Main Character Energy and the Louvre Heist
Following the shocking jewel heist at the Louvre, the world has been transfixed on efforts to unmask the thieves responsible and to recover the stolen jewels. But inside the larger whodunit mystery lingered a smaller (and for the internet, an equally riveting) one.
Who was the “dapper” man the internet (wrongly) guessed as “the detective” and subsequently called “Fedora Man?”
This week, he stepped out of the shadows. “Fedora Man” is actually a 15-year-old boy named Pedro Elias Garzon Delvaux. According to Pedro, he went with his mother and his grandfather to the Louvre but was blocked from going inside by police officers. He didn’t realize there had been a heist. He didn’t know that anyone had taken his picture. Other people realized his image had gone viral before he did.
Yet Pedro, who designed his gentlemanly look in homage to characters like Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes, decided to let the mystery of his own identity play out on a global stage. “I didn’t want to say immediately it was me,” he told the Associated Press. “With this photo, there is a mystery, so you have to make it last.”
Ironically, Pedro’s efforts to dress with the meticulous care of literature’s most iconic detectives had an unintended sleight of hand. Many guessed Pedro was actually a detective. His wardrobe, wrenched from a bygone era, conjures a shared imagery. In our collective mind’s eye, it would seem the ultimate detective wears a fedora, a suit, and grooms his mustache often.
Our ideal detective trope is likely rooted in the stories that raised us. When Agatha Christie created Hercule Poirot, the detective who made in appearance in thirty-three of her novels, she pulled attributes from other noteworthy detectives like Sherlock Holmes.
And, in a case of art imitating life, Christie may have tapped her real life for inspiration, too. During World War I, Belgian refugees fled the conflict and settled in Torquay, a seaside town in England. Christie came into contact with the local Belgian community near her hometown of Torquay. In Christie’s autobiography, An Autobiography, she recounted the story of imagining the Poirot’s nationality: “Then I remembered our Belgian refugees. We had quite a colony of Belgian refugees living in the parish of Tor. Why not make my detective a Belgian? I thought. There were all types of refugees. How about a refugee police officer? A retired police officer.”
Geneologist Michael Clapp believes Hercule Poirot may also be based on a real retired Belgian gendarme, Jacques Hornais. Hornais fled World War I and settled in the same Belgian community in Torquay. Clapp discovered a picture a newspaper article that tenuously linked Christie with Monsieur Hornais when she was a young girl. Unfortunately, none of Poirot’s noteworthy attributes can be definitively traced back to Hornais.
It’s worth noting that, over time, Christie fell out of love with Poirot. Despite his impeccable grooming and brilliance, she couldn’t stand his self-focused personality. She wrote him into her stories anyway. She kept him alive purely because the public was smitten with him.
In novels, plays, and short stories, Christie spent countless hours creating and refining Poirot’s character. As with any long-term relationship, Christie was privy to Poirot’s flaws and quirks. His shiny facade faded over time for her, though perhaps not for us. Poirot and his sleuthing counterparts are so entrenched in our cultural conditioning that we’ve come to take them for granted. In Pedro’s efforts to embody the style of these famous detectives, he’s reminded a jaded public of stories that warrant revisiting.
Because, in a truth stranger than fiction, he was in the right place at the right time. Maybe a heist at the Louvre involving France’s crown jewels demanded a faux detective wearing a fedora. Pedro seems pleased to have worn the right hat for the event.
“When something unusual happens, you don’t imagine a normal detective,” Pedro said. “You imagine someone different.”
If a boy with a main character’s panache and a playful spirit can nudge us to reconnect with classic mysteries again, he may have reminded us of literature’s staying power in the digital age. Even Christie would’ve appreciated that unexpected twist.
