ABSTRACT
The popular appetite for crime stories from the mid-Victorian era ensured that the police would necessarily be a feature of both short stories and novels. The increasing popularity from the 1890s of the private detective, implicitly brought in to solve complex cases because police detectives lacked the education pertaining to the well-educated and well connected, set up expectations of Chief Constables to be as ineffective as the police as a whole. This chapter explores the impact of popular understandings of the amateur sleuth or detective in characterizing the image of the Chief Constable and his force’s efficiency. Margery Allingham’s collection of ‘nice old boy’ Chief Constables, encountered by her detective Albert Campion, or those featuring in Agatha Christie’s Poirot or Miss Marple novels are contrasted with the less popular, but more positive images of Chief Constables presented in Patricia Wentworth’s Miss Silver series. The implicit denigration of the importance of the role in much twentieth century fictional depictions provides an interesting reflection on the reality of the difficulties faced by both rural and borough Chief Constables in asserting their authority.
