The Boy Detective Read Online Free

wandered the city on my cases, I did not think that I existed anywhere other than where I happened to be at the time—in Madison Square Park or the Village or Murray Hill or St. Marks Place. Yet I could not help but sense that I was also treading a path that had been laid out before me centuries earlier by those who believed the human mind was built to confront mysteries. The detective story is that of free speculation at work. And the Dutch wrote it for the world long before Holmes pursued Moriarty, or I, the bad guys of my own manufacture.
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    Y OU’D THINK IT would have been Edgar Allan Poe who coined the word detective, because Poe wrote the first detective stories, that is, stories with the now-familiar components of the know-it-all sleuth, the invaluable stooge or sidekick, the bumbling police, and so forth. But though Poe created “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Purloined Letter,” and “The Gold Bug,” along with C. Auguste Dupin, the little genius who solved his crimes, the term for Dupin was not detective. Poe might have used that term had he written his mysteries after 1843. That was when Sir James Graham, the British home secretary, seeking to give the ablest officers in the London police force a special designation, formed a unit called “the detectives.” Even if Poe had known the word, he would not have pinned it on Dupin without prefixing the word private, because, like all great independent or “consulting” detectives, Dupin never would have been associated with the police. A detective worth his salt has no use for institutions—not only because he’s smarter than the institutions, but also because he cannot survive in a group.
    Take Dupin himself, who in fact was not an amateur sleuth or committed to crime fighting in any way. He was more like an unemployed philosopher, equipped with the reasoning intelligence Poe called “ratiocination,” and driven by a near-manic curiosity. A collector of rare books, he had retreated from Parisian society until he chanced to meet the person who turned out to be the narrator of “Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Thence, Dupin’s legacy.
    When I first took up the trade as a boy, I wondered about the word detective, as detector might have seemed more fitting. You wouldn’t say “lie detective.” The suffix -ive suggests something or someone performing a specific action, or a condition, such as in defective or directive or corrective . But what makes the word right, I think, is that detective seems more detached than detector, which intimates a more personal passion. A true detective had better not care too much about the cases he’s involved in, lest he lose the objectivity that gives him his powers. Hard-boiled private eyes often come perilously close to falling for one dame or another, and sometimes there is a hint of a great love in the past. Holmes’s heart held Irene Adler of “A Scandal in Bohemia,” referred to afterward, with a pang, as “the woman.” Yet, to do his work effectively and dispassionately, the detective must remain the detective. He walks at an even pace. He measures his steps with a cold eye.
    Now that I think of it, that quality of self-control might explain why Poe wrote detective stories in the first place. A wild man in everything else he did, he turned his pen to stories of orderly expectations and rational deductions. Could it be that he saw the world as frenzied and manic, and by creating the detective story, he felt he could contain that chaos within the seemingly immutable laws of reason? Or maybe he invented the detective story as a way of holding madness at arm’s length, to avoid going crazy himself. There is justice in a detective story, and none in madness. And while there is danger in a detective story, it eventually is put to rest, which distinguishes a detective story from life, where the mysteries are