For the Observer Magazine of 20 April 1969, Peter Deeley looked into what made detectives tick and how they tracked down criminals (‘The Detectives’).
There was a breakdown of the contents of a ‘murder bag’ and other police items, including smelling salts for witnesses and a 100ft flexible steel rule. To anyone who’s seen the TV series Dexter, they look more like the contents of a serial killer’s tool kit than the police’s – pliers, hammers, forceps. There’s also a pack of Rizlas, ‘for taking saliva tests’. Or for more of a Sherlock Holmes medicinal approach perhaps.
The first detective to be profiled was ‘the man who cracked the Peugeot kidnap case’, head of the Marseille police force Guy Denis. In 1960, four-year-old Eric Peugeot was taken from a golf course on the outskirts of Paris and a large ransom was demanded. This was eventually paid and the abductors disappeared.
Dixon of Dock Green Denis was not. ‘For Denis, detection is as much a work of art as a great picture is to the painter or a book to the writer,’ Deeley wrote. ‘He does not romanticise crime, but sees in the pursuit of an adversary a deep, intellectual challenge.’
Denis switched from driving Citroëns to Peugeots after the case ‘out of a certain respect for the family name’. I wonder if he ever turned down solving any Reliant Robin-scion-related crime.
Also profiled was New York policeman Romolo J Imundi, who dealt with more than 400 killings, most of them mafia-related (‘The cop who tangled with Murder Inc’). Deeley said he was ‘proud, sincere and loquacious’. His own station was bombed a few days before Deeley visited him.
‘Shooting a man isn’t the purpose of a good detective,’ Imundi said with admirable fortitude. ‘You’ve gotta get in there and bring the man out of his environment without any injury – that’s the skilful policeman.’
