The First Detective: The Life and Revolutionary Times of Vidocq

A biography of the French criminal who became the father of modern criminology and inspired authors like Balzac, Dickens, Doyle, Hugo, and Poe.

Vidocq 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 hi...