On August 22, 1856, private detective Allan Pinkerton looked up to see a woman standing at the door of his Chicago office. She introduced herself as Kate Warne and proclaimed herself in need of a job. She was not, however, looking to be a secretary, as Pinkerton first thought. No, she wanted to be a detective.
Even though no woman sleuthed, Pinkerton agreed to hear her out. Warne said she was a widow in need of a livelihood. She appeared to Pinkerton to be about twenty-three years old. Warne reportedly told the hesitant Pinkerton that she “could go and worm out secrets in many places to which it is impossible for male detectives to gain access.” He described her as slender with brown hair, “graceful in her movements and self-possessed” with “a broad, honest face” that invited trust. She impressed him with her street smarts and intellect, so he decided to take a chance. He never regretted his decision. Warne offered something Pinkerton’s male agents did not: the ability to gain the confidence of other women. Under Pinkerton, she became America’s first-known female private eye and one of his finest sleuths.
Little is known of Warne, except that she joined the Pinkerton National Detective Agency at a critical time. Just a few years into his business, Allan Pinkerton would enflame Americans’ enthusiasm for detection with his high-profile cases and fantastical detective novels.
He saturated audiences with tales of his escapades, tapping public interest in adventure, mystery, and rational problem solving. Unlike most crime writers, Pinkerton was a real detective with actual life experience. He worked hard to build an image of his agency and of detection as a serious profession, and made himself and his operatives, like Warne, the country’s foremost private eyes.
Though many books took crime as their subject, the detective story placed at its core the singular figure of the detective, as well as the investigation and resolution of a crime, usually murder. Detectives solved cases for many reasons, but personal satisfaction in exercising their logical minds and their professional expertise figured boldly in ways not seen in earlier crime fiction. The characters that detected in Gothic, sensation, and other crime stories had a personal motive for their involvement. Their sleuthing also tended to be a one-time outing. In a nation fascinated with the possibilities of phrenology, psychology, and physiognomy, the professional detective’s use of scientific reasoning to arrive at answers marked him—and the detective was usually a “him”—as a new and utterly compelling figure.
Edgar Allan Poe wrote what is generally considered the first modern English-language detective story. His 1841 story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” introduced French detective C. Auguste Dupin, who solves the mystery of a corpse found in what appears to be an impenetrable locked room. An eccentric and nocturnal gentleman of leisure, Dupin helps the police solve crimes for his own amusement. As such, he’s less interested in everyday robberies and petty crimes than in the bizarre and difficult cases that allow him to showcase his superior intellectual skill and powers of logical reasoning. As would become common with most fictional detectives, Dupin solves crimes with his brain rather than brawn.
Poe’s second Dupin story, “The Mystery of Marie Roget,” was based on a real unsolved murder, that of Mary Cecilia Rogers, in New York. Poe, offering his story for publication to the editor of the Boston Notion, wrote that he drafted a story “in a manner altogether novel in literature. I have imagined a series of nearly exact coincidences [to the Rogers case but] occurring in Paris.” Rather than hit the streets in search of clues, Dupin analyzes newspaper stories from the comfort of his home. He then puts forward a solution to the crime, in what became the first case of armchair detection.
The final Dupin story, “The Purloined Letter,” often considered the best of Poe’s three Dupin stories for its reliance on pure reason, concerns the theft of a letter containing compromising information from the room of an unnamed woman. The culprit is known from the start of this case, the unscrupulous Minister D—, so the action centers on finding the letter in his room, something the police have been unable to accomplish. Dupin, of course, finds the letter, and the solution to the case demonstrates that the most unlikely solution is often the right one.
Although the stories are considered a literary milestone today, Poe’s Dupin stories drew scant attention at the time. Some reviewers questioned Dupin’s skill in presenting the solution to a fictional crime devised by the writer. Poe understood the limitations of the form. This is why, for his second Dupin outing, he was drawn to the real-life story of Mary Rogers’s murder. Poe didn’t consider himself a writer of detective fiction. “Detective” was itself both a new word and a new concept, so it’s not surprising that Poe concerned himself more with the storyline of romantic terror, perfected half a century earlier by Ann Radcliffe.
Though Poe is considered the creator of the first fictional detective, Dupin did not inspire a rash of imitators. It was Sherlock Holmes, appearing nearly a half century after Dupin, who became the iconic detective.
Dupin was not the only detective to debut in 1841. A sleuthing woman appeared in Catherine Crowe’s Adventures of Susan Hopley; or, Circumstantial Evidence, a book that drew far more attention than Poe’s Dupin stories. Susan Hopley was Crowe’s first novel, though it was first published anonymously and only later acknowledged as the creation of a woman.
The intricately plotted story concerns the attempt by Susan, a maid, to solve both the mysterious disappearance of her brother, Andrew, and the murder of her guardian, Mr. Wentworth. It’s widely believed that Andrew murdered Wentworth for his money, but Susan turns sleuth to find and redeem her brother: “The most earnest desire Susan had… was to go over to the house that had been the scene of the catastrophe, and inspect every part of it herself.” Susan has a foreboding dream that appears to reveal what happened to both men, and she spends the rest of the book gathering evidence to validate that dream. She’s lucky early on, finding clues on the ground beneath Andrew’s window. After her employer fires her for her connection to the murder suspect, she continues to gather evidence as she moves from job to job. Other would-be detectives are in pursuit of the killer, too, including a clerk from Wentworth’s firm and the family lawyer. In the end, Andrew is found murdered and Susan is vindicated when the real villains are revealed.
Susan Hopley became a best seller and was immediately adapted for the stage by George Dibdin Pitt. The play debuted in London in May 1841 to great acclaim. It then toured with the Henry Nye Chart theatrical company, which counted future sensation writer Mary Braddon as a member. One wonders if Braddon may even have played Hopley herself.
Although Crowe was far ahead of her time as an author, her heroine became largely forgotten. Crowe’s literary reputation diminished with the 1848 publication of The Night Side of Nature, a two-volume collection of ghost stories mixed with spiritualism, phrenology, and other speculative or supernatural subjects. Those weren’t new interests for Crowe, who moved through Edinburgh literary and intellectual circles and was known for her wide interests and eccentricity. At an 1847 dinner for visiting writer Hans Christian Andersen, hosted by Dr. James Young Simpson, who would later discover chloroform, Crowe and another guest drank ether. Andersen recorded in his journal of the evening, “I had a feeling of being with two mad people, they laughed with open, dead, eyes.” Crowe’s involvement in the ghostly and spiritual culminated in a bizarre incident in Edinburgh a few years later. Many thought she had gone mad, including Charles Dickens, who reported her much gossiped about mental breakdown to a friend in 1854: “Mrs Crowe has gone stark mad—and stark naked—on the spirit-rapping imposition. She was found t’other day in the street, clothed only in her chastity, a pocket-handkerchief and a visiting card. She had been informed, it appeared, by the spirits, that if she went out in that trim she would be invisible. She is in a mad-house and, I fear, hopelessly insane.” Crowe recovered from her illness but wrote little afterward. Her trailblazing female detective was forgotten.
The person who brought the concept of detection to the masses was not a fictional detective but a real-life one: private eye Allan Pinkerton, who had hired the first female investigator. Born in Scotland in 1819, Pinkerton worked as a cooper, or barrel maker, until his political activism forced him to flee to North America, in 1842. He opened his own cooperage outside Chicago, but fell into detective work after helping the local sheriff capture a band of counterfeiters hiding near where he harvested wood for his barrels. Pinkerton’s aptitude for detection led to his recruitment by the Chicago Police Department as its first full-time detective. In most police departments, patrolmen performed some detective duties, but the work was not a specialized function and required no special training. It did come laden with all the same political pressures that all police departments faced, however. Pinkerton soon realized he could earn more money and be free of political tides on his own, so in 1850 he quit the police department to open the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. In the nineteenth century, private agencies filled gaps left by rudimentary city police forces. Most police departments struggled to provide adequate services within city limits, leaving parts of the city and rural areas entirely unsupervised. As police had replaced night watchmen in most cities by the 1860s, many businesses contracted with private agencies for night-watch services. Private detectives also found work handling interstate crime and complex investigations as politics and jurisdictional limitations made it hard for city forces to be truly effective. These weaknesses created a thriving market for private detectives like Pinkerton.
The person who brought the concept of detection to the masses was not a fictional detective but a real-life one: private eye Allan Pinkerton, who had hired the first female investigator.
Pinkerton’s work consisted largely of protecting railroad and express companies from fraud, scams often perpetrated by the company’s own employees. His agents blurred the line between spying and detection as they trailed suspects and went undercover to gather information. In 1856, he made history by hiring Kate Warne, the first in what eventually became a whole bureau of female operatives under her supervision.
Warne took to undercover work easily, eliciting information from wives of suspected criminals in embezzlement and security cases, just as she’d promised when seeking a job. Early in her career, Warne was brought on board to help with the case of the Adams Express Company, a railroad company that had suffered the loss of forty thousand dollars, a huge sum in those days. Pinkerton believed that the manager of the company’s Montgomery, Alabama, office, a man named Nathan Maroney, had stolen the money. Warne befriended Maroney’s wife, who eventually led Warne to the money, buried in a boardinghouse cellar. Warne’s work led to Maroney’s conviction. Pinkerton later wrote of Warne’s involvement in the case, “She had the proud satisfaction of knowing that to a woman belonged the honors of the day.”
Not everyone was so thrilled with Warne. Critics and family members of both Warne and Pinkerton accused them of carrying on an affair. The two did frequently pose undercover as husband and wife. In later years, Pinkerton’s son Robert tried to prevent the agency from hiring additional women. Pinkerton refused to yield, insisting on his aim “to use females for the detection of crime where it has been useful and necessary.”
In 1861, Warne took part in foiling an assassination attempt on President Abraham Lincoln. Pinkerton had received a tip on a plot to assassinate the new president as he passed through Baltimore on his way to Washington, DC, to take office. Warne, dressed as a Southern lady, infiltrated Confederate social circles in Baltimore to gather details on the whispered plan. Her work confirmed suspicions, and Warne helped devise and carry out a scheme to get Lincoln safely to Washington. On a night train out of Philadelphia, Lincoln was disguised as Warne’s invalid brother. He arrived unharmed in the capital.
The Civil War provided tremendous opportunities for detective work. Wartime needs not only stimulated industry but also cases of fraud, embezzlement, and corruption. Hundred-dollar enlistment bonuses encouraged bounty jumpers to join the military, collect the money, desert, and then reenlist elsewhere. Around military camps, drinking, gambling, theft, and prostitution became major problems. All created opportunities for entrepreneurial detectives like Pinkerton.
During the war, Pinkerton provided intelligence for the Army of the Potomac under General George McClellan. Pinkerton investigated suspected spies, gathered information behind Confederate lines, and uncovered firms swindling the federal government. Warne also served during the war as a Pinkerton field agent. She helped break up a spy ring in Washington, DC, run by Confederate sympathizer Rose O’Neal Greenhow, rewriting Greenhow’s ciphered dispatches to Southern leaders with useless or false information. Warne may have been the “female detective” Greenhow describes in her memoir as searching her body and clothes. “I blush that the name and character of woman should be so prostituted. But she was certainly not above her honourable calling,” wrote Greenhow of the female detective sent to her room. “As is usual with females employed in this way, she was decently arrayed, as if to impress me with her respectability.”
Pinkerton’s wartime record was spotty, however, and he lost his position when McClellan was relieved of duty. But his participation still generated significant publicity for his agency and for detection as a profession.
After the war, the Pinkerton Agency grabbed national headlines in pursuing the Dalton Gang, Frank and Jesse James, and Butch Cassidy and his Wild Bunch. His agency also created the Rogues’ Gallery, the first comprehensive database of criminals in America, filled with newspaper clippings and mug shots.
Warne continued working with the agency, but fell ill in 1867. Pinkerton stayed by her side until she died the following year. She was only thirty-five years old. Fueling gossip over the nature of their relationship, Warne was buried in the Pinkerton family plot in Chicago’s Graceland Cemetery, directly beside the spot reserved for Pinkerton himself.
Women remained active in Pinkerton’s agency until his death in 1884, when his sons finally succeeded in eliminating female operatives from the agency for several years.
Pinkerton’s own failing health and concern about improving the public image of detecting led him to turn to writing—or at least supervising the writing of—embellished tales of his remarkable life of crime busting. Pinkerton was a talented storyteller and a savvy businessman, and he surely recognized the opportunity to profit from the growing public interest in crime stories. Between 1874 and the end of his life, Pinkerton published sixteen books. His agency’s methods and style of advertising had become so ingrained in popular culture that by the 1870s his name, he proclaimed, had “grown to be a sort of synonym for detective.” His first book, The Expressman and the Detective, combined realistic details from actual cases with sensational drama and characters. It became an immediate success, selling fifteen thousand copies in its first sixty days. Pinkerton dictated the outline of most of his stories to stenographers, who in turn handed their notes over to professional ghostwriters, a system not unlike that behind the creation of the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys series in the twentieth century.
Pinkerton wanted to make money, but he also hoped his stories would enhance the prestige of detection. “My profession, which had been dragged down by unprincipled adventurers until the term ‘detective’ was synonymous with rogue, was, when properly attended to and honestly conducted, one of the most useful and indispensable adjuncts to the preservation of the lives and property of the people,” he wrote. Detection, Pinkerton maintained, was a business with standards and codes of conduct. Of his own agents, he valued honesty and morality above any particular experience or skills, so his agents came from a variety of backgrounds. Some agents worked for Pinkerton as preparation for a career in policing, while others became agents temporarily, before pursuing other jobs. One of those temporary agents was the twentieth-century hard-boiled writer Dashiell Hammett.
Although he claimed to hate detective fiction because, he said, its writers cheapened the profession “with their emphasis on theatrics and mysterious exploits,” Pinkerton’s high profile and widely publicized (by himself and others) cases obviously influenced the work of detective novelists. Pinkerton lacked the literary talent of Braddon or Poe, but that suited his audience just fine. Many readers found the writing of those authors too cerebral for the escapist reading they sought. Pinkerton grounded his adventurous tales in common sense and sought to demystify detection by revealing the legwork actually required to solve cases. His stories assured his place as America’s foremost detective. The popularity of Pinkerton’s books and of all fiction, detective or otherwise, were helped by rising literacy, the spread of cheap novels and magazines, and the growth of a middle class with leisure time to spare. In the early nineteenth century, novels cost too much for few outside the upper classes to enjoy. But by the 1830s, the introduction of the steam rotary press created abundant and inexpensive reading material that could be distributed farther and faster through a growing network of railways. Most detective and mystery stories were first serialized in popular magazines and newspapers. Added to this expansion of literary material was the era’s obsession with self-improvement, which helped give reading an enriching sheen.
Popular interest in criminal stories also lay with the social tensions surrounding policing. Encounters between the lower-class police and the upper class, particularly respectable ladies, posed problems of etiquette in fiction and in life. How would the officer address a lady? What questions were acceptable during an interrogation? Many middle-class Americans did not like the idea of the police intruding into the privacy of their home. The home was supposed to be a safe haven from the corrupting influences of the outside world, which certainly included the uniformed police. Americans wanted suspects apprehended and crimes solved, but they also wanted to protect the sanctity of the domestic space from the very public intrusion a police officer symbolized. The ethics of listening at doors, snooping through drawers, and trailing suspects came up again and again in nineteenth-century crime novels. Detectives justified their actions as a means to a greater end of protecting citizens from harm.
Excerpted from PISTOLS AND PETTICOATS: 175 YEARS OF LADY DETECTIVES IN FACT AND FICTION by Erika Janik (Beacon Press, 2016). Reprinted with permission from Beacon Press.