Forty Years Among Thieves and Murderers

Ivan Dmitrievich Putilin (1830–1893) is a legend of the domestic detective service, the head of the detective police in St. Petersburg, who fought against criminals in the city on the Neva for almost forty years. During this time, he solved hundreds of cases, many of which became widely known, and he considered his best investigations to be those he managed to solve "exclusively through logical deduction". Putilin employed subtle psychological techniques in communicating with witnesses and criminals, thoroughly studied crime scenes. He was the one who introduced into the practice of the Russian police what would later be called "undercover work": he frequented disreputable places, made acquaintances in the criminal world, adopted the styles and manner of speech of criminals. He described the most interesting crimes in the pages of his memoirs "Forty Years Among Thieves and Murderers," which he wrote shortly before his death.