Strange Things That Really Do Happen — The Detective Police
By the time Dickens sat down with five real Scotland Yard detectives for this piece, detective fiction as a genre didn't exist yet. There was no Holmes, no Poirot, no template for what a fictional detective was supposed to sound like. Dickens was simply fascinated by these actual men and wanted to know how their minds worked, so he invited them into a room, let them talk, and wrote down what they said.
What comes through is genuine admiration bordering on something warmer. Dickens is charmed by their confidence, their memory for faces, their easy authority over rooms full of people who'd rather they weren't there. He lets each man tell his own story in his own voice, barely intruding as narrator, which was unusual for him.
It's worth sitting with what this piece actually is: a writer meeting real detectives for the first time, before the word "detective" carried any of the mythology it does now, and quietly building that mythology himself in the act of writing it down.
Something to think about:
Dickens leaves this piece having fallen a little in love with these men, before detective fiction as a genre had even been invented.
Is he capturing real people as they were, or already starting to build the detective myth that Holmes would later inherit?
Read all six stories free in the Weekly Serial app.
