The World’s Greatest Detectives

By Michael Capuzzo

The world’s greatest detectives do their secret work in a grand, wood-paneled Victorian dining room in the shadow of Independence Hall. They meet monthly in Philadelphia from around the world, Scotland Yard and Interpol agents, FBI, NYPD, Egyptian army captains, mafia-busters, Al Qaeda hunters, investigators of the JFK and RFK assassinations, the finest collection of forensic specialists ever assembled — CSI to the tenth power, and real.

After a four-course white-tablecloth lunch, the fifth course is a murder. The bloodied victim appears on a power-point screen, and the room falls hushed. Each month it is a daunting case that has gone cold for years, a sad tale of embarrassed cops, suffering families, and unrepentant killers too smart for the system. Until now.

They are the Vidocq Society, the private club of pro bono crime-fighting avengers who assist police and families because the world has gone mad and somebody has to do something. For twenty years they have worked quietly as both armchair detectives and field agents redeeming the suffering and routing fugitive killers, putting them behind bars.

In a shadowy corner a bronze bust, the visage wide and arrogant, of the 19th Century detective Eugene Francois watches the proceedings.

I spent seven years reporting their story for the nonfiction book, The Murder Room: The Heirs of Sherlock Holmes Gather to Solve the World’s Most Perplexing Cold Cases. I was stunned at the passion for justice that animated these 82 men and women – one for each year of Vidocq’s life. I saw them laboring in the present for a better future and thought I had captured the story.

I was wrong. The Vidocq Society derives its magic from the past, from Vidocq himself, whose mad genius changed us all. E.F. Vidocq was the burly, swashbuckling soldier, highway robber, killer, con-man, ladies man, master of disguise and thief-turned-detective whose unlikely story animates Napoleonic Paris like a red lantern. It is to Vidocq we owe debt for the first state detective agency (forerunner of the Yard and FBI) and the private detective agency, as well as advances in fingerprinting, invisible inks, plaster food casts, and systematic record-keeping of crimes and criminals. His status as “The Father of Forensic Science” is well-documented.

Yet Vidocq is one of those larger-than-life characters who draws contemporary snickers because he is simply “too much.” When I hear such snickers I know am in the presence of a healthy skeptic who may well be right, or, just as likely, a cynic who chooses to be blind to wonders and marvels.

Vidocq’s greatest marvel may be the detective novel. His memoirs, allegedly written by his friend Balzac, were a smash 1830s bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic. Though largely fictionalized, they inspired Edgar Allen Poe, in Philadelphia in the 1840s, to write The Murders in the Rue Morgue, the first detective story, in which he introduces C. August Dupin, the first fictional sleuth – a brilliant, shadowy amateur whose story is told by a more conventional assistant and admirer. Vidocq’s influence on Sherlock Holmes’ is clear and acknowledged by Arthur Conan Doyle; it continues from Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin to the cop-buddy teams of today’s movies and thrillers.

The modern noir detective grew stoic and hard-boiled, with tough-guys Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, but the influence of Vidocq on these haunted loners and unbowed modern knights remains all the way to Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch. And thus it ever will be. For modern police work was invented in the 19th Century as the fact-gathering, rational procedure that it thankfully remains. But the excessively rational, predictable man cannot function in an unpredictable world — and especially cannot penetrate evil- without the eccentric, night-stalking sleuths who reads the dark and senseless heart.

This is true in crime fiction and fact. “Facts, even DNA,” says the gaunt, lonely, tobacco-addicted loner Richard Walter, whom Scotland Yard calls “the living Sherlock Holmes,”are meaningless until they are interpreted.”

The dour Victorian-styled Walter, one of the greatest forensic psychologists and criminal profilers in the world, founded the Vidocq Society with celebrated forensic artist Frank Bender – who has put mass murderers behind bars with his psychic artistic visions and boasts of sleeping with more than 300 women– and former FBI agent-turned-private eye William Fleisher.

Fleisher, who once ran U.S. Customs law enforcement in three states, is the only conventional man of the three founders, yet hardly so. He named the Vidocq Society. He has written a classic book on interrogation, but if you ask him about it he pulls a copy of Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables out of his desk drawer. Hugo was Vidocq’s friend, too, he says, and based both the criminal Valjean and the detective Javert on Vidocq.

“My favorite scene in all literature is Bishop Myriel’s forgiveness of Valjean for stealing the bishop’s silver. He says, I have bought your soul for goodness, for God.” Each time he reads the scene, the former FBI agent weeps.

“Vidocq’s greatest gift to us was redemption. He was a redeemed man who worked to redeem others. That’s what I want to do with the Vidocq Society. I want to buy souls.”

Michael Capuzzo, author of The Murder Room: The Heirs of Sherlock Holmes Gather to Solve the World’s Most Perplexing Cold Cases (Gotham, August 10, 2010), is also the author of the New York Times bestseller Close to Shore and a former feature writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Miami Herald. His stories have appeared in Esquire, Sports Illustrated, and Life. He lives in the suburbs of Philadelphia.

IMAGE: Portrait of Eugéne François Vidocq