Tracing hitherto unexplored aspects of the evolution of official detective agencies between the late eighteenth and the twentieth century, this is the first book to discuss detective agencies in a variety of national contexts, including England, France, the U.S.A, New Zealand, and Germany. The comparative studies included in this collection provide new insights into the development of both plainclothes policing and law enforcement in general, illuminating the historical importance of bureaucratic and administrative changes that occurred within the state system.

While the history of the uniformed police has prompted considerable research, the historical study of police detectives has been largely neglected; confined for the most part to a chapter or a brief mention in books dealing with the development of the police in general. The collection redresses this imbalance. Investigating themes central to the history of detection, such as the inchoate distinction between criminals and detectives, the professionalisation of detective work and the establishment of colonial police forces, the book provides a the first detailed examination of detectives as an occupational group, with a distinct occupational culture. Essays discuss the complex relationship between official and private law enforcers and examine the ways in which the FBI in the U.S.A. and the Gestapo in Nazi Germany operated as instruments of state power. The dynamic interaction between the fictional and the real life image of the detective is also explored. Expanding on themes and approaches introduced in recent academic research of police history, the comparative studies included in this collection provide new insights into the development of both plain-clothes policing and law enforcement in general, illuminating the historical importance of bureaucratic and administrative changes that occurred within the state system.

This unique collection brings together leading international scholars to explore how ideologies about masculinities have shaped police culture, policy and institutional organization from the eighteenth century to the present day. It addresses an under-researched area of historical inquiry, providing the first in-depth study of how gender ideologies have shaped law enforcement and civic governance under ‘old’ and ‘new’ police models, tracing links, continuities, and changes between them. The book opens up scholarly understanding of the ways in which policing reflected, sustained, embodied and enforced ideas of masculinities in historic and modern contexts, as well as how conceptions of masculinities were, and continue to be, interpreted through representations of the police in various forms of print and popular culture. The research covers the UK, Europe, Australia and America and explores police typologies in different international and institutional contexts, using varied approaches, sources and interpretive frameworks drawn from historical and criminological traditions. This book will be essential reading for academics, students and those in interested in gender, culture, police and criminal justice history as well as police practitioners.

Explores the diverse and often arcane world of English police detectives during the formative period of their profession, from 1842 until the First World War, with special emphasis on the famed detective branch established at Scotland Yard.

This book illuminates the neglected history of the Dublin Metropolitan Police – a history that has been long overshadowed by existing historiography, which has traditionally been preoccupied with the more radical aspects of Irish history. It explores the origins of the institution and highlights the Dublin Metropolitan Police’s profound influence on the colonial forces, as its legacy reached some of the furthest outposts of the British Empire. In doing so Anastasia Dukova provides much needed nuance and complexity to our understanding of Ireland as a whole, and Dublin in particular, demonstrating that it was far more than a lawless place ravaged by political and sectarian violence. Simultaneously, the book tells the story of the bobby on the beat, the policeman who made the organisation; his work and day, the conditions of service and how they affected or bettered his lot at home and abroad.

This book re-imagines nineteenth-century detective fiction as a literary genre that was connected to, and nurtured by, contemporary periodical journalism. Whilst ‘detective fiction’ is almost universally-accepted to have originated in the nineteenth century, a variety of widely-accepted scholarly narratives of the genre’s evolution neglect to connect it with the development of a free press. The volume traces how police officers, detectives, criminals, and the criminal justice system were discussed in the pages of a variety of magazines and journals, and argues that this affected how the wider nineteenth-century society perceived organised law enforcement and detection. This, in turn, helped to shape detective fiction into the genre that we recognise today. The book also explores how periodicals and newspapers contained forgotten, non-canonical examples of ‘detective fiction’, and that these texts can help complicate the narrative of the genre’s evolution across the mid- to late nineteenth century.

WINNER OF THE CWA ALCS GOLD DAGGER FOR NON-FICTION 'Brilliantly summons up one girl's life, dreams and suffering. It's ingenious history writing' Mail on Sunday 'A gripping, unputdownable masterpiece' - Hallie Rubenhold, author of The Five 'Extraordinary' - Guardian 'Historical writing does not get any better than this' Matt Houlbrook, author of The Prince of Tricksters 1910, Wellington, New Zealand. Lydia Harvey is sixteen, working long hours for low pay, when a glamorous couple invite her to Buenos Aires. She accepts - and disappears. 1910, London, England. Amid a global panic about sex trafficking, detectives are tracking a ring of international criminals when they find a young woman on the streets of Soho who might be the key to cracking the whole case. As more people are drawn into Lydia's life and the trial at the Old Bailey, the world is being reshaped into a new, global era. Choices are being made - about who gets to cross borders, whose stories matter and what justice looks like - that will shape the next century. In this immersive account, historian Julia Laite traces Lydia Harvey through the fragments she left behind to build an extraordinary story of aspiration, exploitation and survival - and one woman trying to build a life among the forces of history.