It is this curious blend of rugged individualism and public service which accounts for the great appeal of the mythological detective. By virtue of his self-reliance, his individualism and his freedom from external restraint, the private eye is a perfect embodiment of the middle class conception of liberty, which amounts to doing what you please and let the devil take the hindmost. At the same time, because the personal code of the detective coincides with the legal dictates of his society, because he likes to catch criminals, he is in middle class eyes a virtuous man. In this way, the private detective gets the best of two possible worlds. He is an individualist but not an anarchist; he is a public servant but not a cop. In short, the fictional private eye is a specialized version of Adam Smith's ideal entrepreneur, the man whose private ambitions must always and everywhere promote the public welfare. In the mystery story, as in The Wealth of Nations, individualism and the social good are two sides of the same benevolent coin.

There is only one catch to this idyllic arrangement: Adam Smith was wrong. Not only did the ideal entrepreneur not produce the greatest good for the greatest number, he ended by destroying himself, by giving birth to monopoly capitalism. The rise of the giant corporations in Western Europe and the United States dates from the period 1880 -- 1900. Now, although the roots of the mystery story in serious literature go back as far as Balzac, Dickens, and Poe, it was not until the closing decades of the 19th century that the private detective became an established figure in popular fiction. Sherlock Holmes, the ancestor of all private eyes, was born during the 1890 s. Thus the transformation of Adam Smith's ideal entrepreneur into a mythological detective coincides closely with the decline of the real entrepreneur in economic life. Driven from the marketplace by the course of history, our hero disguises himself as a private detective. The birth of the myth compensates for the death of the ideal.