Once Upon a Time in Russia: Memoirs of the Chief of Criminal Investigation for the Russian Empire

The very name of this detective made the criminal world tremble. He is the one who first created a uniquely accurate card index of criminals and developed a special evidence identification system later adopted by Scotland Yard. At the turn of the 20th century, Arkady Koshko was a legend. At the International Congress of Criminal Investigators in 1913 in Switzerland, Russian forensic research methods were recognized as the best in the world because of their exceptionally high crime detection rate. This achievement is no wonder, since the Imperial Criminal Investigation Department was headed by “the most important detective in Russia,” the “Russian Sherlock Holmes”—General Arkady Franzevich Koshko (1867 – 1928). This high success rate was achieved through a new system of identification based on specific classification and an extensive archive of anthropometric, photographic and fingerprint data. It was a breakthrough in criminal investigation now recognized throughout the world. After the Russian Revolution in 1917, A. F. Koshko migrated to France and was invited to work for Scotland Yard, but refused and dedicated his last days to writing detective stories from his own experiences. These memoirs of A. F. Koshko describe the most notorious and scandalous crimes of that time in Russia and include 19 of his stories.