The First Detective: The Life and Revolutionary Times of Vidocq: Criminal, Spy and Private Eye

By James Morton

Eugene François Vidocq was born in France in 1775 and his life spanned the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars and the 1848 revolutions. He was the Inspector Morse, the Sherlock Holmes, the James Bond of his day. A notorious criminal in his youth, he became a police officer and employed a gang of ex-convicts as his detectives. He developed innovative criminal indexing techniques and experimented with fingerprinting, until his cavalier attitude towards the thin blue line forced him out of the police. So he began the world’s very first private detective agency.

The cases he solved were high profile, and gradually he grew in notoriety. However, his reputation didn’t prevent him from becoming a spy and moving secretly across the dangerous borders of Europe. The First Detective is a gloriously enjoyable historical romp through the eighteenth century in the company of the man whose influence on law enforcement still holds to this day.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penguin Group
• Release date: Jun 30, 2011
• ISBN: 9781590208908

Reviews for The First Detective

[dhmontgomery-265379 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

An adequate summary of the life of this larger-than-life criminal-turned-detective, who had a profound impact on both policing and culture. Morton focuses on telling salacious stories from Vidocq's life, rather than analyzing him (a little of that comes in a brief final chapter). This is padded out a little bit by stories of contemporaries with tangential connections to Morton's subject (though these digressions are often somewhat interesting in their own right). The author deserves credit for sorting through the tangle of myths and stories about Vidocq, some of them propagated by the man himself and others by his enemies, but it could have done better to put Vidocq in context rather than merely telling (admittedly fascinating) stories. Despite these caveats, it still serves as a good introduction to the man.

[bryndahlquis · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

FINALLY finished this book. I have literally been reading this for over a month. For me, that is a LONG time.Vidocq is certainly an interesting man (which is why I read a book about him), and James Morton does cover all the details. However, he kind of gives too much backstory about every other person ever to encounter Vidocq. You have to be extremely in the know about French history to follow all of the backstories and histories and rumors and drama that goes on throughout Vidocq's long life. Not only was I not super interested in half of those people, I also just couldn't keep track of them and would rather have found out more about VIDOCQ. I feel like I just got a long summary of all the stuff that happened in France during Vidocq's lifetime, with snippets of what he was up to here and there.Still a Vidocq fan, but not a super fan of this book. It's probably better suited to indepth French scholars.

[kevinashley_1 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

This book is a description of the life - I hesitate to use the word "biography" - of Eugene-Francois Vidocq, a man born in late 18th century France who led what was clearly an extremely colourful life as a thief, spy, policeman and adventurer. Described by the author as the "world's first private detective" this looked to be an interesting read. Unfortunately, this is one of the very few books that I have abandoned rather than finished.Vidocq wrote his own memoirs and has subsequently been written about by many others (although I confess I had never heard of him before encountering this book.) The author clearly draws on these many sources and on some contemporary documents in France and elsewhere. He makes this clear in the introduction and the extensive bibliography, and the introduction itself appears to be a fairly good assessment of the quality and breadth of the existing material on Vidocq. All this holds out great promise as one starts the book.The promise isn't borne out. The style switches continually from segments which are meticulously referenced back to their sources, either in the text or through footnotes, and other sections in which matters of far greater importance are simply asserted without any indication of their source. Given that other parts of the text make clear how unreliable many of the existing sources are (not least Vidocq's own memoirs) this is frustrating. At times the author adopts the style of a scholarly text, assuming a reading knowledge of 18thC french on the part of the reader, and at other times it reads like a celebrity biography, with the simplest of things spelt out for us in a way that made this reader feel talked-down-to.The celebrity style is apparent elsewhere; Morton drops the names of aristocrats freely through the text, often it seems for little other purpose than name-dropping, and there's a sensation of oleaginous reverence that attaches to these. Often, these coincide with statements that assert that the subject "may well have met" these people, even though there is little evidence for it and no purpose, since they clearly have no bearing whatsoever on his life.These failings become less surprising when I realised that the author is also the one behind celebrity exposes of life in British Royalty. If you like that sort of thing then possibly - just possibly - you may find something of interest in this book. Otherwise, whatever you are after - light reading or serious biography - this book manages to let you down.Best avoided.

[vorobyey_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Interesting man, alive during an eventful period. One of those people for whom it may be said that truth is stranger than fiction. I didn't get on so well with Morton's prose style, though.