Early Eyes

Historical and Literary Influences on the Genre

Trying to pinpoint the first fictional “private detective” (never mind the first “private eye”) is pretty much like nailing two pieces of jello together… during an earthquake.

Nonetheless, all the following usual (and maybe occasionally unusual) suspects contributed to the development of the private eye as we now understand the term.

• Sir Lancelot
  Slightly tarnished, but not afraid to continue searching for the dingus. Back then, it WAS a game for knights.
• Robin Hood
  Ran his own agency, called his hard-boiled ops Merry Men. Didn’t get along with the local cops.
• Daniel Boone
  (1734–1820)
  An early childhood hero–thanks to the historically dubious but child-friendly NBC television series where the frontiersman was portrayed by Fess Parker–who may have whetted my appetite for manly heroics, and whose 1776 rescue of his kidnapped daughter–the original wandering daughter job–left a deep ding in American mythology and culture, including the Shamus game. 
• François Eugène Vidocq
  (1775-1857)
  History’s first recorded real-life private detective.
• C. Auguste Dupin
  Created by Edgar Allan Poe
  Literary debut: “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (April 1841, Graham’s Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine)
  The Big Daddy of them all. Created before the word “detective” had even been coined, Poe pretty much laid the groundwork for all fictional detectives to follow in the Dupin stories, establishing most of the common elements of detective fiction. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is widely considered the first detective fiction story. Literary buffs should note that Dupin and Cooper’s Hawkeye made their literary debuts the same year.
  
• Natty “Hawkeye” Bumpo
  Created by James Fenimore Cooper
  Literary debut: The Last of the Mohicans (1841)
  The first “wandering daughter” job? Apparently inspired by the real life story of frontiersman Daniel Boone and the 1776 search for his daughter, taken by hostile Native Americans.
• Allan Pinkerton
  (1819-1884)
  The man who put the “eye” in “private eye,”  Pinkerton founded his own private agency, The North-Western Police Agency, soon to become The Pinkerton National Detective Agency, in 1855. Also one of the first to write P.I. fiction… oh, sorry. His “memoirs.”
• Ralph Henderson
  Created by by Charles Felix
  Literary debut: The Notting Hill Mystery (1862)
  An insurance investigator in arguably the first detective novel.
• Fred J. Dodge
  (1854-1938)
  Legendary Wells Fargo man, he worked for them for over fifty years, much of it undercover, rounding up everything from rustlers to train robbers.
• Charlie Siringo
  (1855-1928)
  The original cowboy detective. He worked for the Pinkertons. Whoopie ti-yi-yay, motherfuckers.
• Wyatt Earp
  (1848-1929)
  Brave, courageous and bold, or just a thug for hire? Cleaned up a town à la Red Harvest, long about 1881. Later became –get this — a real P.I.
• Miss Loveday Brooke
  Created by C.L. Pirkis
  Literary debut: “The Black Bag Left on a Door-Step” (1883)
  Arguably the first female private detective (and almost certainly the first created by a woman), Miss Brooke actually predated Holmes.
• Sherlock Holmes
  Created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
  Literary debut: A Study in Scarlet (1887, Beeton’s Christmas Annual)
  Like, I have to make a case here? The world’s most famous detective, bar none. Obviously inspired by Poe’s Dupin–so much so that Watson even directly compares Holmes to Dupin in  A Study in Scarlet. 
• Mr. Spence
  Created by by Jozua Marius Willem van der Poorten Schwarz
  Literary debut: The Black Box Murder (1889)
  Was this the first private eye novel narrated in the first person by the detective?
• Horace Dorrington
  Created by Arthur Morrison
  Literary debut: “The Narrative of Mr. James Rigby” (1897)
  This early British rival of Sherlock Holmes is one of the most vile P.I.s of all time, and he appeared over a century ago.
• Sadipe Okukenu
  Created by John E. Bruce
  Literary debut: The Black Sleuth (1907)
  Not just the first black eye, but one of the very first eyes of all, predating even Hammett and Daly!
• Jim Hanvey, Florian Slappey and David Carroll
  Created by Octavus Roy Cohen
  Literary debut (Slappey): “The Fight That Failed” (1919)
  Literary debut (Carroll): “Gray Dusk” (1919)
  Literary debut (Hanvey): “Fish Eyes” (1922)
  Both kinder, gentler Hanvey and unfortunate racial stereotype Slappey were detecting in the pages of The Saturday Evening Post (and Carroll had already appeared in novels and a play) before those uncouth hard-boiled private eye barbarians began popping up in Black Mask in the December 1922 issue.
• Philo Vance
  Created by S.S. Van Dine
  Literary debut: The Benson Murder Case (1926)
  Just to keep things in perspective, Vance was a presumptuous, pretentious, monocle-wearing upper class twit, about as far from the mean streets as you can get, but for years he was America’s most popular detective, even after Hammett, Daly, Black Mask and the hard-boiled deluge…