The Vidocq Society, the Court of Last Resort, and Cold Cases

This 2013 article from Mental Floss focuses on the Vidocq Society, an amateur detecting club that considers "cold cases," and occasionally solves them. While the Society has no official status, its members have professional qualifications. The Vidocq Society is named for Francois-Eugene Vidocq, the world's first private detective, and model for such fictional detectives as Sherlock Holmes.

An organization like the Vidocq Society reminds me of the Court of Last Resort, set up by the last Erle Stanley Gardner, creator of Perry Mason. Gardner and some friends thought an informal "court of last resort," experts working to solve cases that seemed to be miscarriages of justice, would be a good use of their leisure time. They did manage to obtain reversals of fortune for some of those convicted and sentenced. Gardner wrote about the cases in The Court of Last Resort: The True Story of a Team of Crime Experts Who Fought To Save the Wrongfully Convicted. A new edition is available from Open Road Media (2017), in paperback and etext editions.

More here about the Court of Last Resort.

Detecting Murder

Martin Edwards has published The Golden Age of Murder (Harper Collins, 2015), available both in hardcover and as a e-book.  Here's a description of the contents from the publisher's website.

A real-life detective story, investigating how Agatha Christie and colleagues in a mysterious literary club transformed crime fiction, writing books casting new light on unsolved murders whilst hiding clues to their authors’ darkest secrets.

 

Another interesting book about a group that does somewhat the same thing is Michael Capuzzo's The Murder Room (Gotham, 2011), about the Vidocq Society, named for Eugene Francois Vidocq, the criminal turned detective who founded the Surete, France's first expert official detective bureau.