A bit more about proto-detectives, and a question for readers

I wrote a few days ago about Voltaire and his tantalizing and funny foreshadowing of the detective story in Zadig. (Find an archaic but free e-text version of Zadig here. Look for Chapter III.) That piece of Holmes-like reasoning dates from 112 years before Conan Doyle's birth. But pre-detective writing goes back far further, at least to a proto-legal thriller and the world's first locked-room mystery, both from additions to the Book of Daniel.

What pre-crime fiction can you think of? Your examples should not just be about murder, fraud and revenge, they should use narrative techniques and methods of detection that would be at home in Poe, Conan Doyle or their successors. Find me, in other words, a patient, pipe-smoking Athenian detective or a wise-cracking sentinel from the mean streets of Palmyra or Carthage.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

Was Voltaire Sherlock Holmes' grandfather?

I posted last week about François-Marie Arouet, detective, suggesting that Voltaire would make a good fictional sleuth. I'd forgotten at the time that he wrote a vignette often cited as a forerunner of the classic tale of detection. Here’s part of that vignette, from Zadig:

“As regards the king of kings’ horse, you may know that as I walked along the road in this wood I saw the marks of horseshoes, all equal distances apart. That horse, said I, gallops perfectly. The dust on the trees in this narrow road only seven feet wide brushed off a little right and left three and a half feet from the middle of the road. This horse, said I, has a tail three and half feet long, and its movement left and right has swept away this dust. I saw beneath the trees, which made a cradle five feet high, some leaves newly fallen from the branches, and I recognized that this horse had touched there and was hence fifteen hands high. As regards his bit, it must be of twenty-three carat gold, for he rubbed the studs against a stone which I knew to be a touchstone and tested. From the marks his hoofs made on certain pebbles I knew the horse was shod with eleven scruple silver.”

That’s pretty Holmesian, and it was published in 1747 – 112 years before Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle was born.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Paris-crime IVème: François-Marie Arouet, detective

Who's that Arouet guy? He's better known by the name he took for himself — Voltaire — and he made a pretty good detective at least once in his celebrated career.

Jean Calas was a draper in Toulose in 1761, a Calvinist at a time when it was not always healthy to be one in France. In October of that year, his son Marc-Antoine was found dead. A hue (and also a cry) went up among the population that Calas had murdered his son to prevent him from converting to Catholicism. Calas' family was dispossessed, and he was taken into custody, eventually to be tortured publicly and executed.

The affair became a rallying cry for religious toleration, the inspiration for Voltaire's famous treatise on the subject. Here are some excerpts from an introduction to the edition of that treatise, Traité sur la tolerance, that I bought when I was thinking elevated thoughts at the Panthéon this week:

"Did (Marc-Antoine), when he came down to the ground floor, commit suicide by hanging in the store? The answer depends on the position of the body when it was discovered. On this chief point, the Calases disagreed, which aggravated the presumption of their guilt. The evening of the 13th, Pierre, pressed by his father, affirmed that the body was stretched out on the floor, the first version and no doubt the truth. Such a position does not exclude the thesis of suicide by hanging, but it accords better with murder by strangulation. Also, the Calases changed their story the next day. ... an acrobatic suicide, but these exist.

"The investigator, David de Beaudrigue, was no Maigret, much less a Sherlock Holmes; He failed to follow tracks that might have led to the truth. In the afternoon, Marc-Antoine had exchanged some silver for [gold] louis d'or for his father's account. These louis d'or were never found. What became of them? Beaudrigue never asked that question. Did Marc-Antoine lose them, gambling or some other way, which would explain his suicide? Did an assassin wait for him in the rear of the house, watching for him to rob him, or for some other reason? (The investigation did not interest itself in this 28-year-old man's relations with women."

With the scene thus set, allies of the Calas family called in Voltaire, who took the case and solved it in three months, eventually winning a posthumous exoneration for Calas and a royal pension for his family. What most impressed this crime-fiction reader, though, was the introduction's readiness to cast the story in detective-story terms, and this from an academic.

And now, readers, can you name other historical figures who have turned detective?

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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