"I wonder what real detectives are like"

I wonder what real detectives are like. It may be that my life has been abnormally placid, but I have never wanted a detective. Neither (I anticipate your thunderbolt of repartee) neither has a detective ever wanted me. If he did, that is, it was a private yearning, an ungovernable individual affection, distinct from his business, and he let his concealment feed on his damask cheek. And apart from these two positions, that of the patron and that of the material or subject matter (I mean the burglar), it is hard to get into spiritual relations with detectives. Other important people are more accessible. Anybody can see an editor, so long as he comes with a list of the urgent reforms that ought to be effected in some other country. It seems to be an axiom of our admirable and mysterious trade that if you want to make things better in Norway you begin an agitation in Vienna, and if you are dissatisfied with the management of Portugal you ask the inhabitants of Glasgow how long they are going to submit. Again, anyone can see statesmen- when there are any statesmen to see. As for crowned heads and great dukes and the Pope and people of that sort, we know from a hundred kindly journalistic anecdotes that they are to be seen by any small child who has a broken toy or a wounded kitten. So that you or I have only to procure a hurt kitten (I do not countenance hurting the kitten on purpose), a hurt kitten and a damaged doll and present ourselves with one in each hand at the gates of the Vatican or the steps of the White House at Washington, to be immediately ushered into the presence by bowing flunkies and reverently saluting guards. You can even know servants, by far the most remote, awful, and exclusive class in our community. I once knew a wild fellow who knew a butler. He saw the other side of that splendid moon; "silver lights and darks undreamed of," as Browning says. But you cannot very well know a detective, except by all the trouble of committing a crime; and when you have got as low as that you may as well go the whole hog and be a detective yourself; then you will know him intimately.

-November 4, 1905, Illustrated London News