The Sunday Gentleman (55 page)

After his staff left, Dr. Locard quietly got out of bed, dressed, and drove swiftly back to Lyons. He was barely in time to catch the last showing of his weekly movie. “I just couldn’t miss it,” he says sheepishly. “It was a Humphrey Bogart picture.”

WHAT HAS HAPPENED SINCE…

In 1949, while I was visiting New York City en route to Paris, I met with a new editor on
Cosmopolitan
magazine, who was interested in my suggestions for some factual stories. When he told me that he wanted to give his publication more masculine appeal, I immediately thought of a story I had wanted to do for years, an interview-biography of Dr. Edmond Locard, of Lyons. Dr. Locard was reputed to be one of the world’s foremost living detectives, although he was relatively unknown in the United States. The editor thought that this was a fascinating idea, and he gave me the assignment.

Once in Paris, I telephoned Dr. Locard in Lyons. He proved ready to cooperate with me. I took a night train from Paris to Lyons, and there spent several days chatting with Dr. Locard. Aside from the time I spent with the great detective, who was friendly and colorful, I found Lyons a bore. It was dismal, lacking in charm, and a municipal tomb after nine o’clock in the evening. I am a night person, and I have always shunned cities that go to sleep early. New York and Paris are night cities; Zurich and Vienna are not Lyons was the worst of all. Except for Dr. Locard, the place was impossible.

I hastened back to Paris not only with the inner relief of one who has been liberated from a mausoleum, but with the excitement of one who has collected material for a good story not yet told. I wrote this story, sent it by airmail to
Cosmopolitan
, and a week later, learned that the periodical had again changed its policy—it now wanted stories of feminine appeal, anything with masculine appeal was taboo. My unhappiness was alleviated somewhat by the fact that I had met a remarkable man in Lyons—and considerably more by the fact that I had on hand a completed story that I knew I would one day publish.

In 1953, when I returned to Paris, I took rooms as always at the California Hotel in the Rue de Berri. There the bartender, concierges, and telephone operators knew all my business as I knew theirs (they had known, four years earlier, of the purpose of my side trip to Lyons), and I heard from one of them that Dr. Locard was dead. I was not surprised by this, since he would have been seventy-six years old in 1953. But I was surprised that I had not read about it in the news. I asked my French informant—a knowledgeable telephone operator, as I recall—if she had read Dr. Locard’s obituary in the press. She could not be sure. She believed that she had learned about it on the radio or had seen it in a newsreel. Well, I thought at the time. Good-bye, dear Dr. Locard, perhaps one day my story will be your obituary.

A full decade later, in 1963, when I decided to assemble the material for this book, I made the decision to include this story of Dr. Locard among my favorite published and unpublished articles. But a sense of incompleteness troubled me. To cap the story of Dr. Locard’s life, I must have the exact place and time and circumstances of his death. I wrote to a friend of mine, a correspondent in the Paris bureau of
The New York Times
, and asked him if he could supply the information I needed. I assured him the task would be simple. It turned out to be anything but simple.

I kept getting memorandums from my correspondent friend in Paris, each one more exasperated than the last. He had gone to the files of
France-Soir
. There was “a big dossier” on Dr. Locard. No obituary. He had gone to the files of Agence France-Presse. No date of death. He had consulted the French
Who’s Who
for 1961-62. There was a birth date, but no death date.

In desperation, my friend visited the Paris bureau of
Progrès de Lyon
, and what he heard in reply to his inquiry sent him running to a telephone. As he wrote me that evening of April 10, 1963:

“Herewith a surprise for you: Dr. Locard not only is not dead, but I talked to him over the phone just a half-hour ago!”

Dr. Locard, at the age of eighty-six, was still alive in Lyons. The resurrection of one whom I had unfairly buried ten years before shocked me, then excited me, and finally spurred me into action. Quickly, I reviewed what I had written about the great detective in 1949, and now, in 1963, I fired off ten questions to Lyons to learn what had happened to him in the interval of fourteen years. The old crime hunter replied promptly, and for the most part frankly. But since he was evasive or cryptic on certain points, I was forced to fill in some answers from material found in various archives in Paris, after I arrived there in June of 1963. Here, then, is the compleat Dr. Locard to date:

For almost two years after I met him, Dr. Edmond Locard remained on active duty for the Sûreté Nationale in Lyons. In that short period, Dr. Locard was directly involved in 1,652 criminal cases—in other words, during his entire career for the Sûreté Nationale, he was involved in a total of 10,905 criminal cases, a formidable record.

I have the impression, however, that in those last two active years he was receiving more public attention as an author than as a government sleuth. Only one case in that time was found worthy of mention by the Paris press. This investigation occurred in December of 1950, and concerned two physicians, brothers-in-law of a dead man, whom the government suspected of having made some revisions in the deceased’s will. Since 50 million francs were at stake, the authorities called upon the expertise of Dr. Locard. I did not learn what Dr. Locard accomplished, only that he was brought in and that his effort was publicized. Although only this single case, of the 1,652 cases which he covered between 1949 and 1951, was mentioned in the newspapers, there were numerous references to Dr. Locard in his capacity as criminologist-author and to the variety of his writings for the same period.

In 1950—a prolific year for our aging hero—Dr. Locard published a revised edition of his seven-volume Book of Criminology, a single-volume work entitled
Defend Yourself Against the Criminal
, and several magazine articles and essays. One of the latter received special attention. It was a provocative piece in the journal
Médecine
50, called
La défense du crime
. As Dr. Locard told curious reporters, “I should really have called it ‘In Defense of the Criminals.’ After all, we are all perfectly capable of being criminals.”

As Dr. Locard’s advanced years began to make retirement an imminent probability, the French government decided to decorate him for his services to his country. In France, there are five grades of decoration, omitting the Grand Cordon, which President de Gaulle alone holds. Of these five, in November, 1950, Dr. Locard was awarded the third-highest. He was given the rank of
Commandeur de la Légion d’Honneur
.

After that, there was little else for Dr. Locard to do but step out of government service. And so, on February 21, 1951, after automatically being made “honorary director of the Laboratoire de Police” in Lyons, Dr. Locard retired from the Sûreté Nationale. He was seventy-four years old. He had been in the Sûreté ’s service for forty-one years.

One thing that made retirement easier for Dr. Locard was that he was replaced in the Lyons laboratory by his own son. Dr. Jacques Locard. But there is a sad note here, for his son served only one year and nine months. When I asked Dr. Locard about his son, he replied curtly, “Died 24th of November, 1952. He was succeeded by Professor Bouret.”

But retirement from his official position did not mean retirement from work for Dr. Locard. At seventy-four, he felt young and therefore was young. He rented offices at 5 Rue Mercière in Lyons, and he did not resume but rather continued his activity in all aspects of criminology. Soon he was off to North Africa on a lecture tour of Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco. He had always been interested in motion pictures, but mainly as a spectator. Now, returning home, he decided to become a film writer and actor. Late in 1952, he delivered the completed manuscript of a scenario entitled “Crime Never Pays” to Henri Lepage, the French film director. Perhaps recalling his apprehension of Jules Bonnot, A. Conan Doyle’s former chauffeur who had committed twelve murders, Dr. Locard’s cinematic villain indulged in similar crimes in Lyons’ Chinatown and deposited the corpses in the Rhone River. The hero, an elderly professor-detective, whom Dr. Locard lovingly created for his own film debut, identified the villain from a silk thread clinging to a rope found in the culprit’s house, a thread of the same material as that of the blouse of a female victim. The hero then closed in on the murderer after finding a wax droplet from a candle the killer had used to make his way, corpse on his back, to the river. Unhappily for Dr. Locard, if not for cinema audiences, the scenario was never made into a film.

In the fifteen years following his retirement from the Sûreté, Dr. Locard continued to devote himself to his twin passions—writing about crime for periodicals and in books, and using the laboratory for detection. His prolific international correspondence with other detectives and prospective clients and admirers suffered. He had time, he told me, to correspond regularly with only “a few famous lawyers and a few criminals.”

The hours taken from private correspondence, apparently, went into his public writings. When he retired, he had told the local press, “I will now be able to write that great work that is so close to my heart—a complete general catalog of the lichens in France.” Since the relatively inoffensive lichen is a symbiotic plant that thrives on bark or rocks, Dr. Locard’s questioners were understandably confused by this odd enthusiasm. His explanation of this interest gives us a minute insight into a traumatic moment of his youth. When he was in school, he explained, taking a botany examination for his baccalaureate, he was unsure of one important test question—on lichens. He asked a fellow candidate for the correct answer, misunderstood his friend’s whispered reply, and as a result put down the wrong answer. He received a poor grade. Then and there he determined to compensate for his failure by becoming an expert in botany. When I inquired, a dozen years later, if he had overcome the lichen and exposed it in print, he replied tersely, “Book not finished.”

Other books, however, were finished. Dr. Locard wrote and published
Les Causes Célèbres
, a popular and dramatic nonfiction book about famous criminals including Mata Hari and Angèle Laval, the latter the poison-pen letter writer whom he had apprehended in Tulle and who had made him world-famous. In 1961, the French publisher of scientific books, Payout, brought out Dr. Locard’s more serious study,
Expertises de Documents Écrits.
Not unexpectedly, Dr. Locard was frequently approached about writing his memoirs. He Bad neither the interest nor the time, but at last he permitted Robert Corval, a Paris newspaperman, to collaborate with him on his autobiography, which appeared in France in September of 1957. There is no evidence that it was widely read.

Meanwhile, Dr. Locard continued to occupy himself with other aspects of creativity. He wrote and published his scientific papers and his popular articles. He edited a magazine, which I have never seen, called
Androcles
. And he contributed to the “Letters to the Editor” section of such newspapers as
Figaro
of Paris.

From time to time, through the years of so-called retirement, he made himself available to interviewers from Paris. When a journalist from the late
Samedi-Soir
asked him if the violence reported in mass-circulation newspapers had effected the increase in crime, Dr. Locard replied that he doubted if the press contributed to crime at all. Then he turned against an old love. The motion picture, he said, was far more dangerous, because films often gave potential criminals graphic illustrations—“ideas”—of how to commit their crimes. Dr. Locard went on to castigate his old enemy, the anonymous letter writer. He felt, he said, that there was no difference between a writer of anonymous letters and a murderer who killed by poison. And as to the poisoner. Dr. Locard added, lax colleagues who believed that any evidence of arsenic in a crime was absolute proof of premeditated poisoning were jumping to conclusions. Said Dr. Locard, “Arsenic is everywhere, even to be found in the armrests of easy chairs, and finding it does not prove anything.”

But above all, in recent years. Dr. Locard has remained active as a private detective. I asked him in 1963, “Since your retirement, have you accepted criminal investigations in a private capacity?” He replied, “Yes. Especially in cases involving forgery and anonymous letters.” He was often engaged, he said, in cases concerning the forgery of rare stamps. “And there is not a day that passes,” he went on, “that someone doesn’t send me, for one reason or another, a specimen of hair to examine. Generally, it is just hair from dogs.”

While reluctant to discuss in detail any specific criminal cases he had handled since he left the Sûreté Nationale, Dr. Locard made it clear to me, when he wrote me in April of 1963, that he was as occupied in the fight against crime as ever. “I put my signature this morning underneath crime report Number 11,704.” This meant that, in his years of private practice, he had been involved in 799 criminal cases.

It is plain that Dr. Edmond Locard needs no further spectacular investigations or front-page publicity to secure his place among the great detectives of all time. What Sherlock Holmes suggested as possible in fiction, Dr. Locard transformed into reality. What France’s Minister of the Interior wrote to him upon his leaving the Sûreté holds true today:

“In an era when the most current means of convicting people were the confession and witnesses, you, Dr. Locard, undertook to place in the first position research and scientific precision in establishing material traces and indices as essential objective proof of crime. This method has progressively become a classic approach in all judicial inquests of democratic countries.”

When I last heard from him, Dr. Locard was still enjoying the comforts of his old house in a suburb of Lyons. He was not wanting in companionship. “I have fifteen grandchildren,” he told me, “the oldest of whom is soon to get married.” Although in good health, he no longer was going out to attend his weekly movie. One might imagine he has been too busy with his work or with that newer diversion—television. But I suspect another reason for his neglect of the cinema. There has been no one to replace his beloved Humphrey Bogart.