The Lost Detective (3 page)

By the time he was twenty, Sam was a gangly and quiet young man with reddish hair who liked to fish and hunt and drink and who vastly preferred the company of women and books to what he’d seen of the working world. Like the father he quarreled with, Sam was a bit of a loafer and aspiring ladies’ man. (Early that same year, 1915, he caught his first dose of gonorrhea, possibly from a woman he had met while working near the train yards. It would not be his last case of the clap.) Still living with his parents, he increasingly turned up late to work, if not also hungover from his growing nightlife.

“I became the unsatisfactory and unsatisfied employee of various railroads, stock brokers, machine manufacturers, canners, and the like,” he remembered. “Usually I was fired.”
²
According to Hammett, his boss at the B&O Railroad office attempted to cut him loose after a week of late arrivals, then relented when he refused to lie and promise to do better, delaying the inevitable.

At twenty his most recent positions had been with the Baltimore brokerage house Poe & Davies, where his lateness and sloppiness with sums got him fired, and as a dockworker, where “I made the grade but then it became too strenuous.”
³
He passed some idle weeks before something else caught his eye in the newspaper, an “enigmatic want-ad” seeking capable young men with a range of experience like his own who were fond of travel. Although the exact newspaper message has never been identified, according to one former employee from this era, the company’s blind recruitment ads were pretty much of a piece:

WANTED—A bright, experienced salesman to handle good line; salary and commission. Excellent opportunity for right man to connect with first-class house.
⁴

Hammett mailed in his reply, then was called downtown to interview in a suite at the Continental Trust Company building on Baltimore Street, an office tower whose sixteen floors were guarded by small stone falcons. The position, it turned out, was not in either sales or insurance but something with the Baltimore office of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. “The fortunes of job-hunting not guided by definite vocational training had taken him into the employ of a private detective agency,” Hammett wrote of another detective in “The Hunter.”

Pinkerton’s was looking for detectives, or “general operatives,” as the agency preferred, and by advertising instead for other professions the company maintained its secrecy. Many of the skills of salespeople, for instance, served well in operative work, especially the ability to quickly size up a stranger without raising suspicion, but the murky ads were also used to recruit for Pinkerton’s strikebreaking efforts. Hammett would work at both.

According to one former Pinkerton, a good general operative was a man “who can be relied upon to do the right thing, even in the absence of instructions from the executive department, and who will at all times act in a cool, discreet and level-headed manner.”
⁵
A hoarder of quirky knowledge from his wide reading, Hammett must also have impressed his interviewer as cool, discreet and level-headed, because he was hired as a Pinkerton clerk, and within months was an agency operative. Now twenty-one, he had lucked into hard, unpredictable work that peculiarly suited him with the country’s oldest and largest detective agency. “The eye of the detective must never sleep,” Allan Pinkerton wrote, and Hammett soon discovered that operatives were expected to work every day of the week, if needed. The company’s symbol, an unblinking eye above the
motto “We Never Sleep,” had given rise to a popular term its founder disliked:
private eye
.

An operative’s life took him everywhere and nowhere, and by following the basic laws for shadowing, he could go unnoticed for hours or even days at a time. “Keep behind your subject as much as possible,” Hammett later summed up tailing for his civilian public, “never try to hide from him; act in a natural manner no matter what happens; and never meet his eye.”
⁶

For a young man whose formal instruction had ended only months into high school, the Pinkerton Agency offered a unique education, which he continued to supplement at public libraries. There is no indication he wanted to write as early as 1915, but the agency helped form the writer he became as surely as working at a newspaper might have. A veteran operative recalled joining Pinkerton’s “to see the world and learn human nature.”
⁷

Allan Pinkerton was long gone by the time Hammett joined the company, although his imprint was everywhere. The Scottish immigrant had gradually transformed himself, through a job he invented, into the leader of a kind of national police force that could chase criminals unhindered by state or county lines. In his many books (ghostwritten and otherwise) he sketched a clear picture of his dogged ideal investigator:

The profession of the detective is, at once, an honorable and highly useful one. For practical benefits few professions excel it. He is an officer of justice, and must himself be pure and above reproach … The great essential is to prevent his identity from becoming known, even among his associates of respectable character, and when he fails to do this; when the nature of his calling is discovered and made known his
usefulness to the profession is at an end, and failure certain and inevitable is the result.
⁸

Pinkerton took his own circuitous path to sleuthing. He was born in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1819, and while working as a barrel maker, he became involved in the Scottish Chartist labor movement (from which he later borrowed the term
operative
), before trouble with the police over his activism led him to emigrate with his wife in 1842. After several false starts together, the couple settled in the village of Dundee, Illinois, northwest of Chicago, where they built a small house and Pinkerton opened a reasonably profitable business supplying barrels to the farmers of the region. Pinkerton differed from a number of his neighbors in that he was a teetotaler and an abolitionist; in addition to sheltering his growing young family, Pinkerton’s modest house was home to runaways traveling North to freedom.

The first American detective agency grew out of the suspicions of a young man searching for wood. To cut his material costs, Pinkerton would hunt for timber to make his barrel staves, poling his barge along the nearby Fox River and harvesting from unclaimed stands of trees along the route. He was several miles upriver, near the town of Algonquin, Illinois, in June 1846, when he discovered something that would push his cooper’s life off course. A small island in the middle of the river belonged to no one, and Pinkerton set to work one morning felling and cutting up what he needed when he spotted a blackened patch of ground, proof of an earlier campfire, and other signs of repeated visits by strangers. The fire seemed suspect. “There was no picnicking in those days, people had more serious matters to attend to and it required no great
keenness to conclude that no honest men were in the habit of occupying the place.”
⁹

Pinkerton visited the island several times to find other hints of secret meetings. Then, while watching it one night, he saw a group of men land and gather conspiratorially around a fire. He returned once more, bringing the sheriff and a posse, who arrested a group of counterfeiters caught with their tools and “a bag of bogus dimes.” After this triumph, on what came to be called Bogus Island, Pinkerton was solicited by local businessmen for his help cracking another counterfeiting gang. He declined, citing his cooperage business, before his sense of justice got the better of him and he accepted his first paid job of sleuthing.

Pinkerton’s activism had got him chased to America in the first place, and running for county sheriff on the Abolitionist ticket in 1847 brought to a head his conflict with the pastor of the local Dundee Baptist Church, who put him on trial for atheism and “selling ardent spirits.” The slander led Pinkerton to accept a job as assistant sheriff of Cook County and move to Chicago, then a filthy but growing city of nearly thirty thousand people. There, sometime around 1850, he opened the country’s first detective firm, the North-Western Police Agency, which evolved into Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency.
^**
He would popularize the use of rap sheets, rogues’
galleries, mug shots, and fingerprints, and he hired the first female detectives decades before the City of New York had any.

Crimes were not solved by aloof geniuses, Pinkerton long contended, but by an operative being an observant student of human nature who guarded his identity as if his life depended on it, a knight who could pass as a rogue, “Assimilating, as far as possible, with the individuals who are destined to feel the force of his authority.”
¹⁰

The Pinkerton Agency grew in the years when many frontier towns had no municipal police force, while those that did have small ones still saw criminals escape over county lines. “The history of all places which have had a rapid growth is full of startling incidents of crime,” Pinkerton explained, creating “opportunities for criminal deeds so numerous, as to sometimes create an epidemic of wrong-doing.”
¹¹
Such epidemics became Pinkerton’s opportunity. In 1855 he had the good fortune to sign a contract to protect the Illinois Central Railroad, whose director, George McClellan, and company attorney, Abraham Lincoln, were men on the rise.

In 1861, Pinkerton uncovered a “Baltimore Plot” against the newly elected president; he spirited Lincoln by train safely through the heart of the conspiracy to his inaugural, and served for a time as his wartime intelligence chief. In a famous war photograph of Lincoln visiting a Union campsite, Pinkerton is right there, hiding in plain sight, identified by his alias “Major Allen,” a stocky, glowering figure in a dark beard and bowler beside the elongated man in the top hat.

To the end of his life, Allan Pinkerton held to the methods roughed out in his first cases. In
The Model Town and the Detectives
, he recalled being visited by a man representing a
group of Illinois merchants whose community was experiencing a wave of thefts. “I told him that I would undertake to clear the town of its active scoundrels, on condition that I should be allowed to work in my own way without interference by any one, and that my instructions be obeyed implicitly.” Pinkerton scouted the town himself, under an assumed name and dressed as a farmer, before unleashing his undercover operatives into the saloons and boardinghouses.

Clearing the town of active scoundrels is what some Hammett heroes do, even if they don’t always keep to Mr. Pinkerton’s other rules of detecting. Pinkerton broke plenty of his own rules as well, when the case was important enough, the most egregious example being his war with the James gang in the 1870s. “I know that the James’ and the Youngers are desperate men,” Pinkerton wrote to his New York office, “and that when we meet it must be the death of one or both of us.”
¹²

After one of his detectives, J. W. Whicher, was abducted, tortured, and murdered point blank by the gang in 1874, a Pinkerton supervisor analyzed the agent’s deadly error: “He was roughly dressed, but when he got there they must have noticed that he was a sharp, penetrating-looking fellow, and they probably took notice of his soft hands.”
¹³
In fact, Operative Whicher’s biggest mistake, beyond going in alone, had been to identify himself to the local sheriff, George E. Patton, a one-armed Confederate veteran and boyhood friend of the James boys, to whom he boasted of his plans to go undercover and infiltrate the gang.

“My blood is spilt, and they must repay,” Pinkerton wrote his New York superintendent, George Bangs, and sent a contingent to the Missouri farmhouse of the Jameses’ mother, whose
weatherboarded windows prevented lawmen from getting a bead on possible targets inside. Bob and Jesse were not in the house—Jesse was in fact away on a kind of honeymoon in Nashville—but the Pinkertons’ plan was to toss in a large incendiary device meant to light up the interior and smoke any of the gang from the building. Instead, it ended up in the fireplace and exploded, killing Frank and Jesse’s nine-year-old half-brother with iron shrapnel and maiming their mother’s right hand, which had to be amputated, adding fresh sympathy to the cause of the folkloric gang around the country. In this rare case, Pinkerton knew when he was licked and bitterly quit the hunt.
^†

In the years following his death in 1884, Allan Pinkerton’s sons divided control of the agency into eastern and western headquarters, and increased the firm’s protection work. With the Homestead steel strike of 1892, the Pinkertons had another disastrous public lesson, that serving openly as armed strikebreakers in labor violence could be riskier than more stealthy modes of detecting.

Their railroad contacts had led the company into the pursuit of outlaw gangs who robbed the express companies; following the company’s success infiltrating the deadly society of the Molly Maguires in the Pennsylvania coalfields, the Pinkertons inserted nervy labor spies into union after union, reporting the
inside strategies of strike committees directly to company executives, often daily. Certain individual detectives, such as the Thiel Agency’s “Operative 58A” (Edward L Zimmerman) or the Pinkerton’s Charlie Siringo became celebrated for their undercover daring, even as the mining companies they risked their lives in service of were reviled as “crushers of labor.”

As a reader of detective and cowboy stories, Hammett would have known the career of the “Cowboy Detective” Charlie Siringo and his adventures “on mountain and plain, among moonshiners, cattle thieves, tramps, dynamiters, and strong-arm men.” But Siringo’s life as a detective also offered a caution for any operative tempted to tell tales out of school. The year Hammett started at the Agency, 1915, had been the year of Siringo’s second attempt to tell the story of his exciting two decades with the Pinkertons. Born in Matagorda County, Texas, Siringo was a working cowboy by age eleven, and while living in Chicago as a young man, he witnessed the deadly Haymarket Square bombing and riot in 1886, leaving him wishing he were a detective “so as to ferret out the thrower of the bomb and his backers.” When he went to the Chicago Pinkerton headquarters, he cited the lawman Pat Garrett, killer of Billy the Kid, as a reference.