One thing that has always intrigued me – and what became a major impetus to write my novel – is the lack of attention paid by Victorian novelists to the birth of police detection and more particularly to Scotland Yard's Detective Branch. It is true that Dickens gave us Inspector Bucket and Collins, Sergeant Cuff, and as Kate Summerscale's excellent recent book The Suspicions of Mr Whicher showed us, the public perception of 'real-life' policing figures like Jack Whicher, who is a minor character in The Detective Branch, has been greatly influenced by such literary endeavours. But while both Bucket and Cuff are both very much paid employees of the Metropolitan Police, we are given precious little detail about the nature of the organisation they serve – and deliberately so. For the figure of the police detective, in the early 1840s when the Detective Branch was established, was a controversial one. Few disputed that a team of professional men dedicated to the task of investigating the more serious crimes afflicting the capital such as murder and violent robbery was, in theory, a good thing. But many feared that such a force, moving invisibly in their plainclothes through the city, would be a threat to 'English' notions of liberty and privacy. And as Summerscale's book details so well, the idea that police detectives – by and large working men made good – would snoop around in the private homes of the well-off was an anathema to those who would have to sign off on the new force.
It is not surprising, then, that the Detective Branch, when it was finally founded in the summer of 1842, was small and relatively insignificant in the context of the Metropolitan Police as a whole: just eight men among three and a half thousand. The team had its early successes but its existence was also incredibly precarious, with its defenders, among them Sir Richard Mayne – the more liberal and far-sighted of the two Commissioners – more than outnumbered by those who felt the job of the police was to prevent and not detect crime. This, then, is the context for my book The Detective Branch: an attempt, with the gift of hindsight, to do what the Victorians couldn't or didn't want to – to show the police not as lone operators or romanticised outsiders but rather as fully bureaucratic creatures, nonetheless chaffing against the institutionalised restrictions imposed on them. This, too, is the environment that Pyke – the ultimate Victorian maverick – must operate within and for those familiar with the earlier Pyke novels it should come as no surprise that the newly inaugurated Detective Inspector Pyke quickly runs into difficulties with his superiors, especially as he suspects that they have their own reasons for wanting him to toe the line. What The Detective Branch tries to explore, therefore, is the unravelling of an investigation into murder, robbery and political corruption whereby the complicity and competing agendas of the detectives is matched by their desire to uncover the truth, however unpalatable and threatening to their own positions it may end up being.
The Detective Branch is published by Weidenfeld
