About the book: year / We are Nikolay Svechin, Valery Vvedensky and Ivan Pogonin - authors of historical detective stories. Our literary heroes investigate crimes in the Russian Empire in late XIX - early XX centuries. And although, by historical standards, not much time has passed since then, colossal changes have occurred in the lives and everyday life of people, their psychology, behavior and ideas. And in order to describe that era, without later blushing in front of knowledgeable people, before we sit down to write another story or novel, we study sources: memoirs and diaries, newspapers and magazines, reference books and reports, scientific works of those years and fiction, archival documents. However, not all information known to us can be “packaged” into the format of a work of fiction. Therefore, for the time being, many interesting facts remained in our notebooks. And then the idea came to write this book: to tell about the history of the St. Petersburg detective police, about how they searched for criminals in the capital in the old days, about the fate of the royal detectives and the cases they solved... Contents: The daily life of the St. Petersburg detective police. From pre-Petrine times to 1923. Unknown stories of detectives Ivan Putilin, Mikhail Chulitsky and Arkady Koshko.