Posted by Thomas Morris on November 11th, 2021

In November 1856 George Little, the chief cashier of Dublin’s Broadstone railway terminus, was found dead on the floor underneath his desk, lying in a pool of his own blood. The door of the room was locked, apparently from the inside, and thousands of pounds in gold and silver had been left untouched.

This was the most sensational crime to befall the Irish capital in decades. And it led to the most complex and lengthy investigation that Dublin’s detective force had ever undertaken. It would be another seven months before the man leading the murder inquiry, Superintendent Augustus Guy, was able to arrest the prime suspect. As I soon discovered when I started to research The Dublin Railway Murder, the story of how the crime was solved is a classic Victorian detective mystery. The decade in which these events took place, the 1850s, was the era when the romance of detection began to exert its grip on the public imagination. Scotland Yard sleuths such as Charles Frederick Field and Jack Whicher became celebrities, while the books of Edgar Allen Poe, Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins made the detective a staple of popular fiction.

But detectives weren’t always such glamorous figures. In some places they were positively reviled – and one of those places was Dublin. The city’s Metropolitan Police force was founded in 1836, and Dubliners were still getting used to the idea of uniformed police officers patrolling the streets when the first detectives were appointed six years later. For many people this was a step too far: these were officials of the British state, inconspicuous in their plain clothes, and able to mingle with the populace as they pleased. The authorities did their best to assure the public that the only function of these new officers was to detect and apprehend robbers and violent criminals, but they met with fierce opposition.

An editorial published in one Dublin newspaper in 1845 gives some idea of the hostility the detectives aroused. The author bemoans the fact that plainclothes officers ‘now jostle the respectable citizen in the halls of commerce, dog his footsteps in the house of worship, and even pry into the sacred privacy of his domestic circle.’ The writer goes on to assert that ‘the public will not and ought not to endure an espionage so lawless, so unconstitutional, so dangerous,’ before concluding that that ‘we never will be contented till the huge army of spying scoundrels…shall have been banished from our city.’

And the feeling was widely held. Shortly afterwards the MP and campaigner for Catholic rights Daniel O’Connell was one of many prominent Dubliners who signed a petition calling for the abolition of the detective force, ‘inasmuch as that body exercises a power obnoxious to the habits, character, and feelings of our fellow citizens...and utterly repugnant to the principles of the constitution.’

Londoners had expressed similar disquiet when the Met hired its first detectives in 1842 – but such objections soon melted away when their new detective force proved fiercely effective at clearing up major crime. In Ireland, however, hostility only grew. The detectives of the Dublin Metropolitan Police were all members of its ‘G’ division, and Dubliners joked that the ‘G’ stood for ‘government’. This was not mere paranoia: the headquarters of ‘G’ division were in Dublin Castle, the seat of British government in Ireland, making it only too plausible that the plainclothes officers were not just fighting crime but – as one Irish MP claimed in Parliament – working as ‘spies and informers’.

In the late 1840s, when Irish nationalists began to threaten revolution, the detectives not only gathered intelligence about the activities of the rebels, but even acted as provocateurs, placing orders for illicit weapons and then arresting anybody willing to supply them. During a short-lived armed rebellion in 1848, Augustus Guy himself was at the heart of a covert operation that shut down one of the leading nationalist newspapers. Is it any wonder that the residents of Dublin – particularly those who yearned for independence from Britain – feared and hated the city’s detectives?

The crime fiction of the last 150 years has given us a fabulous variety of detective protagonists. Old and young, male and female; lovers of crosswords, jazz and poetry; alcoholics, drug addicts and gamblers. Some have been puritanical in their virtue, others morally bankrupt. But whatever their personal ethics, they are almost without exception portrayed as agents of the forces of good. And that is what makes nineteenth-century Dublin such a fascinating setting for a real-life murder mystery – a place where even the detectives are not necessarily the good guys.