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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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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No crime in the fountains

I reserve the right to make a non-crime-fiction post every few months, and I think it's been a few months since the last one, so . . .

Today's principal activity was a stroll along the avenue des Champs-Élysées that culminated in a half-hour or so of reading in the Tuileries, where reasonably comfortable chairs are provided for the purpose or for sitting and watching the birds. In the U.S., the chairs would be of concrete, bolted down, stolen, or eliminated by a local government that has no time for such fripperies.

Yesterday, I visited the Pantheon, which is as awe-inspiring as any great church you'd care to name. That's appropriate, since it used to be a church. Of course, the church was modeled after a "pagan," Roman building. Not only that, but right from the beginning, the church borrowed its administrative structure from those same Romans. From pagans ye came; unto pagans thou shalt return, as some waggish member of the Convention surely must have said sometime in the 1790s.

The tombs of Rousseau and Voltaire face one another in the building's crypt. The remains of many great Frenchmen and at least one great French woman also repose there. This woman achieved epoch-making discoveries, as outlined in a short display just outside her tomb. The display includes pictures, and I noted that she was rather attractive. In fact, if not for the danger that I would be accused of outrageous word play, I might even say she was hot.

Can you name this woman?

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

Detectives Beyond Borders' life of Johnson

Dr. Samuel Johnson (aka Blinking 
Sam), by Sir Joshua Reynolds, 
the Huntington

Vacation: 1. Intermission of juridical proceedings, or any other stated employments; recess of courts or senates. ...

2. Leisure, freedom from trouble or perplexity. 

— Samuel Johnson, Dictionary of the English Language

I consulted my copy of Johnson's dictionary for terms related to law and murder (you know, to crime fiction), and I found the above — apt, since I bought the book during my most recent respite from trouble and perplexity.

Johnson was a man of words, but I bought the book because of a picture. I'd always associated Sir Joshua Reynolds with those endless English eighteenth-century society portraits by him, George Romney, and others, but this dynamic, loosely executed picture made me realize that Reynolds could do a fine job when he got hold of a worthwhile subject. And what the hell; the society pictures probably earned Reynolds and the others a nice living.

(Henry E. Huntington, who founded the collection where the Johnson picture hangs, loved eighteenth-century English portraits, and the Huntington has a room full of them. It's probably no accident that the most congenial portrait in the room to my eyes was Reynolds' of the celebrated English actress Sarah Siddons portraying the dramatic muse. It was about the only painting in the room whose subject is pictured doing something other than showing off his or her era's new attitudes to leisure. The same room, by the way, includes this impressive young man.)

Back to Johnson, whose portrait hangs upstairs from the society pictures opposite Henry Raeburn's portrait of James Watt (left). Can you imagine a scientist as a celebrity today?  Suddenly the eighteenth century's painting seems more like the century's literature, which included men like Hume, Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Rousseau writing for an educated public as well as for themselves and one another. It's still not my favorite period in art, but it's a lot more interesting to me than it was before this week.

(Detectives Beyond Borders readers may soon read more about Dr. Johnson. The preface to his dictionary includes an assessment of the dictionary maker's place in the public esteem that, with the substitution of one job title for another, would describe perfectly the lot of a modern-day newspaper copy editor in America.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Irish proto-crime tale is a lot of bull

[Road sculpture, Táin Bó Cúailnge (the Cattle
Raid of Cooley), County Louth, Ireland.
From the blog "Pictures of Ireland."]
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I like to post, seriously or not so seriously, about classics of world literature that remind me of crime fiction. These range from Voltaire's Holmesian interlude in "Zadig" to speculation that Herodotus was the father of the gentleman thief and a post about the Epic of Gilgamesh that I called "Sumer time, and the living is easy."

I am pleased to add Táin Bó Cúailnge  (The Cattle Raid of Cooley or, simply, The Táin) to the list, and Cúchulain hasn't even started doing his thing yet.

The opening of this old Irish tale is a heist story, Ailill and Medb, king and queen of Connacht, planning to steal Donn Cúailnge, the great brown bull of Cooley, and assembling their crew with all the care of Richard Stark's Parker. And Ailill and Medb (Maeve) themselves have to be the most fun fictional couple I've run into since Nick and Nora Charles. The tale begins in one of its two main recensions, or versions, with pillow talk between the two, a disagreement over which is richer. (Women could hold onto their own property in old Ireland.)

***

The Táin is available in several English translations, including versions by the Irish poets Ciaran Carson and Thomas Kinsella. Several older versions are available free online. For evidence that Irish myth can still excite Irish crime writers, look no further than Requiems for the Departed (Morrigan Books, 2010)

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

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