The Suspicions of Mr Whicher

untethered. While an ordinary policeman circled his beat like the arm of a compass, passing each point every hour, the detectives crisscrossed the city and the country at will. In the London underworld they were known as 'Jacks', which captured their classless anonymity.

The first English detective story, by the journalist William Russell, writing as 'Waters', appeared in Chambers's Edinburgh Journal in July 1849. The next year Whicher and his colleagues were eulogised by Charles Dickens in several magazine articles: 'They are, one and all, respectable-looking men,' Dickens reported, 'of perfectly good deportment and unusual intelligence; with nothing lounging or slinking in their manners; with an air of keen observation and quick perception when addressed; and generally presenting in their faces, traces more or less marked of habitually leading lives of strong mental excitement. They have all good eyes; and they all can, and they all do, look full at whomsoever they speak to.' George Augustus Sala, a fellow journalist, found Dickens' enthusiasm cloying – he disliked the novelist's 'curious and almost morbid partiality for communing with and entertaining police officers . . . He seemed always at his ease with these personages, and never tired of questioning them.' The detectives, like Dickens, were working-class boys made good, thrilled to find themselves with the run of the city. In Tom Fox; Or, the Revelations of a Detective, a mock-memoir of 1860, John Bennett noted that the detective was socially superior to 'the common peeler', because he was better educated and 'of far higher intelligence'. He sought the secrets of the establishment and of the underworld alike, and since he had few precedents he made up his methods on the hoof.

These methods were sometimes criticised. In 1851 Whicher was accused of spying and entrapment when he caught two bank robbers in The Mall. While walking across Trafalgar Square in May that year, Whicher spotted 'an old acquaintance', an ex-convict who was back in town after a stint in the penal colonies of Australia. He saw him join another old lag on a bench in The Mall, opposite the London and Westminster Bank. Over the next few weeks Whicher and a colleague watched the pair size up the bank. The policemen lay in wait until, on 28 June, they caught the crooks red-handed, fleeing the bank with their loot. Correspondents to The Times censured the officers for letting the crime take place rather than nipping it in the bud. 'The credit for skill and ingenuity gained by the detectives is probably what greatly inclines them to detection rather than prevention,' complained one letter-writer, implying that they had become puffed up by the attentions of Dickens and the like.

Dickens recast his new heroes in the figure of Inspector Bucket in Bleak House (1853), the supreme fictional detective of the era. Mr Bucket was a 'sparkling stranger' who 'walks in an atmosphere of mysterious greatness'. The first police detective in an English novel, Bucket was a mythological figure for his age. He glided and floated into new zones, like a ghost or a cloud: 'Time and place cannot bind Mr Bucket.' He had 'adaptability to all grades'. He borrowed some of the dazzle of Edgar Allan Poe's amateur detective and intellectual magician Auguste Dupin, who preceded him by twelve years.

Bucket was broadly based on Whicher's friend and boss Charley Field – they shared a fat forefinger, an earthy charm, a relish for the 'beauty' of their work, a blithe assurance. Bucket was reminiscent of Jack Whicher, too. Like Whicher at the grand Oxford hotel, there was 'nothing remarkable about [Bucket] at first sight but his ghostly manner of appearing'. He was 'a stoutly-built, steady-looking, sharp-eyed man in black' who watched and listened with a face 'as unchanging as the great mourning ring on his little finger'.

Through the 1840s and 1850s Whicher worked on sleights of hand and of the mind. He dealt with criminals who slipped away into alternative identities, melted into the streets and alleys. He was set on the trail of men and women who counterfeited coin, signatures on cheques, money orders, who escaped from alias to alias, shuffling off names as snakes shuffle off skins. He was the specialist on the 'swell mob', conmen and pickpockets who dressed as gentlemen and could slit open a pocket with a concealed knife, whip out a tie pin under cover of a flourished handkerchief. They worked their dodges at theatres, shopping galleries, places of amusement such as Madame Tussaud's waxworks museum and the London Zoological Gardens. Their greatest harvests were reaped at big public occasions – race meetings, agricultural shows, political gatherings – to which they would travel by first-class train to insinuate themselves among the men and women they hoped to rob.

In 1850 Charley Field told Dickens of a trick that Whicher had pulled off at the Epsom Derby. Field, Whicher and a friend called Mr Tatt were drinking together at the bar – they were on their third or fourth sherry – when they were rushed by four swell mobsmen. The gangsters knocked them over, and a fierce scuffle broke out – 'There we are, all down together, heads and heels, knocking about on the floor of the bar – perhaps you never see such a scene of confusion!' When the villains tried to flee the bar, Whicher cut them off at the door. All four were taken to the local police station. Mr Tatt discovered that his diamond shirt-pin had been stolen during the fight, but there was no sign of it on any of the swell mobsmen. Field was feeling very 'blank' (dejected) about the thieves' victory, when Whicher opened his hand to reveal the pin in his palm. 'Why, in the name of wonder,' said Field, 'how did you come by that?' 'I'll tell you how I come by it,' said Whicher. 'I saw which of 'em took it; and when we were all down on the floor together, knocking about, I just gave him a little touch on the back of his hand, as I knew his pal would; and he thought it was his pal; and gave it me!'

'One of the most beautiful things that ever was done, perhaps,' said Field. 'Beautiful. Beau-ti-ful . . . It was a lovely idea!' The artistry of crime was a familiar conceit, most strikingly advanced in Thomas de Quincey's ironic essay 'On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts' (1827), but the artistry of the law enforcer was something new. In the early nineteenth century, the subject of a crime story was the daring, dashing crook; now he was more often the analytical detective.

Whicher, who was said to be Commissioner Mayne's favourite officer, was made an inspector in 1856, and his salary rose to more than ?100. Charley Field had left the force to become a private investigator, and Whicher and Thornton were now in charge of the department. In 1858 Whicher caught the valet who had stolen Leonardo da Vinci's Virgin and Child from the Earl of Suffolk. In the same year he took part in the hunt for the Italian revolutionaries who had tried to assassinate Napoleon III in Paris – the terrorists had hatched their plot and built their bombs in London – and he led a reopened inquiry into the murder of a police constable in an Essex cornfield. In 1859 Whicher investigated whether the Reverend James Bonwell, rector of a church in east London, and his lover, a clergyman's daughter, had killed their illegitimate son. Bonwell had paid an undertaker eighteen shillings to bury the baby secretly by slipping him into someone else's coffin. The coroner's court cleared the couple of murder but censured them for their behaviour, and in July 1860 the Bishop of London sued Bonwell for misconduct.

A couple of months before he was dispatched to Road Hill, Whicher tracked down the perpetrators of a ?12,000 jewellery heist near the Palais Royal, in Paris. The thieves, Emily Lawrence and James Pearce, used the trappings of gentility to work their cons in jewellers' shops, where Lawrence 'palmed' lockets and bracelets off the counters and into her handmuff (female thieves were well-equipped with places in which to stash their spoils – shawls, stoles, muffs, vast pockets in their crinolines). With his favourite sidekicks, Detective Sergeants 'Dolly' Williamson and 'Dick' Tanner, Whicher gained entry in April to the jewel thieves' house in Stoke Newington, just north of London. When he charged Emily Lawrence, he noticed her shuffle her hands, and asked to see what she was holding. A struggle ensued, during which her boyfriend threatened to smash Whicher's skull with a poker, and Lawrence let three diamond rings fall to the floor.

From his brief appearances in memoirs, newspapers and journals, Jack Whicher emerges as kind, laconic, alert to the comedy in his work. He was 'an excellent officer', said a fellow detective, 'quiet, shrewd and practical, never in a hurry, generally successful, and ready to take on any case'. He had a wry turn of phrase. If Whicher was certain of something, he was 'as sure as I'm alive'. 'That'll do!' he said when he found a clue. He was benevolent to his foes – he agreed to share a drink with one thief before taking him prisoner, and to spare him the handcuffs: 'I'm willing to behave as a man to you,' he said, 'if you are willing to behave as a man to me.' He was not above a