Is he even real? The internet had many questions after a photo began to circulate.
Is he even real? The internet had many questions after a photo began to circulate.
It was, in nearly every way, an ordinary photo distributed by The Associated Press to news media outlets. It showed three police officers leaning against a silver car parked in the courtyard of the Louvre Museum in Paris just hours after the brazen theft of a collection of French crown jewels on Sunday.
But then there was the dapper man standing jauntily on the right side of the photo.
The officers, the AP caption said, were there to block the entrance to the museum. But the man, dressed in a buttoned up vest, a trench coat and a fedora, who seemed to be surveilling the scene, was more than enough reason for the internet to pounce.
In the days since the photo was uploaded, social media users — who had been romanticizing the crime as a Hollywood movie — have dreamed up numerous theories of who the unnamed man could be.
He was, many suggested, a detective assigned to the case who happened to have taken more than a few style cues from fictional characters like Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot.
“Never gonna crack it with a detective who wears an actual fedora unironically,” Melissa Chen, a tech executive based in London, wrote in post on the social platform X that has been viewed more than 5 million times. “To solve it, we need an unshaven, overweight, washed-out detective who’s in the middle of divorce.
