Legwork has 3 ratings and 1 review. Chris said: Legwork: A Weird Crime Casebook is an e-book collection of Weird Crime or Tech Noir tales by Lon Prat.
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In his early days, even the Master of Crime was a dunce. His very talents were a handicap. He was strong enough never to refuse a fight, he became so famous as a master of disguise that he was recognised from Brest to Toulon, and, of course, in order to effect so many daring escapes, he had to be one of the most frequently captured criminals in French history. After each display of ingenuity, he became so hapless, often staying put and waiting to be recaptured, that his crimes — burglary, swindling, forgery, beating people up and killing them in duels — look like an unconscious desire to be taken in hand by the grim, paternal state.
Sometimes he escaped but stayed in the prison, just to enjoy the amazement of his warders when they found him out of his manacles. Vidocq could carry on a normal conversation with a file in his mouth. As soon as he left the unremunerative world of crime for a steady job with the forces of order, he became significantly more intelligent. His transformation into a policeman was a coming of age, though not necessarily a step in the right direction. Vidocq may not, as his admirers claim, have invented fingerprinting and the science of ballistics, but he did show the importance of keeping detailed criminal records.
He proved, on occasion, that reason could be applied to problems previously left to chance and leg-work. This was surely one of the main attractions for Balzac.
When he first went forth with pliers and crowbar, belief in wizardry was still widespread. The judicial system was perceived as an evil intrusion, even by victims of crime: One day my father followed him, and just as he was going to put his hand on his collar, he grasped only a wisp of hay. He was the first folklore bandit to have an office and a salary, the first to lend himself to political violence. As a detective, he was far more dangerous than he ever was as a crook. Vidocq came to power at a time when state justice was becoming pervasive. The first paragraph of his memoirs, significantly, mentions Robespierre, who was born a few doors from the Vidocq bakery in Arras.
He was the human face — or faces — of a system that spent more time rooting out subversives than catching thieves. The idea that Vidocq was a self-made hero rather than a criminal in the service of a criminal state has been the dominant view ever since the publication of his memoirs in At the same time that he was pursuing the guilty, he was also freeing the innocent. It makes an interesting contrast to historical fact.
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At this rate, it would have taken fewer than fifteen Vidocqs to arrest every criminal in the country. His dodgy memoirs are ultimately more thrilling than the open-and-shut casebook of Sherlock Holmes. Readers of Vidocq must be either fools or detectives.
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His memoirs are suspiciously like the selective confession of a prisoner with time on his hands and a captive audience too polite or scared to interrupt the relentless self-exoneration. True, he might have carried a knife, but it was only for eating meat or for carving a carrot into a mould for a key made of prison spoons melted over a fire of rags and lard. His hands, admittedly, were covered in blood when his mistress Francine was found with five stab wounds inflicted by his knife, but he just happened to have cut his hand on some broken glass and Francine, by her own admission, had borrowed the knife for a suicide attempt.
Even the crucial story of the crime that first sent him to the galleys went through different versions. According to the original one, he was unjustly accused of forging an order of release for a prisoner at Lille.
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In a later version, he claimed to have been convicted for forging a key at Douai prison. This is not to say that Vidocq was not sometimes well-intentioned; he would hardly be such an interestingly sinister figure if he had never believed in the rightness of his mission.
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Legwork: A Weird Crime Casebook by Lon Prater
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