[Gutenberg 38057] • Mémoires de Vidocq, chef de la police de Sureté jusqu'en 1827, tome I

Aside from a fortune-telling midwife, few would have guessed that Eugene Francois Vidocq was born for greatness. From unpromising origins as a two-bit thief, army deserter, grifter, and convict, he rose to become the celebrated chief of the Paris Surete de police and an internationally renowned private detective. Vidocq is one of the most seminal, fantastic and pleasingly ambiguous historical figures you could ever hope to encounter. Balzac, Dumas and Victor Hugo freely borrowed from his stories for their novels. His life influenced the early crime fiction of Conan Doyle and Poe, and forever shaped both the crime novel and our notions of crime in general. Among his admirers, Vidocq as the first detective, a man of action, master of disguise, expert investigator, and champion of security and order, the kind of detective who 'always gets his man.' Among his detractors, Vidocq was and always remained a scoundrel and criminal, a con man who emerged from the underworld milieu to become the kind of corrupt detective for whom dissimulation, extortion and graft are tools of the trade. Both are false distinctions, for in Vidocq the criminal and detective are one. He was the world's first anti-hero rogue cop.