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From Sherlock Holmes to Miss Marple, we all love stories of the eccentric master detective, solving crimes through clever deduction and superior wit. Yet the world’s first modern investigator was himself something of a bohemian, founding a small team of like-minded individuals to take on the criminal underworld of 19th century Paris – Eugene Francois Vidocq. In the years that he worked for the Parisian police he claimed to have been responsible for the arrest of thousands of ne’er-do-wells, and is even credited with establishing the world’s first private detective agency.
Of his adventures, much has been written and it is clear that he was not opposed to embellishing the facts with heavy doses of fiction too. As such, it is often difficult to separate the man Vidocq from his own self-created myth. Join us as we don our deerstalkers, grab our magnifying glasses and indulge in some investigating of our own to discover the true identity of the first detective?