How to Be Idle -- on Private Detectives
No chapter on walking could be complete without a nod to the private detective, who started to appear in the nineteenth century. He is an attractive character precisely because he is essentially an idler, as Walter Benjamin wrote in Arcades:
Performed in the figure of the flâneur is that of the detective. The flâneur required a social legitimation of his habitus. It suited him very well to see the indolence presented as a plausible front, behind which, in reality, hides the riveted attention of an observer who will not let the unsuspecting malefactor out of his sight.
The truth of Benjamin's observation is embodied in that great literary loafer Sherlock Holmes, who, we conjecture, became a detective because he liked to loaf in his fictional world; to watch, to think, to walk. Like the poet, the detective does his work by walking and by sitting. He is not a victim of society; instead, he watches it, he stands outside it, he enjoys it, he smiles at its foibles.
-- Tom Hodgkinson
Performed in the figure of the flâneur is that of the detective. The flâneur required a social legitimation of his habitus. It suited him very well to see the indolence presented as a plausible front, behind which, in reality, hides the riveted attention of an observer who will not let the unsuspecting malefactor out of his sight.
The truth of Benjamin's observation is embodied in that great literary loafer Sherlock Holmes, who, we conjecture, became a detective because he liked to loaf in his fictional world; to watch, to think, to walk. Like the poet, the detective does his work by walking and by sitting. He is not a victim of society; instead, he watches it, he stands outside it, he enjoys it, he smiles at its foibles.
-- Tom Hodgkinson