‘Little wildcat! You won’t do any more scratching when I get through with you!’

‘Let me go!’ Nancy cried, struggling harder. The man half-carried, half-dragged her across the room. Opening the closet door, he flung her roughly inside. Nancy heard a key turn in the lock. The sliding of a bolt into place followed.

‘Now you can starve for all I care!’ the man laughed harshly. Then the steady tramp of his heavy boots across the floor told Nancy Drew that he had left the house…

        –The Secret of the Old Clock (1930 edition)

As any of the generations of fans of the fictional girl detective Nancy Drew—heroine of hundreds of serial novels published from 1930 to this day—can tell you, Nancy does not stay locked in the closet for long. She tries to pick the lock with a hairpin, then uses a clothing rod to pry off the hinges, while giving one of her trademark side lectures—this time, on Archimedes and the wedge.

This teenage detective became the archetype of a kind of tough American woman: smart and fierce in the face of violence, but also well-respected by police and her doting father. Fashionable, too. Even though she was just a fictional character, she was inspirational, and none other than Supreme Court Justices Sandra Day O’Connor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Sonia Sotomayor have said she was a huge influence in their lives.

Over the course of more than 600 books, Nancy Drew’s adventures were often repetitive, and though her cars and clothes were frequently updated, she always remained the same age. Accompanied by her best friends Bess and George, she unearthed lost wills and heirlooms and found missing people. She explored hidden staircases and spooky haunted houses. Tenacious and plucky, Nancy had a boyfriend, the handsome Ned. She always fought to right wrongs, using her smarts to wriggle out of perilous situations. Nancy Drew got kidnapped. She was knocked unconscious. Foes threatened her to stay off cases (or else!).

What she offered American girls was a sense of resourcefulness. She taught us to signal SOS with a tube of lipstick, to break out of a window using spike heels, and to always keep an overnight bag in our car—a girl never knew when she’d encounter a sudden overnight sleuthing adventure. Real-life kidnapping victims have said that Nancy Drew stories inspired them to use their wits to escape; successful women in law enforcement say Nancy Drew led them to their careers.

The real mystery of Nancy Drew is how such a fictional character could inspire real women. Clues can be found in the woman who fleshed out the young detective’s personality, who was named Mildred Wirt Benson. Over the years many different writers worked on Nancy Drew’s stories, which were always published under the pen name of Carolyn Keene. But the very first books in the series, the ones that established her particular steely bravery, were written by Benson, who was just as tenacious and bold and independent as her heroine. Benson sought adventure and bucked conventions throughout her life. Once she was even locked in a room.

Mildred Augustine was born in 1905 in Ladora, Iowa, a rural farming community near Iowa City. An avid reader of children’s classics like Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, children’s magazines, and serial fiction, she preferred the books written for boys over those for girls, she said, because they focused on adventure and action.

The young Benson liked to write. When she was 13, her short story “The Courtesy” appeared in St. Nicholas, a monthly children’s magazine that also published notable authors like Louisa May Alcott, Mark Twain, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. The story won a second-place silver badge in a monthly contest. “When I grow up I’m going to be a GREAT writer,” Benson later recalled saying.

In rural Ladora, there were few career opportunities for women outside of domestic pursuits. Most girls planned on raising families and helping run the farms. Benson was a country doctor’s daughter who often rode with her father on patient calls, and that life was never in the cards. Benson’s parents encouraged her to get a college education, and to pursue adventure and her writing career. She graduated early from high school and enrolled in the University of Iowa, excelling in her classes and as a championship diver. She graduated with a degree in English in 1925—just five years after women earned the right to vote—and soon after, in 1927, she would become the first student, man or woman, to earn a master’s degree in journalism at Iowa. She traveled to New York City, where she began pursuing her long-sought career in writing.

During her first trip to New York she met a businessman named Edward Stratemeyer whose company, the Stratemeyer Syndicate, hired ghostwriters to write popular books. For a flat fee, these writers produced manuscripts based on outlines provided by the syndicate, signing away their authorship rights. Stratemeyer then attributed the books to pseudonymous authors and farmed them out to publishers. It was a very successful business model that churned out popular series such as “The Bobbsey Twins,” “Ruth Fielding,” “Tom Swift,” and “The Hardy Boys,” the boys’ detective serial that had started in 1927. “As oil has its Rockefeller, literature has its Stratemeyer,” Fortune magazine wrote of the publishing magnate, in 1934.

Stratemeyer didn’t have work for Benson right away, but he soon hired her to work on the “Ruth Fielding” series, which she had read as a child, and then asked her to help him launch a new series, about a teenage girl detective named Nancy Drew. The three-page outline Stratemeyer wrote for the first Nancy Drew book, The Secret of the Old Clock, set a tone for his new protagonist, whom he described as “An up-to-date American girl at her best, bright, clever, resourceful, and full of energy.”

He mailed the document to Benson, who set out to breathe life into the sleuthing heroine, giving her a healthy dose of her own independence, bravery, and feistiness.

Benson’s original Nancy Drew, depicted in books such as The Hidden Staircase, The Secret at Shadow Ranch, and The Clue in the Crumbling Wall, was a brash and daring sleuth. The 1930s and 1940s, when this first Nancy Drew debuted, were a time when girls who liked to read were ready for something more than the norm—those books Benson described as “namby pamby” girls’ series of the time. Life was hard for kids during the Great Depression and World War II, and parents didn’t sugarcoat the evil in the world. Reading about an adventurous girl who faced down the dangers around her provided young readers a safe escape from the troubles of the day, while also offering a nod to difficult times. Benson’s Nancy Drew paved the way for all of the others that followed, though the character was softened in later years.

Underwood typewriter used by Mildred Wirt Benson, also known as Carolyn Keene, to write several of the “Nancy Drew” mysteries. Photo courtesy of the National Museum of American History.

Nancy Drew was independent and was not tied down by work, domestic pursuits, or a fretting mother (hers had died). She was treated as an equal by her father and by many in law enforcement, and she never gave up when the going got hard. Her spirit struck a chord. Nancy Drew personified “the dream image which exists within most teen-agers,” Benson wrote in an autobiographical essay in 1973. This teen of 1930s remained culturally relevant for more than 80 years, even as young women’s roles changed dramatically. Mothers and grandmothers passed the books down to their daughters. “Women still tell me how they identified with Nancy Drew and that Nancy Drew gave them confidence to be whatever they wanted to be,” she told an interviewer in 1999.

Benson eventually did marry, twice, and had a daughter. But her career always drove her. Between 1926 and 1959, she wrote 135 books, including 23 of the first 30 Nancy Drew books. Benson published some novels under her own name, including her favorite Penny Parker Mystery Stories and books in Stratemeyer Syndicate series like “The Dana Girls” and “Honey Bunch.”

Benson also worked as a journalist for more than 50 years, mainly in Toledo, Ohio at The Toledo Times and the Toledo Blade. She worked the courthouse beat, tenaciously shaking out the facts about local crimes and city corruption. Later she wrote features, aviation columns, and a popular column for active seniors.

After all those years of writing series books adventures, Benson embarked on real-life adventures. During the 1960s, she trained to become a pilot and traveled to Central America to view ancient Maya sites before they were opened to widespread tourism. She traveled alone, braving crocodile-infested rivers and jungles she had to hack through with a machete. She was even once locked inside a room, in Guatemala in the early 1960s, by some locals who thought she knew too much about criminal activity in their town. (In that moment, Benson later said, she ruefully thought, “What would Nancy do?”) Eventually Benson, in true Nancy Drew style, overpowered one of her captors and escaped. Like any good sleuth, she later returned to Guatemala to learn more about what had happened to her.

It would be decades before most Nancy Drew fans learned that Benson was the original Carolyn Keene—the Stratemeyers always kept authors’ identities under wraps, preferring to tell fans that the family wrote all the books. The truth slowly leaked out, starting in the 1970s, thanks to researchers who discovered Benson had been Carolyn Keene. In the early 1990s, Benson donated a series of papers and her Underwood typewriter to the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History. And in 1993 the University of Iowa held a widely-publicized Nancy Drew Conference, after which Benson finally got the public credit and adulation she deserved. She was even named the “Person of the Week” by ABC’s World News Tonight with Peter Jennings.

Benson told Jennings that she’d probably still be writing when the undertaker walked through the door. She was right—she was working in semi-retirement on a column for the Toledo Blade on May 28, 2002, the day she died, at age 96.

The post The Real-Life Adventuress Who Turned Nancy Drew Into a Modern Heroine appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

My mother was in the kitchen doing what she characteristically does on a Saturday, making spaghetti sauce, meatballs, sausage, and braciole for the week. The comforting aroma of sautéed garlic, onions, and tomatoes cooking with the frying meat filled the house. I treasured Saturdays for the simple reason that I felt loved.

Two of my older sisters were upstairs in their rooms doing whatever. (Bonnie, the oldest, was away at college.) Being the youngest of four girls, followed later by my brother Tommy, I was never included in their affairs, and pretended not to care much, since they ridiculed me whenever I was with them. And so being downstairs alone with the laundry and the hockey game suited me just fine.

Saturdays, my dad was at his store working. On Sundays, though, Dad and I watched football together. I loved watching sports with my father. It was one of the few times I felt the closeness he and I once shared before my brother was born. Then I became like my sisters; girls with whom he didn’t know how to communicate or show outward signs of affection. But watching football together was our bonding time. Except when he decided to root for teams who were not from New York.

“Get out of the room!”

“What?! Why? New York is winning.” I’d be completely confused.

“Out. Now!” He’d say as his jaw clenched and his finger pointed threateningly at me.

He never explained why he would, at times, change his New York affiliation, but then, he never explained much of anything. He didn’t make sense to me sometimes, my father. Yet on this day, this Saturday, I began to understand who my father was and how to play outside of the rules.

There was an abrupt knock on the family room door. Since my brother’s friends entered through that door, I called out, “Come in,” while keeping my eyes glued to the game and continuing to fold the towels. After a slight beat, there was another knock. This time more forcefully.

“It’s open!” I said with annoyance, not knowing where my brother was or why my brother’s friends suddenly developed a hearing impediment. But again, more knocks.

Irritated, I got up to answer the door. As I swung it open, a gold badge and an identification card with a blurred picture of a man’s face was shoved within millimeters of mine. It was thrust so close to my nose that my eyes couldn’t focus to read what I assumed I was supposed to be reading.

“I’m lieutenant so-and-so of the FBI.”

He was a tall man in a dark suit. “Is your father home?”

Without waiting for a response or an invitation, his arm stretched out several feet like a Gumby toy and brushed me and my pile of towels aside as he entered the family room. When my eyes and mind refocused, I saw three other men standing in the garage. They were the biggest men I had ever seen.

Two were dressed in similar outfits of red plaid flannel shirts, khaki pants, and work boots. The third man behind the intruder wore a dark suit as well. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking, he just followed suit, no pun intended, and entered the house after the man with the badge. The other two men in plaid flannel and khakis walked past me into my family’s home. No one bothered to wait for an invitation.

“Come on in,” I muttered sarcastically under my breath.

Though I did not understand exactly why these four oversized men were in our home looking for my father, I sensed my dad’s odd little nightly rituals had something to do with it.

The author’s father (third from the left), standing behind his mother and with other members of his family in 1941.

 
My father, Angelo, was a generous man, a self-made man with only a high school education who treasured his family. He was a storyteller, a raconteur, whose charm amused those he enjoyed entertaining.

His mother, Teresa, was an industrious and formidable woman, not unlike the icon from Calcutta. She made things by hand (doilies, handkerchiefs) and started selling small dry goods out of her two-bedroom flat in the Italian section of Schenectady’s Mont Pleasant neighborhood. Business went so well that her husband Carmelo, a mason by trade, built a department store across the street with two apartment dwellings on the second floor. Thus, the family business was established. When my father returned from World War II, he moved into one of the flats upstairs and ran the department store with my grandmother.

The store was successful not only because it provided for the needs of the small immigrant community, but also because my father had a personal touch with his customers. He took great care in measuring a proper fit for their new shoes. He covered their children’s schoolbooks with plastic, provided money order service for those without a bank account, and supplied goods from dresses to toiletries.

The author’s grandfather, renovating a building so the family could run a department store on the first floor and live on the second.

***

As the four massive men stood looking around the family room, I called for my mother, who was in the kitchen oblivious to the intrusion.

“Ma, these men are here to see Dad.”

My mother came out from the kitchen wiping her hands on the mapine (Italian slang for dishtowel). As she graciously extended her arm with a smile to greet them, the large man in the dark suit said, “Ma’am, I have a warrant for your husband’s arrest.”

My mother’s smiling countenance dropped liked the ball at Times Square, as if a shock went through her body from head to toe. The four giant men then circled her like dogs with their prey. My small, agile body quickly slipped by them unnoticed as I dashed upstairs, knowing that any incriminating evidence they were looking for needed to be found, hidden, and destroyed. What that evidence was exactly I wasn’t certain, but I knew what it looked like, and so did my sisters. We saw it almost every evening after dinner.

Dinner was a nightly ritual. It was my father’s insistence that we eat together as a family, something that I could never understand. It’s not as if he waxed poetic at the dinner table. He just wanted us all there, together. It didn’t occur to me back then that it was probably the only time he saw his family together in one place at one time, given his seven-day work week. For me, it was just another rule by which I had to abide.

When dinner was over, we girls would clean up. My brother was allowed to go off and play. My father remained at the head of the table and took out a brown paper bag or a shoebox from the store, or both. He waited patiently as we wiped the table clean and dried it. Then he’d pour the contents of the shoebox or bag out onto the tabletop.

They were always the same type of items: narrow rolls of paper, the kind taken from a small adding machine, and other individual bits of paper held together by paper clips. He used the paper bag to make his notes, or if it were a shoebox, he’d write on the back of its lid. On these small bits of paper were odd writings—two or three letters with a dash followed by numbers, none of which made sense to me.

“Dad, what are those numbers?” I’d ask.

“Just ‘figgers’,” he’d say with a Brooklyn accent.

My father wasn’t from Brooklyn—his cousins were—and he didn’t normally speak with a Brooklyn accent, but there were certain words he would pronounce as if he were raised in Bensonhurst.

“But what do they mean?”

“Just ‘figgers’,” he’d say, continuing his calculations.

When he finished at the table, he went into the family room with his paper bag or shoebox of “figgers.” He called either a woman named Cathy or his friend, Fiorentino, (a name you couldn’t make up) and spoke what sounded like code into the phone.

“Hey Fior,” his nickname for Fiorentino, “INT-175, FDV-150, ZJH-333.” And so the one-sided conversation went.

When he finished the phone call, he’d typically walk to the fireplace, empty the shoebox or paper bag of all its contents, and light everything on fire. I’d watch with him sometimes as he waited until the papers ignited. The fire didn’t last long and he’d spread the bits of paper around, making sure they were all dark dust.

***

Upstairs my sister Donna was on her bed. She was a senior in high school and president of her sorority, and always had an air of superiority. She shot me an annoyed look as I rushed in.

“The cops are here. Dad’s under arrest!” I blurted.

Donna shot up like a rocket as my sister Elaine, only a year older than I and the one to whom I was closest, rushed into the room.

“It’s that thing he’s been doing,” Donna said.

“What is that thing he’s been doing? I asked.

“You know, those papers.”

“But what are those papers?”

Whether my sisters knew or not, I couldn’t tell. They didn’t answer. But whatever it was my father was doing, even though we knew deep down it was not totally above board, we were going to hide from the men downstairs. Donna went into combat mode.

“Let’s go into Mom and Dad’s room. Search the drawers. Anything you find, those bits of paper, stuff in your panties.”

Like a well-organized sports team, we made a game plan: to strike before the feds ascended the stairs. Time was of the essence and we had to be discrete.

Downstairs the feds kept my mother in close sight. They made sure she had no chance to stash away any convicting proof of my father’s guilt as they scoured through cupboards, drawers, and sofa cushions, unaware all the while that actual evidence tampering was happening one flight above them.

Donna took on my mother’s dresser, Elaine the smaller closet, and I the walk-in closet where many shoes boxes lay on the shelves. I dug through sports jacket after sports jacket, wanting to find something, anything, that would save my father from the wolves downstairs, but there was nothing except paper clips and loose change.

“I found something!” Elaine exclaimed.

Donna and I ran over to her. My heart pounded. Elaine’s hands shook as she held small pieces of yellow paper. Quickly unfolding them, we realized … it was a false alarm. They were store receipts from recent sales.

“Put ’em in your panties anyway—they could be code for something,” Donna ordered. Elaine obeyed.

I peeked out my parents’ bedroom door to see where the feds were. Only their legs and shoes were visible from the top of the stairs as their feet disappeared into the living room. Their next stop would be the second floor.

“They’re getting closer,” I whispered as I rushed back to the closet. I looked around for where to continue my search. The shoeboxes sat on the shelves as if screaming at me. Of course! I ripped open lid after lid as I eagerly expected to find the gold, the treasure, the Ark of the Covenant (though I didn’t actually know what the Ark of the Covenant was)! But instead of finding the evidence and saving my father, all that stared back at me were pairs of high heels, low heels, slip-ons, men’s dress shoes, and loafers. My excitement turned to frustration and all I wanted was for this to end, for the large men downstairs to go away, for my mother to continue making her sauce, and for me go back to folding the laundry and finish watching my hockey game!

The men’s voices downstairs were getting louder. They were now at the bottom of the stairs. I hurried to get the last box on the shelf, accidently knocking another off its ledge. Its contents spilled onto the floor. I froze. There, on the carpet in the middle of my parents’ walk-in closet, were what seemed like millions of little pieces of white paper with the all-too-familiar code on them and a small, dark notebook.

“I found them! I found the ‘figgers’!” I whispered straining not to shout.

My sisters rushed over. The three of us stared at the evidence the feds were coveting strewn over the floor. Now, Donna, Elaine, and I had to figure out what to do with it.

The post What Are Three Teenagers Supposed to Do When the FBI Raids Their House? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In particular, I can’t stand the fact that, in Farewell My Lovely, Chandler writes about Marlowe arriving at a seaside estate: “Through a green gate I saw a Jap gardener at work weeding a huge lawn. He was pulling a piece of weed out of the vast velvet expanse and sneering at it the way Jap gardeners do.”

My late father, who was raised in Japan, was a gardener. He inspired my mystery series character, Mas Arai, a senior citizen and accidental detective who works as a gardener, lives in Altadena (in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains), and drives a beat-up Ford truck. In fact, one motivation for my having such a protagonist is to give the nameless gardener—who also showed up in the film classic, Chinatown—a name and history.

Part of my pique is native pride. I live in Pasadena, where I was born. I’ve lived in other places—Palo Alto, Tokyo, and even Wichita, Kansas, where I spent nine months on a writing fellowship. It was in the middle of the country where the details of my first mystery novel, set in Southern California, came fully to me. I was told by someone that once I was away from Los Angeles, I would better sense what was there. He was right. Wichita helped me hear the voices of the old Japanese immigrant and Japanese-American men hanging out at the local lawnmower shop, see the sharp and narrow turns of the historic Pasadena Freeway, and smell the mixture of the sea and smog. Chandler may be the dean of L.A. crime fiction, but I knew this was a world that didn’t figure in his books.

Chandler was never fully rooted in L.A. He was born in Chicago and spent his early years in England. Once he arrived in Los Angeles, he moved countless times within the western part of L.A. before finally settling in La Jolla, the wealthy and picturesque coastal community north of San Diego.

I was born in Huntington Hospital in Pasadena, delivered by the doctor who would be my pediatrician until I was 16 years old. I inhabited a place where, once a week, I could accompany my immigrant mother to a Japanese grocery store in a blighted business area of Pasadena to purchase shiny-eyed whole fish, large red cans full of the magic clear sprinkles of ajinomoto (also known as monosodium glutamate), metal canisters of soy sauce (then not readily available in your average grocery store), and coils of long daikon picked in fermented miso and sliced in thin crunchy wedges. “Musume-san,” the shopkeeper would call out to me. Little daughter, a term of endearment that reinforced that I was indeed a part of this place.

Being an only child for eight and a half years, I was surrounded by adults and adult problems. I learned to listen carefully in two languages, English and Japanese, and perhaps even more importantly, learned to interpret silence. Watch for signs—did a prolonged silence mean serious trouble? Did a smile mean real approval or brewing anger? At a young age, I became a cultural detective of sorts, attempting to absorb the rules of my households while negotiating the ones in the outside world.

L.A. is supposed to be a good setting for mysteries because of all the reinvention that goes on here, from its palm trees originally from Australia to its official city flower, the South African bird of paradise. Change at L.A.’s pace creates unreliable characters, and unreliable characters drive mysteries.

But I like L.A. as a setting because it’s home, a peculiar kind of home because, through fiction and movies, people all over the world have memories of a Los Angeles they may never have seen in person. And even for those who live here, so many of the region’s places remain mysteries, communities they’ve never visited.

I like writing about these places that are so often ignored: Torrance, Gardena, Boyle Heights, Montebello, Altadena, Sawtelle. These communities I list are places where people of my same ethnic background settled or resettled—pushed into neighborhoods by racial covenants or ethnic preservation after being incarcerated in camps during World War II. And I like to write about such places from more than one perspective; in my new series, I have a young multiracial female rookie cop, Ellie Rush, who travels through downtown L.A. on an LAPD bicycle.

I have a natural curiosity about places, driving me to investigate what types of people lived there in the past, what crops may have been grown there, what crimes may have been committed. The way Los Angeles holds its communities of people, delicate honeycombs overlapping, destroying and multiplying, is fascinating and creates the kinds of conflict that produce interesting plots.

Harmony in such a place is as elusive as any mystery. In my book Snakeskin Shamisen, I imagined one attempt at harmony:

Lopez, Sing, and Iwasaki Mortuary specialized in cheap funerals, which you’d think would attract a crowd. … Mr. Lopez was obviously trying to hit the Latino, Chinese, and Japanese markets. A perfect plan in Lincoln Heights, where Mexican seafood restaurants and Chinese Vietnamese auto repair shops stood side by side. But the idea backfired, because mortuaries were like churches; people seemed to prefer them separated and segregated. It reminded Mas of his favorite Neapolitan ice cream—strawberry, chocolate, and vanilla were packaged together, but the solid lines of flavors never blended into each other.

I do share Chandler’s obsession with identity—both real and false—and family secrets. Perhaps this is why the detective novel belongs to L.A. We like to think we can erase our pasts, but we can’t. To escape from past and secrets, those of us who were born and raised here rely on silence.

Maybe I’m still that girl desperately trying to connect the dots in a world where much was left unspoken. By following my detectives, I finally have a chance to forge words and scenarios that make sense in solving the mystery of my home.

The post What Raymond Chandler Didn’t Understand About L.A. appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This shoemaker’s wife looked down from her upper-story window and saw a gang of masked thugs slicing up a kneeling man with swords and axes. Some of the assailants held torches, lighting the horrific scene.

“Murder!” Jacquette screamed.

One of the killers looked up and yelled: “Shut up, you damned woman!”

What Jacquette had just witnessed—and soon would describe to investigators—was the assassination of the king’s brother, Louis of Orleans. Louis had periodically ruled France during the king’s frequent spells of insanity. His bloody demise plunged France into civil war and led to Henry V’s devastating English invasion that put the “Hundred” in The Hundred Years’ War.

And yet the story of how Paris’ chief of police, a precursor to Raymond Chandler’s honorable detective hero who goes down the “mean streets” but “who is neither tarnished, nor afraid,” was lost for centuries.

I first learned about the courageous sleuth, Sir Guillaume de Tignonville, a decade ago, when my wife and I rented an apartment for a month on the Rue Vieille du Temple while I worked in the Paris archives. I’m a professor of medieval literature at UCLA, and I was researching a trial by combat that took place in Paris in 1386. One day, reading up on “our” street, I learned that it had been the scene of a bloody assassination in 1407 that changed the course of history. The story grabbed me, and I began thinking about my next book.

As a murder in the royal family, this case was different from most of the crimes that Guillaume dealt with in the crowded, smelly, dangerous place that was medieval Paris. Europe’s largest city, it had at least 100,000 inhabitants, many of them beggars, pimps, prostitutes, petty thieves, and grifters roaming the city in search of clients or victims. Some of them bribed the police to look the other way, and one obliging officer even took fiddlers on his nightly rounds to play music and alert any crooks in the area.

Suspects from this Parisian underworld were often hauled into court at police headquarters, a gloomy old fortress fronting the river Seine and known as the Châtelet— “the little castle.” It had a morgue, several prisons, and an evil reputation because of the torture regularly used there to extract confessions. Methods included an early form of waterboarding combined with a sort of rack.

High-profile cases could be difficult to crack. Powerful figures always have enemies, and Paris at night was a dark labyrinth where attackers could strike by surprise and just disappear. In 1392, for example, the king’s top military officer, Olivier de Clisson, was nearly assassinated by a gang of sword-wielding thugs who were never caught. Unlike the fictional sleuths in shows like CSI and True Detective, who pack heat and have back-up at the lab, a man of the law in 1400s Paris had to rely on his wits and his encyclopedic knowledge of the city. And he had to keep his sword handy: In 1372, a law officer had been assassinated while investigating a crime.

Guillaume, who had been police chief for six years at the time of Louis’ murder, mobilized his officers at once. He ordered all the city gates closed to prevent the assassins from escaping and posted guards in the streets to keep the peace. He ordered a search of a nearby house, evidently used by the killers as a hideout. And the day after the murder, he began summoning several dozen potential witnesses. These clerks, barbers, and housewives were deposed in small rooms by two-man teams. One asked questions while the other recorded their testimony, his goose quill scratching on parchment. Details came from Jacquette, who was drying her baby’s linen by the window, a salt seller named Gilet watching from his doorway, and a young clerk who found Louis’ severed hand just outside his door.

After a number of false leads and dead ends, as well as reluctant or misleading witnesses, Guillaume found the broker who had rented the house to the assassins and several vendors who had sold them goods or supplies. He began to suspect a far-flung conspiracy behind the murder—and a deadly political rot reaching as high as the royal family itself.

Guillaume suspected Louis’ cousin, John of Burgundy, a lord who had conspicuously appeared at Louis’s funeral draped in black and boldly proclaimed, “Never was there a more treacherous murder!” At great personal risk, the police chief set a cunning trap for Burgundy: At a meeting of the royal council, he dared the lords of France to allow his officers to search their palaces, normally off-limits to law enforcement officials. All but he agreed, because they were innocent of the crime, thus trapping Burgundy into a search and prompting a sudden confession. “I did it!” he burst out right there, in front of his relatives. It was the culmination of diligent inquiry that amazingly did not appear to have used judicial torture, force, or threats. Instead, Guillaume relied on stealth, surprise, and cleverness.

We know a lot about Guillaume’s methods because of the detailed report he left behind in a 30-foot parchment scroll. For two centuries, the scroll was lost. In the 1660s it mysteriously turned up in Pau, a town in the Pyrenees, far from Paris. A copy sent to the royal library in Paris was ignored until the 1740s, when it rekindled interest in the original, which was finally printed in the 1860s. Even today, scholars have been slow to recognize Guillaume’s pioneering detective work, apparently skeptical that true detective work was possible in an age of torture, or that there was in fact any mystery about who killed Louis.

Reading about the scroll in historical accounts and suspecting that scholars had not “gotten” Guillaume, I sought out the 1860s transcript copied from the original. Amazed by the everyday detail about ordinary Parisians like Jacquette, I was also astonished by Guillaume’s masterly inquiry, which reads like a modern police procedural. I decided to travel to Pau to examine the scroll at the archive. The transcript was complete and accurate and included a 35-line gap, perhaps left open for a deposition yet to come.

Reading Jacquette’s testimony—this time, on the tattered parchment scroll, in small, neat script now faded from black to brown—made the events of that chilly November night more than 600 years ago seem all the more real and astounding.

Much has changed in crime detection since Guillaume hurried to the scene of the horrible murder that Jacquette saw out her window. Since the rise of police detectives in the 19th century, and their modern fictional counterparts—from Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes to Chandler’s Philip Marlowe and beyond—we think we know who detectives are and what they do. But the story of how a brave and uncompromising police chief of Paris solved the crime of the century is a story worthy of Chandler, and yet it’s torn from the pages of medieval history. And as a true-crime tale, it’s far stranger than fiction.

The post Meet the Philip Marlowe of 15th-Century Paris appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.