Sometimes facts and fiction meet up in unexpected ways. I was invited to talk about my books and research in Nysted close to where I live, and, of course, mentioned Hakon Jørgensen, one of the most important people in the history of the police in Denmark.
He invented a method of remote identification by coding fingerprints so they could be wired across borders, introduced and educated police dogs and -handlers and wrote the manual of course. He was the first leader of the Danish police academy, Commissioner of Police in Copenhagen for a short while and the leader of the first international Central Bureau of Identification, placed in Copenhagen because of him. Sadly closed at the start of the first world war. And – he wrote a handbook on investigation, published in 1912.
His ‘Method on Crime Investigation (Læren of Forbrydelsens Efterforskning) is absolutely fantastic, very modern, and includes the ‘detective bag’, Christian always brings along. I have made him the one to encourage Christian to apply for the detective job and recommend him to Madsen, who was the real life chief of the detective office at the time.
And then, having enthused about this amazing man, an old lady in the audience raises her hand and tells us: ‘he’s my grandad’. She told about his four children – three girls and a boy, and how – while he had a flat at the Copenhagen Police Headquarters, which is a huge building – they used to rollerskate in the very long corridors when visiting.
I love interacting with an audience. There are always people there who knows about technical stuff or ballet or photography or history… so we can dig deeper into the 1910s and talk about electric cars (plenty of those then) or colour photography (yes, also there), but it was the very first time I met someone an actual descendant of one of my personal heroes, who unfortunately died way too young, and could tell about him from first hand experience.
(Maleri af N.V. Dorph (1862-1931))