Abstract
The central quandary in solving crime cases has always been who will detect the criminal and how. Beyond catching the perpetrator red-handed or raising the Hue and Cry, policing and detection in England had long been the purview of victims and neighbours as well as night watchmen. Some histories even suggest there was little detection before the creation of the Detective Branch to the Metropolitan Police in 1842. But, in the previous century, new investigative bodies had arisen, particularly in the metropolis: thief-takers, royal messengers, women searchers, and Bow Street Runners (all of whom were often termed agents or spies at the time), as well as officers leading investigations for Bank of England (forgers) and Thames River Police (theft). To complicate any simple progressive view of these developments, however, the main crime throughout the period was theft, and victims of theft desired recovery of goods or compensation more than punishment of the criminal. Unreported, essentially private investigations generate little evidence. And, soon after the creation of the Metropolitan Police in 1829, the administration realized that uncovering crime needed officers in “plain-clothes,” and old fears of detectives as extra-legal spies and agents provocateurs resurfaced.
Bio
Professor Key is the co-author of Early Modern England, 1485-1714 (3rd ed., 2020) and co-editor of an accompanying sourcebook. He is currently a co-editor of a 3-volume work on Detective and Detective Fiction for Routledge’s Historical Resources series. He has published articles on plotting, preaching, feasting, politicking, and gossiping in Britain and Ireland, primarily in the late-17th and early 18th-century.
