Vintage Volumes: Thirty Years a Detective

"We Never Sleep"

In the late 1800s, a series of books was published by Allan Pinkerton, the Ur-detective who gave his name to one of the world’s most famous security companies.

There is some doubt as to the extent of Allan Pinkerton’s participation in the series of “Great Detective Books” – so many experts state that ghostwriters were used that I will say that “Pinkerton” was the author – but there is no doubt that Thirty Years a Detective is a lace curtained but grimy window onto morality and crime circa 1880. The prose is purple, the detectives noble, the criminals (“knights of darkness”) detestable but well dressed and improbably well mannered. If you are writing historical fiction, this book is a gold mine.

Plus, it’s a ripping read! Thirty Years a Detective is an unintentional how-to for criminals, replete with stories of justice served, spiced with a surprisingly sultry chapter on a scamming seductress for good measure.

If you didn’t know how to run a confidence scheme, rob a steamboat, bilk society worthies, or break into hotel rooms, you will after reading this book. In each chapter on different flavors of criminal - The Society Thief, The Pickpocket, Store Robbers, The “Boodle Game” (“cupidity greater than judgment”), Sneak Thieving, Palace Car Thieves (“Mr. Potter Loses some Diamonds”), Steamboat Operators, Confidence and Blackmail (“The Confidence Man About Town”), The Burglar (“Burglars and dynamite”), Forgers and Forging, Counterfeiting and Counterfeiters, and the Express Robber - “Pinkerton” helpfully delineates each stage of the criminal’s work.

With diagrams.

Thirty Years a Detective by Alan Pinkerton

The great detective invariably praises the intelligence, wiliness, and preparation of what we would call the perpetrator, the better to showcase the intelligence, wiliness, and preparation of the Pinkerton Operatives who take them down.

The author, an émigré from Scotland, often mentions the superiority of the American criminal, American criminals being more apt to fashion their own burglar tools to break into tough-to-crack bank vaults and homes. Even then, Americans were leveraging technology to get the job done.

He also includes what we’d call the Dumb Criminal file (“The Biter Bitten”), a tale of two of New York’s most brazen confidence men being fleeced by a cowboy cousin.

The chapter on the seductive scammer, titled “A Social Leper,” breathlessly inspires all Fifty Shades of “Pinkerton’s” Violet Verbiage.

He begins on this somber note: “Crime, I regret to say, is not entirely confined to the male portion of humanity…. I am reluctant to confess it, but her fair fingers have more than once been bathed in blood.” What an introduction! We set aside our refined cup of tea for a delicious wallow in the account of Helen Graham, a tale of “genuine romantic deviltry.” The pages turn themselves.

“Pinkerton” describes Graham as “truly beautiful, her eyes beamed with a bright softness that own the hearts of those around her.” Graham’s scam was answering help wanted ads and then accusing the respectable businessmen she visited of “accosting her with most vile and degrading proposals.” She then flung cayenne pepper into the eyes of the businessman to ensure he’d have to call for help - and witnesses. Accosting ladies with vile proposals got you arrested in 1884. Her mark, Mr. Ingalls, did not give in to her blackmail and hired “trusty detectives.”

Thank goodness Ingalls’ trusty detectives – “Pinkerton’s” modesty does not permit him to spell out the identity of those detectives - revealed Graham as a “beautiful fiend whose seductive wiles had been the ruin of many who had been led by the witching spell of her charms into the abyss of moral destruction.” Whew! Bring me my fan! These operatives discovered that Helen Graham was actually Mary Freeland, a barmaid who left a trail of dozens of duped men from a dockside London bar to the palatial homes of Manhattan. “Pinkerton” devotes several heavy breathing but disapproving pages to the tale of her depraved descent into “genuine romantic deviltry.” Take that, E. L. James!

As you can see from the above excerpts, one also wonders if the ghostwriter was paid by the word.

The inside cover advertisement for the other books in the series Allan Pinkerton’s Great Detective Books contains this blurb: “The interest which the reader feels from the outset is intense and resistless; he is swept along by the narrative, held by it, whether he will or no.”

Translation to Modern Book Cover: “A thrill ride!”

Selling on abebooks.com for $98.42, Thirty Years a Detective is a priceless window into the past. You can check out “Pinkerton’s” adventures, which are accessible online free through many digital libraries such as projectgutenberg.org.