Person of Interest

Of what old-time crime fighting story series does Person of Interest remind me?  I can't help thinking that sometime in the early 20th c. there was a similar setup, with a stay-at-home tech guy with a range of apparatus and another on-the-street guy who did the rough stuff, and they chose their own crimes to solve, which seemed mostly rather ordinary given all the resources they had.  (It's NOT Nero Wolfe -- he just stayed home with his orchids and pondered.  This was high-tech marvel stuff).  Any thoughts?  Am I supposing their ought to have been such a setup back then though there wasn't?