enquiries in England or abroad". From 1861 onwards, he also was in the habit of inserting mysterious messages in the "Agony" columns, presumably linked to cases that he was working on.
In 1867 he joined the X Division of the Metropolitan Police as a special constable. He specialised in intelligence on aliens living in Britain. His experience in this area made him advocate the registration of all aliens upon arrival in Britain, something which was not done at the time...
In 1882 he retired from the private investigation business and closed his office. [Wikipedia]
🔎 Henry Goddard is the only Bow Street Runner to have had his memoirs published. They were published in 1956 by Museum Press, with an introduction by Patrick Pringle.
Goddard enlisted in the Foot Patrol, the lowest paid of the Bow Street Forces, in 1824. He resigned in 1826 to become an officer at Great Marlborough Street Police Station, later rejoining Bow Street in 1834, where he remained until they were disbanded in 1839. Then in 1840 he became the first Chief Constable of the County of Northamptonshire. In 1849 he returned to London and worked in the Department of the Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod at the House of Lords, first as a messenger and then as one of the three principal gatekeepers. At the same time, he continued working as a private detective.
Pringle relates that, 'Most of his private detective cases, came from John & Daniel Forrester, who continued to run a semi-official private-detective agency in the City of London for nearly twenty years after the Bow Street and other metropolitan police-office Runners had been disbanded. The Forrester brothers were the most famous detectives of their day, and the police-court reports in contemporary newspapers contain many accounts of their exploits. [York Book Fair]
🔎 Leicester's first private detective (formerly a policeman), Francis 'Tanky' Smith had a legendary ability to infiltrate the street gangs and criminal fraternities of Leicester in the mid-1800s… A master of disguise, he is believed to have been one of the men on whom Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes character was based. [University of Leicester]
🔎 Jerome Caminada (1844 – March 1914) was a 19th-century police officer in Manchester, England. Caminada served with the police between 1868 and 1899, and has been called Manchester's Sherlock Holmes… Caminada retired in 1899, and become a private detective, an estate agent, and a Manchester city councillor for Openshaw between 1907 and 1910. [Wikipedia]
🔎 In many cases, [Victorian] PIs were drawn from the pool of retired police officers with experience collecting evidence. In other instances, PIs were simply individuals with the time or inclination to take up this line of work. [Rachael Griffin]
🔎 Private detectives were enlarged massively, as a profession, by the 1857 divorce (‘Matrimonial Causes’) Act. [That is, they found evidence of adultery.] [John Sutherland] ...the new divorce laws resulted in the emergence of private detectives (usually belonging to the middle classes) who stood apart from the police. [Rashmi Sahni]
🔎 While there were many private detectives in Britain in the [Victorian] period, and their number grew during the latter part of the nineteenth century, such detectives did not in reality deal with the majority of those violations of the law most often associated with them in literature – notably murder – nor did they possess the special constabulary powers that would in fact have been required to enable them to discharge certain detective duties. The modern police forces, which spread out over the entire country during the second quarter of the nineteenth century, financed by public funds, were the primary apparatus for tackling crime, and were increasingly perceived as such. It was the police detective departments, created in larger urban forces from the middle of the century onwards, which handled the serious offences. [Haia Shpayer-Makov]
🔎 Even less realistic was the fictional motif of cooperation [in Victorian detective stories] between police and professional private detectives... From time to time, the police did collaborate with private detectives who were former colleagues in the police, and once in a while with America’s Pinkerton sleuths in international cases. ...[but] in fact joint ventures were few and far between. In any event, private detectives were not, in reality, accorded equal status with police officers, nor did the figure of the gentlemanly detective have actual equivalents. Certainly, private investigators did not have the authority to manage police inquiries. [Haia Shpayer-Makov]
🔎 …[Victorian] private detectives barely figured in press reports, and little was known about them and their work… ...their assignments in real life were on the whole less stirring than those police detectives, especially in the central branch in London, as they were barred from dealing with serious crime… In any case, they generally did not get a good press, even when they were mentioned in newspaper reports. [Haia Shpayer-Makov]
🔎 Evidence shows that the majority of real-life police detectives came from the working class, with a minority coming from the lower middle class. Conceivably, because people from these backgrounds were not associated in the public mind with glamour and important accomplishments, popular writers tended not to portray them as heroes, and certainly not as super-heroes, in the belief that the reading public, which was largely (though not exclusively) middle class, would not easily identify with such heroes. As very little was known about real private detectives, authors were less bound by readers' expectations when it came to fleshing them out, and they could draw on their imagination more freely. The result was that fictional private detectives, particularly if they were the main investigators, were often depicted as having a middle- or upper-class identity, and so could be portrayed without reservation as highly talented or even as outstanding. [Haia Shpayer-Makov]
🔎 ...the preponderance in the fiction of the [Victorian] period of characters with no detective experience, or private detectives who repeatedly handle cases of crime, whether for a fee or not, might be a carry-over of the eighteenth century tradition that the victim, and not the authorities, commonly initiated the pursuit and prosecution of the offender; and therefore the entire process of detection and substantiation of evidence. All this was done at the victim's own expense…
From the mid-eighteenth century the Bow Street Magistrate’s Office in London (which also functioned as a summary court) engaged a handful of detectives, later called the Bow Street Runners, though they could also be hired privately for a fee. From the end of the eighteenth century, other, newly formed, Police Offices in London tasked some of their experienced officers with detective assignments, but the overall number of these detectives and the Bow Street Runners was very small – not more than 60 or 70 – and these were deployed both in London and in the provinces...
The detection of crime before the formation of the new police thus relied mainly on persons who were not part of the formal system of law enforcement...
...in mid-nineteenth century – the early days of detective fiction – it was perhaps natural for writers of fiction to assume that all kinds of people unconnected with the police would be involved in chasing offenders. This was the reality in which they lived. The retention of this motif in late-nineteenth century fiction suggests that many people still thought in terms of self-help when it came to solving crime... In fact, the number and diversity of private bodies and agents who carried out detective tasks actually expanded as the century progressed. Sometimes the police informally allowed private detectives to undertake tasks they themselves did not want to do (and, alternatively, provided services to private companies or individuals for a fee)... [Haia Shpayer-Makov]
Some useful resources:
Revisiting the Detective Figure in Late Victorian and Edwardian Fiction: A View from the Perspective of Police History By Haia Shpayer-Makov. An academic work in PDF form. As the title says, this is mainly a look at fictional police and private detectives, but there are some references to the real-life private detectives too.
Private investigator: History On Wikipedia.
The Real PIs of Victorian London By Rachael Griffin, on Victorian Detectives.
Ascent of the Detective: Police Sleuths in Victorian and Edwardian England A review by Dr John Carter Wood of the book by Haia Shpayer-Makov. In part, compares fictional private detectives with fictional and real police detectives.
Ignatius Paul Pollaky On Wikipedia.
Top Hat Terrace, London Road (LE2 0QT) Hanging on London Road with 'Tanky' Smith, Leicester's first private detective. On the University of Leicester’s website.
Inspector Charles Frederick Field On the Rhode Island College website.
Charles Frederick Field On Wikipedia.
Jerome Caminada On Wikipedia.
Bow Street Runner, Chief Constable, Private Detective & Gatekeeper at the House of Lords. Goddard, Henry The 1854 manuscript diary of Henry Goddard (1800-1883) together with first edition copy of Memoirs of a Bow Street Runner. Photographs of the diary with brief biography of Goddard. On The York Book Fair website.
The detective as heroic literary type By Rashmi Sahni, on the Victorian Web. A brief mention of real-life private detectives.
The History of Private Investigators and the Investigation Trade By Steven Farrell, on eInvestigator.
The Ascent of the Detective: Police Sleuths in Victorian and Edwardian England By Haia Shpayer-Makov. A preview on Google books, so may or may not work for you.
Sherlock Holmes, the world's most famous literary detective By John Sutherland, on the British Library website.
Vivien O'Neve A photograph. Should (hopefully) be the first image that comes up in the search. Labelled on Pinterest as A rare Victorian photograph of female private detective Vivien O'Neve (pictured central in black dress) with her assistants Janie (left) and Chloe (right). Behind the three ladies stands Vivien's bodyguard Mr. Stewart. Just in shot with the beard is a character enticingly referred to as 'an unknown local doctor'. I can find absolutely nothing online about Vivien O’Neve but this was too intriguing a photograph not to include.
Please feel free to discuss this topic in the comments.
Please also feel free to comment about the canon story itself or any related aspects outside this week’s theme. For example, any reactions, thoughts, theories, fic recs, favourite adaptations of the canon story… Or any other contribution you wish to make. And if you have any suggestions for fic prompts springing from this week's story, please feel free to share those in the comments as well.
Must admit I couldn’t find much on this subject online but here’s what I got.
A few facts:
🔎 In 1833, Eugène François Vidocq… founded the first known private detective agency, "Le Bureau des Renseignements Universels pour le commerce et l'Industrie" ("The Office of Universal Information For Commerce and Industry") and hired ex-convicts. Official law enforcement tried many times to shut it down. In 1842, police arrested him in suspicion of unlawful imprisonment and taking money on false pretences after he had solved an embezzlement case. Vidocq later suspected that it had been a set-up. He was sentenced to five years and fined 3,000-francs, but the Court of Appeals released him. Vidocq is credited with having introduced record-keeping, criminology, and ballistics to criminal investigation. He made the first plaster casts of shoe impressions. He created indelible ink and unalterable bond paper with his printing company. His form of anthropometrics [measurements and proportions of the human body] is still partially used by French police…
After Vidocq, the industry was born… Much of what private investigators did in the early days was to act as the police in matters for which their clients felt the police were not equipped or willing to do. A larger role for this new private investigative industry was to assist companies in labor disputes. Some early private investigators provided armed guards to act as a private militia.
In the United Kingdom, Charles Frederick Field set up an enquiry office upon his retirement from the Metropolitan Police in 1852… In 1862, one of his employees, the Hungarian Ignatius Paul Pollaky, left him and set up a rival agency. Although little-remembered today, Pollaky's fame at the time was such that he was mentioned in various books of the 1870s and immortalized as "Paddington" Pollaky for his "keen penetration" in the 1881 comic opera, Patience.
In the United States, Allan Pinkerton established the Pinkerton National Detective Agency - a private detective agency - in 1850… [Wikipedia]
🔎 Charles Frederick Field, a veteran of the Met’s Detective Department, began his own “private Inquiry Office” in the City following his retirement in 1852. [Rachael Griffin] ...he got into trouble with his former superiors when, during his private detective work, he was referred to by the press as "Inspector Field," which gave the impression that he was falsely encouraging people to believe that he was still affiliated with the Metropolitan Police. This confusion may well have been inadvertent, but the issue gave Field some trouble, and his pension was even stopped for six months in reprisal… [Rhode Island College]
🔎 Ignatius Paul Pollaky (1828 – 25 February 1918) also known as "Paddington" Pollaky, born in Hungary, became one of the first and best-known professional private detectives in Britain… In 1862 he started an early private detective agency in Britain, Pollaky's Private Inquiry Office. One of his first commissions was from Henry Sanford who asked him to spy on Confederate agents in Britain who were purchasing supplies for the American Civil War. From 1865 until 1882 his office was located at 13 Paddington Green, hence his nickname. He often advertised in the personal section of The Times offering assistance in "election, divorce and libel cases" or "discreet enquiries in England or abroad". From 1861 onwards, he also was in the habit of inserting mysterious messages in the "Agony" columns, presumably linked to cases that he was working on.
In 1867 he joined the X Division of the Metropolitan Police as a special constable. He specialised in intelligence on aliens living in Britain. His experience in this area made him advocate the registration of all aliens upon arrival in Britain, something which was not done at the time...
In 1882 he retired from the private investigation business and closed his office. [Wikipedia]
🔎 Henry Goddard is the only Bow Street Runner to have had his memoirs published. They were published in 1956 by Museum Press, with an introduction by Patrick Pringle.
Goddard enlisted in the Foot Patrol, the lowest paid of the Bow Street Forces, in 1824. He resigned in 1826 to become an officer at Great Marlborough Street Police Station, later rejoining Bow Street in 1834, where he remained until they were disbanded in 1839. Then in 1840 he became the first Chief Constable of the County of Northamptonshire. In 1849 he returned to London and worked in the Department of the Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod at the House of Lords, first as a messenger and then as one of the three principal gatekeepers. At the same time, he continued working as a private detective.
Pringle relates that, 'Most of his private detective cases, came from John & Daniel Forrester, who continued to run a semi-official private-detective agency in the City of London for nearly twenty years after the Bow Street and other metropolitan police-office Runners had been disbanded. The Forrester brothers were the most famous detectives of their day, and the police-court reports in contemporary newspapers contain many accounts of their exploits. [York Book Fair]
🔎 Leicester's first private detective (formerly a policeman), Francis 'Tanky' Smith had a legendary ability to infiltrate the street gangs and criminal fraternities of Leicester in the mid-1800s… A master of disguise, he is believed to have been one of the men on whom Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes character was based. [University of Leicester]
🔎 Jerome Caminada (1844 – March 1914) was a 19th-century police officer in Manchester, England. Caminada served with the police between 1868 and 1899, and has been called Manchester's Sherlock Holmes… Caminada retired in 1899, and become a private detective, an estate agent, and a Manchester city councillor for Openshaw between 1907 and 1910. [Wikipedia]
🔎 In many cases, [Victorian] PIs were drawn from the pool of retired police officers with experience collecting evidence. In other instances, PIs were simply individuals with the time or inclination to take up this line of work. [Rachael Griffin]
🔎 Private detectives were enlarged massively, as a profession, by the 1857 divorce (‘Matrimonial Causes’) Act. [That is, they found evidence of adultery.] [John Sutherland] ...the new divorce laws resulted in the emergence of private detectives (usually belonging to the middle classes) who stood apart from the police. [Rashmi Sahni]
🔎 While there were many private detectives in Britain in the [Victorian] period, and their number grew during the latter part of the nineteenth century, such detectives did not in reality deal with the majority of those violations of the law most often associated with them in literature – notably murder – nor did they possess the special constabulary powers that would in fact have been required to enable them to discharge certain detective duties. The modern police forces, which spread out over the entire country during the second quarter of the nineteenth century, financed by public funds, were the primary apparatus for tackling crime, and were increasingly perceived as such. It was the police detective departments, created in larger urban forces from the middle of the century onwards, which handled the serious offences. [Haia Shpayer-Makov]
🔎 Even less realistic was the fictional motif of cooperation [in Victorian detective stories] between police and professional private detectives... From time to time, the police did collaborate with private detectives who were former colleagues in the police, and once in a while with America’s Pinkerton sleuths in international cases. ...[but] in fact joint ventures were few and far between. In any event, private detectives were not, in reality, accorded equal status with police officers, nor did the figure of the gentlemanly detective have actual equivalents. Certainly, private investigators did not have the authority to manage police inquiries. [Haia Shpayer-Makov]
🔎 …[Victorian] private detectives barely figured in press reports, and little was known about them and their work… ...their assignments in real life were on the whole less stirring than those police detectives, especially in the central branch in London, as they were barred from dealing with serious crime… In any case, they generally did not get a good press, even when they were mentioned in newspaper reports. [Haia Shpayer-Makov]
🔎 Evidence shows that the majority of real-life police detectives came from the working class, with a minority coming from the lower middle class. Conceivably, because people from these backgrounds were not associated in the public mind with glamour and important accomplishments, popular writers tended not to portray them as heroes, and certainly not as super-heroes, in the belief that the reading public, which was largely (though not exclusively) middle class, would not easily identify with such heroes. As very little was known about real private detectives, authors were less bound by readers' expectations when it came to fleshing them out, and they could draw on their imagination more freely. The result was that fictional private detectives, particularly if they were the main investigators, were often depicted as having a middle- or upper-class identity, and so could be portrayed without reservation as highly talented or even as outstanding. [Haia Shpayer-Makov]
🔎 ...the preponderance in the fiction of the [Victorian] period of characters with no detective experience, or private detectives who repeatedly handle cases of crime, whether for a fee or not, might be a carry-over of the eighteenth century tradition that the victim, and not the authorities, commonly initiated the pursuit and prosecution of the offender; and therefore the entire process of detection and substantiation of evidence. All this was done at the victim's own expense…
From the mid-eighteenth century the Bow Street Magistrate’s Office in London (which also functioned as a summary court) engaged a handful of detectives, later called the Bow Street Runners, though they could also be hired privately for a fee. From the end of the eighteenth century, other, newly formed, Police Offices in London tasked some of their experienced officers with detective assignments, but the overall number of these detectives and the Bow Street Runners was very small – not more than 60 or 70 – and these were deployed both in London and in the provinces...
The detection of crime before the formation of the new police thus relied mainly on persons who were not part of the formal system of law enforcement...
...in mid-nineteenth century – the early days of detective fiction – it was perhaps natural for writers of fiction to assume that all kinds of people unconnected with the police would be involved in chasing offenders. This was the reality in which they lived. The retention of this motif in late-nineteenth century fiction suggests that many people still thought in terms of self-help when it came to solving crime... In fact, the number and diversity of private bodies and agents who carried out detective tasks actually expanded as the century progressed. Sometimes the police informally allowed private detectives to undertake tasks they themselves did not want to do (and, alternatively, provided services to private companies or individuals for a fee)... [Haia Shpayer-Makov]
Some useful resources:
Revisiting the Detective Figure in Late Victorian and Edwardian Fiction: A View from the Perspective of Police History By Haia Shpayer-Makov. An academic work in PDF form. As the title says, this is mainly a look at fictional police and private detectives, but there are some references to the real-life private detectives too.
Private investigator: History On Wikipedia.
The Real PIs of Victorian London By Rachael Griffin, on Victorian Detectives.
Ascent of the Detective: Police Sleuths in Victorian and Edwardian England A review by Dr John Carter Wood of the book by Haia Shpayer-Makov. In part, compares fictional private detectives with fictional and real police detectives.
Ignatius Paul Pollaky On Wikipedia.
Top Hat Terrace, London Road (LE2 0QT) Hanging on London Road with 'Tanky' Smith, Leicester's first private detective. On the University of Leicester’s website.
Inspector Charles Frederick Field On the Rhode Island College website.
Charles Frederick Field On Wikipedia.
Jerome Caminada On Wikipedia.
Bow Street Runner, Chief Constable, Private Detective & Gatekeeper at the House of Lords. Goddard, Henry The 1854 manuscript diary of Henry Goddard (1800-1883) together with first edition copy of Memoirs of a Bow Street Runner. Photographs of the diary with brief biography of Goddard. On The York Book Fair website.
The detective as heroic literary type By Rashmi Sahni, on the Victorian Web. A brief mention of real-life private detectives.
The History of Private Investigators and the Investigation Trade By Steven Farrell, on eInvestigator.
The Ascent of the Detective: Police Sleuths in Victorian and Edwardian England By Haia Shpayer-Makov. A preview on Google books, so may or may not work for you.
Sherlock Holmes, the world's most famous literary detective By John Sutherland, on the British Library website.
Vivien O'Neve A photograph. Should (hopefully) be the first image that comes up in the search. Labelled on Pinterest as A rare Victorian photograph of female private detective Vivien O'Neve (pictured central in black dress) with her assistants Janie (left) and Chloe (right). Behind the three ladies stands Vivien's bodyguard Mr. Stewart. Just in shot with the beard is a character enticingly referred to as 'an unknown local doctor'. I can find absolutely nothing online about Vivien O’Neve but this was too intriguing a photograph not to include.
Please feel free to discuss this topic in the comments.
Please also feel free to comment about the canon story itself or any related aspects outside this week’s theme. For example, any reactions, thoughts, theories, fic recs, favourite adaptations of the canon story… Or any other contribution you wish to make. And if you have any suggestions for fic prompts springing from this week's story, please feel free to share those in the comments as well.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2017-05-07 12:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-05-07 01:15 pm (UTC)From what little I've found though, it sounds like being a real private investigator would be pretty dull. The talented young detective would be better off emulating Lestrade and joining the police force.
no subject
Date: 2017-07-04 04:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-07-04 03:47 pm (UTC)Huh, the 1893 Anti-Pinkerton Act, who knew? (Not that it actually seems to have restrained the feds re Halliburton, et al.)
The Wood review of the Shpayer-Makov book is fascinating. I especially like all the early tensions about whether detectives were spies, and the symbiosis between police detectives and the press. (I've wondered for a while now if there's a similar thing, at least in the US, currently going on between police detectives and the television studios.) But this closing quote in particular:
...one wonders whether the recent surge in film and television adaptations of the most archetypal ‘private’ detective of them all, Sherlock Holmes, is – as was the case at the character’s birth – at least partly a result of contemporary doubts about the effectiveness and moral integrity of the real-life police, and the longing for a figure who, to refer back to my opening quote, has ‘something of the god about him’ when it comes to solving the chronic and insoluble problem of crime.
There is so much one could write on that topic. There really, really is.
Also, I am amused to learn that the original expansion of PIs into a flourishing industry was because of divorce law -- because that's still the bread-and-butter of the industry, isn't it?
Also, RETI very neatly brings together three detectives into a capsule summary of some of the big trends in these articles, does it not? One PI being hired to settle an adultery case (sorry, Holmes, but that's what you were hired to do!), another PI being hired to pursue a missing persons case that the official force had dropped (which is a more historical role for PIs), and the official detective with his worry about getting press recognition. I have to presume Holmes suspected murder early on, yeah? Because otherwise he literally did sign on to do the equivalent of taking telephotos of compromising meetings at a roadside motel.
ETA: ...and
But we also note that said photo has an entirely different caption elsewhere on the internet: "Lady Caroline Bridgeman Corbet centre, Victorian Women. Gertrude Corbet(left) & Constance Corbet (right). Acton reynald hall."
no subject
Date: 2017-07-06 01:48 pm (UTC)There is so much one could write on that topic. There really, really is. Absolutely. That's part of what I love about Holmes and his world - he will always uncover the truth and, on the whole, will treat people fairly. Out in the real world, being innocent of any crime is not enough to protect you from the attentions of the police, and even from being convicted.
Also, I am amused to learn that the original expansion of PIs into a flourishing industry was because of divorce law -- because that's still the bread-and-butter of the industry, isn't it? Yes, indeed ^__^ I have to say, being a private detective doesn't sound much fun - it's just a job.
Also, RETI very neatly brings together three detectives into a capsule summary of some of the big trends in these articles, does it not? One PI being hired to settle an adultery case (sorry, Holmes, but that's what you were hired to do!), another PI being hired to pursue a missing persons case that the official force had dropped (which is a more historical role for PIs), and the official detective with his worry about getting press recognition. I have to presume Holmes suspected murder early on, yeah? Because otherwise he literally did sign on to do the equivalent of taking telephotos of compromising meetings at a roadside motel. That is very elegantly and amusingly put together ^__^ I would just argue though that Holmes was perhaps officially hired to find stolen money, rather than prove adultery.
Re the Vivien O'Neve photograph: crikey, I'm impressed with all the work you and amindamazed have put into investigating it. I am beginning to suspect the caption was just someone exercising their imagination - it's such a nice idea though ^__^
no subject
Date: 2017-07-06 02:23 pm (UTC)Well, if we're going to get down to brass tacks like that, Holmes was officially hired to make the murderer look innocent. :-P
But yeah, we agree that it looks like someone was doing a bit of fictional worldbuilding with that photo. She found a link to this kickstarter from one of the pages that had repinned that photo-and-caption, and while neither of us can confirm that the caption began there (and I'm honestly not sure it did), it looks like the same kind of thing that "Vivien O'neve" might have been: someone taking Victorian photos and making up new histories for them.