The thinking detective ... a portrait of Sherlock Holmes sold at Sotheby's. Photograph: David Sillitoe.
This week the devotees of Richard and Judy's book club will be going out to buy Jed Rubenfeld's excellent The Interpretation of Murder, a historical detective story about Freud and Jung chasing a serial killer during their 1909 visit to New York. If you enjoyed that, you can follow it with two other 2006 novels about towering intellects involved in foul play: Michael Gregorio's The Critique of Criminal Reason, also about a serial killer but this time with Kant joining the investigation, and The Poe Shadow, about a Baltimore lawyer trying to reconstruct the writer's death. Is this turning into a trend?
Although the insertion of real historical figures into novels like EL Doctorow's Ragtime is often thought of as a uniquely postmodern trick, we find Johnson and Boswell picking up the magnifying glass in a story by Lillian de la Torre as long ago as 1943.
That was a promising start, but, since then, when mystery writers have looked for a real historical figure to add gravitas to their novels, they've usually gone for the very mighty, from Julius Caesar in Steven Saylor's Rubicon to John F Kennedy in James Ellroy's American Tabloid. This makes sense - a lot of murders are about power - but what's much more interesting is the clash between the brutal, messy world and someone who lives mostly in their own gentle, ordered mind, like a philosopher or a novelist.
The supreme example of this is probably an out-of-print, 1978 novel called The Case of the Philosopher's Ring by Randall Collins, in which Bertrand Russell despatches Sherlock Holmes to find out who has stolen Wittgenstein's mind. In the same year, Margaret Doody published Aristotle Detective. But writers tend to be more popular than philosophers, perhaps because philosophers don't get out much (Gregorio, for example, has to haul his magistrate hero down to Konigsberg, the town Kant never left). So instead we've had murders solved by Chaucer, Shakespeare, Defoe, Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Mark Twain, Poe again, and even, of all people, Jane Austen and Beatrix Potter.
I've always thought Rousseau was a natural choice for this kind of book. After writing some unpopular anti-religious tracts in 1762, the philosopher found himself in exile for several years, first in Motiers in Switzerland and then in Wootton in Staffordshire. Both these little towns, like Miss Marple's St Mary Mead, could have seen regular poisonings and stabbings, and Rousseau, with his insight into human wickedness, would have been just the man to unravel them. But which great thinker could you see as the next Sherlock Holmes?
