From the Bow Street Runners to the Modern Detective | Historical Overview by Kurtz Detective Agency Frankfurt

The Detective Through the Ages – Part 2

In Part 1 of our series “The Detective Through the Ages”, we focused on the “forefather” of all private detectives: Eugène François Vidocq. As brilliant and creative as he was in the field of criminalistics, his exceptional position in the history of private investigations was ultimately also due to the right timing in which he operated. A time that favoured the development of the profession of “detective” and from which, in the long term, today’s investigative services such as Kurtz Detective Agency Frankfurt emerged.

Professionalisation of Criminalistics | Bow Street Runners

Criminalistics began to professionalise more and more shortly before Vidocq’s time: an organised police force as we know it today practically did not exist around 1800, and the fight against crime was therefore usually only partially funded by public money and to a large extent privately organised. As early as the middle of the 18th century, semi-professional groups for gathering information and combating crime were formed – in other words, the very early relatives of today’s private detectives in Frankfurt. The “Bow Street Runners”, for example, were a kind of security unit founded as early as 1742 by the London magistrate Henry Fielding. Fielding was not only a senior official, but also a novelist and playwright – an early indication that detective work already seemed to be intertwined with the literary arts at a very early stage, long before Poe and Doyle.

 

Fielding’s Bow Street Runners achieved groundbreaking results in criminal investigative work: they brought structure to crime fighting and aimed at the systematic gathering of information, usually by operating within the “milieu”, in ordinary street clothes, and obtaining information in pubs or on the street with the help of their contacts. In this respect, they were in some ways the forerunners of today’s Frankfurt detectives, although, due to their official function, they were still far removed from the detective in the classical sense. The Bow Street Runners can therefore be understood more as precursors of the organised police, in this case Scotland Yard. They brought at least a certain degree of order to an increasingly confusing world, especially in what was then the largest metropolis in the world: London.

Population Boom and Urbanisation Fuel Crime – Historical Increase in Detective Fields of Activity

The demand for professional investigations by private detective agencies quickly became enormous – not only in England – due to social circumstances. The early 19th century was a time of major urbanisation and rural exodus. More and more people had to be fed, yet in the countryside the masses soon found themselves unable to do so as industrialisation progressed, and therefore moved to nearby small towns, hoping for better opportunities for work and thus money for food. Cities grew, and eventually the first large cities emerged, albeit hardly comparable to the situation today. Even Berlin had only just over 400,000 inhabitants around 1850 – fifty years earlier it had not even reached 200,000.

 

However, wherever people congregate and urban living situations arise, there is also – unfortunately, such is human nature – mistrust, deceit and fraud. Outside the village community, people often lose their sense of collective identity and feel unprotected. It is ultimately only within the “protection of the masses” that detective agencies such as Kurtz Detective Agency Frankfurt are able to conduct covert investigations at all. In a village with five houses, it is difficult to carry out detective work unnoticed, especially at a time when the world was not yet so interconnected and village communities were more or less self-contained. People also quickly realise that the threshold for deceit and fraud drops drastically in the anonymity of the city – mistrust arises. Dispelling or confirming this mistrust has been one of the core tasks of Kurtz Private Detective Agency Frankfurt to this day.

Emergence of the First Detective Agencies

That investigative offices such as Kurtz Detective Agency Frankfurt are an important point of contact for those seeking help was already recognised in Vidocq’s time by other enterprising contemporaries who took up the idea: if there was evidently a growing demand for investigative services, why not jump on the bandwagon directly? A certain degree of specialisation helped from the very beginning. Some detective agencies offered, quite plainly, a kind of private security service (with armed personnel), while others specialised more in commercial intelligence for businesspeople who did not want to operate blindly when potential new business partners were involved. Yet others remained in the private sphere: the unfaithful husband or the wife with obscure appointments are certainly not inventions of modern times – and even today these private investigations still account for a significant proportion of the work of our private detectives in Frankfurt.

 

Thus, visionary men increasingly distanced themselves from official investigative work in the service of the government and devoted themselves to what, after Vidocq, would become famous in the 1840s as classical detective work and reads much like the case portfolio of Kurtz Detective Agency Frankfurt in the 2010s: deceit and fraud, infidelity, embezzlement and the solving of mysteries. Who these men were, and how they would become famous – more on that in Part 3.

Author: Gerrit Kohler

 

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