Among Thieves and Killers. Memories of the Chief of the Criminal Police

The first head of the criminal police of St. Petersburg was already referred to as the "Russian Sherlock Holmes" during his lifetime. He was truly a legendary figure. Novels and sketches were written about him, and later movies and series were made. Over forty years of work, he solved hundreds of crimes, many of which became high-profile cases. He narrates the most interesting, cunning, and witty crimes in the pages of his memoirs. In a light and engaging manner resembling a classic detective novel of the early 20th century, he describes the structure of the criminal world, mournfully recounts the complicated fates of robbers and murderers, and sympathetically tells the stories of crime victims. You are about to embark on a unique journey into the criminal world of St. Petersburg at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. From the memoirs of the great Russian lawyer A. Koni: "The head of the St. Petersburg criminal police, Ivan Dmitrievich Putilin, was one of those gifted individuals whom the old St. Petersburg governor F. F. Trepov could skillfully choose and, nevertheless, skillfully keep in check. By nature, Putilin was extraordinarily gifted and seemingly made for his position. An exceptionally delicate attention and remarkable observance, which possessed a certain special intuition that compelled him to scrutinize what everyone else passed by indifferently, were combined in him with calm restraint, great humor, and a peculiar crafty good-naturedness. In the first half of the 1870s in St. Petersburg, there was not a single major and complex criminal case that Putilin had not dedicated his efforts to. I had the opportunity to witness his remarkable abilities for investigating crimes in January 1873 when a murder of the hieromonk Illarion was discovered in the Alexander Nevsky Lavra… Late in the evening of the same day, I was informed that the murderer had been arrested."