Criminal investigation has a long history, both formally and informally. As long as there has been gossip, there have been people who have investigated whatever allegations a cave person might have against another cave person: that guy stole my mastodon bone! Eavesdropping is as old as spoken language and it is probable that since the dawn of time some folks hid in the bushes to keep an eye on what other folks were doing. On a more formal level, investigative services arose as an alternative to policing, which did not make official law enforcement very happy at first.

In fact, the first private detective, Eugène François Vidocq, was arrested for his work. He got out on appeal. Sherlock Holmes, as a character, was created while private detective work, as a profession, was rising in popularity. Holmes’s main strategy for solving a crime was a powerful sense of logic; he could look at a series of clues and figure out a chain of events from that. Real detective work, though, competed with police work and thus developed technologies that are familiar to anyone who watches crime shows on television: ballistics, plaster shoe tracks, and even bond paper that was more difficult to be forged. All of these were created by Vidocq. Private businesses began noticing the advantage of hiring a private investigation agency. If law enforcement couldn’t catch Jesse James and his gang, then maybe the Pinkertons could.

Even today, companies hire private eyes to keep employees from stealing secrets and selling them to competitors. Preventing loss via shoplifting has become a major part of the investigative services industry currently. While police officers are legally in charge of investigating a crime scene, even Sherlock Holmes did not rely simply on the word of others about the clues. He observed the crime scene himself. Private investigators look at clues from crime scenes, especially if there might be a civil court case connected to the crime or when citizens feel a crime should be investigated more thoroughly than the police can do in a given case.

A person who is accused of a crime may hire a private detective to find evidence of someone else’s guilt. There is an art to reading the clues at a crime scene—of knowing what is a real clue and what might have been staged, being able to figure out how marks such as blood splatters or tire tracks might have been made, being able to spot the tiniest detail that is out of place and potentially a great source of information.

There is also an art to questioning people, to see the little flick of the eye that might indicate prevarication, to keep track of details to see if there is consistency across all witnesses. The need for the power of observation has not changed since the days of Sherlock Holmes. What has changed, and this is what would be very different for old Sherlock, is technology. The World Wide Web has added a new moniker to the old PI—“web detective.” The web provides a vast array of information that can assist a private eye in an investigation. For example, one can find property records, business filings, court records, property tax records, not to mention what people put on the web about themselves in social networking sites.

Instead of having to go to the county court house for dusty records in obscure boxes or run through miles of microfilm in a library, this information is a search and a few clicks away. Information searches these days are a lot more detailed than they used to be and they take far less time.

Forensic computing and forensic accounting have arisen as specialties in private investigation agencies as a result of technology. While embezzlement has taken place for as long as there has been any form of exchange of goods or money between human beings, modern embezzlement has become complex with the electronic network of banks and business. Embezzlers, of course, do their best to wipe their hard disks of evidence, but a good private eye with some hacking skills can find the smoking gun, even if it is in binary.

Computers have escalated the crime of identity theft, which has become as every day as the common cold. Here is where a private detective can really help a victim to figure out who is stealing the information and to track the chain of crimes that have been committed. Private eyes can also follow the money and help to break up crime rings that make use of false identities. Another change that would shock Sherlock is the global nature of business and relationships and therefore detective agency work. Drugs, money, goods, even people are smuggled from here to there, to avoid some law or other. Federal agents at the border can only do so much. Private detectives even work for environmental non-profit organizations to prevent the smuggling of endangered species across various national borders.

The material items a detective is working with have changed drastically since the time of Sherlock Holmes. We can do DNA tests, fingerprint identification, and use technology in so many other ways to figure out who is doing what to whom—to find and examine evidence. We can watch people with infrared heat sensing devices or even look up a picture of their neighborhood on a satellite.

The people haven’t changed. They are still cheating on each other, still tucking merchandise in their coats, still pocketing the cash, still faking the books, still running off with the kids in a custody battle, still bootlegging or selling drugs, still killing, still forging money and other documents, still trying to get you to wire them $300 so you can get the inheritance from Nigeria. And all the people affected by these activities still require the services of a private detective agency. What also has not changed about being a private detective is what Sherlock and our modern PI’s share: an ability to find the pieces and put puzzles together. This requires stick-to-itiveness and creativity. People who want to hide their activities have the motivation to explore new ways of doing so.

Investigative services continue to advance the technology of finding information in ways that Sherlock Holmes could not have predicted (although his brother Mycroft would have been a phenomenal hacker), but would nevertheless have approved.

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