by Nathan Ward
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.
Siringo became part of the Pinkerton posse that chased Butch Cassidy’s Hole-in-the-Wall Gang, and he went undercover as a miner in an ore-stealing case in Aspen. Then, during the Coeur d’Alene mining strikes in Idaho, he got himself elected recording secretary of the gem miners’ union before being discovered as a spy. He escaped through the floorboards of a building in Gem, Idaho, and crawled for some yards beneath the wooden sidewalk, where an outraged mob was waiting to kill him. In public, he was often picturesquely armed with his sidekick cane-sword and Colt. 45, and he served as bodyguard to his fellow Pinkerton detective William McParland when the latter investigated for the prosecution in the murder of the former Idaho governor Frank Steunenberg in 1905.
Siringo learned the limits of the Pinkertons’ tolerance when he tried to publish his memoir, Cowboy Detective (1912). Although the book read like a recruitment manual for the detective’s life, the Pinkerton family held up publication for two years, until Siringo had changed many crucial names, most especially that of the “world-famous” detective firm that employed him, substituting the fictional “Dickenson” Agency. In 1915, greatly soured by his treatment, he tried again with the vengeful Two Evil Isms: Pinkertonism and Anarchism. This time he told many stories too dark for the heroic first account, explaining how he was paid to vote five times in one day in a Colorado election, and why he had repeatedly refused promotions in what he called “the most corrupt institution of the century.”14 Citing his signed confidentiality agreement, the Pinkertons sued and seized the publisher’s plates for the book. No one was allowed to write about being a Pinkerton except the Pinkerton family and their ghostwriters.
By 1915, when Sam Hammett answered the ad and joined its relatively recent Baltimore office, Pinkerton’s had twenty branches in North America. The founder had always feared losing control of his company by expanding, with corruption a strong temptation in far-flung offices. Yet, following his death, the sons established outposts West of Chicago, in Denver and Spokane, and moved south into Baltimore and Washington, D.C. By the time Hammett was hired, the demand for detective work had grown so that there were seventy-three different agencies in New York City alone. The rival Burns International Detective Agency had almost as many offices as Pinkerton’s, and a headquarters in New York’s gorgeous new Woolworth Building. And while the price to become an amateur detective through a popular correspondence school was $7.50, a beginning operative such as Hammett made only $21.00 per week. Still, “I liked gumshoeing,” he said, “better than anything I had done before.”15
* * *
* His wife, Josephine Dolan Hammett, reported in 1975 that he was “always” called Sam until the success of the Op stories and novels in the late 1920s, when his new literary and Hollywood friends called him Dash. But his granddaughter Julie Rivett points out that he sometimes signed letters to his wife “D” or “Dash” (starting in 1928). Of course, that is only evidence that he had begun to use the name himself. But this census record suggests that he was called Dashiell, at least by his mother, as early as 1900. Employers, schoolmates, army chums, cousins, and his wife, though, knew him as Sam. Lillian Hellman came along during his famous Dash years.
** The world’s first private detective firm had been started in France, in 1833, by a former thief and police spy named François Eugene Vidocq, whose florid life inspired characters by Poe, Balzac, Hugo, Dumas, and Conan Doyle. Vidocq had earlier recruited many former criminal colleagues to establish the Parisian plainclothes security force La Sûreté in 1811.
† Many accounts repeat the claim that Jesse’s son (not half-bother) was killed by the Pinkerton blast; in fact, the outlaw was away in Nashville with his new bride, and his first son was born on New Year’s Eve, 1875. The most accurate version is in Ron Hansen’s beautifully faithful novel, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.
Chapter II
A COMPANY MAN
It will not do to follow a person on the opposite side of the street, or close behind him, and when he stops to speak to a friend stop also; or if a person goes into a saloon, or store, pop in after him, stand staring till he goes out, and then follow him again. Of course such a “shadow” would be detected in fifteen minutes.
—ALLAN PINKERTON1
A well-trained Pinkerton could keep shadowing in his sleep, when he was allowed any. Even while drugged with laudanum, Hammett’s hard-traveled character the Continental Op trudges the dozens of American streets he’s seen for the agency, names that Hammett likely unearthed from his own humble experience: Gay Street and Mount Royal Avenue in Baltimore, Colfax Avenue in Denver, McKinney Avenue in Dallas. Hammett seems to have been an adept shadow man from early on, as he was later happy to explain to his editor:
[A] detective may shadow a ma
n for days and in the end have but the haziest idea of the man’s features. Tricks of carriage, ways of wearing clothes, general outline, individual mannerisms—all as seen from the rear—are much more important to the shadow than faces. They can be recognized at a greater distance, and do not necessitate his getting in front of his subject at any time.2
For young shadow men starting out when Sam Hammett did, Pinkerton’s had company pamphlets to explain the house style for every surveillance setting, from basic street shadowing to “railroad checking”: “[operatives] should be provided with a suitable pretext such as salesman.”3 Separate pamphlets detailed the methods of stealing from streetcar boxes, how to examine steamer trunks on trains or monitor a railroad commissary for waste, theft, or doctored checks.4 Every aspect of a Pinkerton’s appearance was thought through, down to his luggage: “A brief case will often answer the purpose for daylight runs, but no operative should travel in a Pullman without a bag or suitcase.”5
In Hammett’s story “Who Killed Bob Teal?” a younger detective who is “well along the way to expertness” after only two years at the agency is killed by a bullet. Hammett survived his own apprenticeship, and one of the first men to help him along the way to expertness may have been his supervisor in the Baltimore office, an experienced Pinkerton whom Hammett later called James or Jimmy Wright and sometimes credited as the model for his fictional Continental Op. Many biographies and treatises have cited the importance of Wright to Hammett’s development as a man and, ultimately, a writer. The trouble with this view is that no one has ever found proof of the elusive mentor Jimmy Wright. There seems little doubt that Hammett learned many of his skills and codes of detective conduct while employed with the Baltimore Pinkerton office, but Wright himself might be a bit of misdirection, a character as fictitious as Bob Teal.
In fact, “James Wright” had long been a popular alias with Pinkertons working undercover.6 The code name appears as far back as 1874, when a St. Louis Pinkerton (John Boyle) traveling as “Mr. James Wright” rode with a former Chicago police captain (Louis J. Lull) going by W. J. Allen (echoing Allan Pinkerton’s wartime alias). With a local lawman as guide, the two Pinkertons posed as land prospectors while trailing the Younger brothers in Missouri the same month that operative J. W. Whicher was murdered there by the James-Younger gang. The Youngers were staying in a rural farmhouse in St. Clair County, watching from the attic, when they noticed three well-armed strangers passing on the country road. Riding hard, the Youngers came up behind James Wright and his two colleagues. Wright galloped away as guns were drawn and had his hat blasted off by the Youngers as he rode out of view.* He left the other two men behind to face the brothers; one of them, Lull, produced a hidden Smith & Wesson and shot John Younger through the throat before being hit himself. Younger and Deputy Ed Daniels, the agent’s guide, were killed in the melee, but Lull crawled away and lingered long enough to give a sworn account of the showdown before he died.
“James Wright” lived to ride another day for Pinkerton’s.
* * *
As a detective, Hammett was a company man like his Op, a foot soldier in an army of detecting. During Hammett’s time, an operative might see a whole case through or merely snippets of it, as the Pinkerton agency rotated its scores of regional operatives in and out as needed. “Ninety-nine per cent of detective work is a patient collecting of details—and your details must be got as nearly first-hand as possible,” says the Op in Hammett’s story “One Hour.”
Operative reports were meant to show clients how much daily investigating they were getting for their fee. As in news writing, the reports captured the “who, what, when, and where,” with more expansive characterizations reserved for office memos such as this 1901 sketch of a post office thief: “‘Figgsey’ Lyons has made his home in Newark for some time and can be found any day in the Newark City Library, reading over the Cincinnati Inquirer for western news in regard to the doings of crooks.”7
The Pinkerton archive at the Library of Congress lives in the Madison Building, near the Capitol, and holds sixty thousand documents and several hundred boxes of operative reports, along with agency employee records, memos on field agent salaries, cipher books, cables to clients, brochures for early listening devices (the Burns agency’s “Detecti-Fone”) or the patented Pinkerton “Photo Cabinet” (1917), a roll-top affair that law enforcement agencies could buy and fill with thousands of the latest mug shots.
As rich a trove as the archive is, no writing by Hammett has ever been identified within it; his reports either were submitted anonymously to client companies or have since been lost to fire or time. All materials from the offices where he worked longest, Baltimore and San Francisco, are also sadly missing, and very few unflattering records of strikebreaking cases were included when the collection was donated. (These purges could have been made in the 1930s, when the Agency was worried about being called before Congress for union busting under the new National Labor Relations Act.)
But even an hour spent reading through the reports of other operatives gives a good idea of the experiences and format that formed Hammett as a writer. For a general education in the details of a typical Pinkerton’s life, there are many letters and directives out of the New York and Chicago offices (the latter in spite of the Great Chicago Fire) and memorable paperwork from ops working out of the Kansas City, Pittsburgh, or Spokane branches, enough to make plain what was expected in Hammett’s day.**
Pinkertons were cautioned not to begin a case with a hasty theory, and their reports were written to a certain understated standard, presenting a collection of rogues rendered matter-of-factly, with a surprisingly light touch, though often their work was edited before being sent on to the client.
Pinkerton supervisors routinely functioned as editors, revising operatives’ reports to please clients, somewhat the way a rewrite desk in a newspaper city room polished the eyewitness stories filed by “legmen.” As Hammett explained, “A detective official in San Francisco once substituted ‘truthful’ for ‘voracious’ in one of my reports on the grounds that the client might not understand the latter. A few days later in another report ‘simulate’ became ‘quicken’ for the same reason.” It is not surprising that a writer who was later proud of his ability to sneak bits of gamey street parlance past his editors would have started out learning to improve his reports for Pinkerton clients. In Red Harvest, his Continental Op grouses about dressing up field reports for his old-school boss, “I might just as well have saved the labor and sweat I had put into trying to make my reports harmless. They didn’t fool the Old Man. He gave me merry hell.”
A single celebrated murder case from just before the Great War makes clear the breadth of investigation the Agency could bring to bear, and the kind of shadow work expected in Hammett’s day. As an operative, Hammett did jobs just like these: watching a wealthy gentleman’s Pullman berth overnight, tipping a porter to pluck a telegram from a subject’s trash basket, chatting up gossipy landladies, or minding the driveway of a robbery suspect who was dumb enough to return home. Months and years were spent sharpening the habits of suspicious observation. Combined from multiple op reports, the investigation of the Rice murder makes an interesting detective story on its own.
William Lowe Rice was a successful corporate lawyer living in an elegant subdivision he’d helped pioneer, Cleveland Heights. He was an athletic man nearing fifty whose wife and daughters had gone ahead of him to the family’s summer house on Cape Cod. On the evening of Friday, August 5, 1910, after playing nine holes at the Euclid Golf Club and dining and drinking there with friends until about ten thirty, he started to walk the five hundred yards along Overlook Road to his pillared brick colonial home, Lowe Ridge. On the road, Rice encountered several men beneath a street lamp who were described by others as having dark, curly hair and soft hats.
An altercation followed and the lawyer lay dying minutes later, when two automobiles stopped to investigate the still figure lying by the road. His jewelry and mo
re than a hundred dollars cash were left on him; his body cut, bruised, and shot; a gold penknife lying open as if from a slashing fight. (His panama hat was also found nearby, with two bullet tears in it.) Two doctors out driving with their wives brought Rice to the hospital, where he died without a word. Rice’s law partner then sent a telegram to a Pinkerton supervisor: PLEASE SEND FIRST TRAIN YOUR VERY BEST AND MOST EXPERIENCED MAN TO PUT IN RICE CASE. NO ORDINARY MAN, BUT ONE ACCUSTOMED TO SUCH CASES.
Operatives interviewed streetcar workers who might have seen the bloodied killer in the hours after William Rice died. “I can see it in my mind’s eye just like a picture,” a brakeman recalled. “He was sitting on the south side of the car in the smoker just behind me, leaning his head on his hand.’”8 On learning that dark, “foreign”-looking men had been seen on the road just before Rice was killed, Pinkerton’s sent in its own Sicilian agents to secure rooms in Italian boardinghouses.
On August 7, a day and a half after the crime, operative C. Y. Riddle arrived in Cleveland Heights with a flourish: “I alighted from a Euclid car at Lake View and walked up through Mayfield Road, known as Little Italy, to Overlook Road and over the scene of the murder.” An experienced op like those Hammett would later sketch, Riddle cast a cold eye over clues that proved irrelevant, even a bloodstained handkerchief:
The handkerchief is of a cheap variety with blue and white border, but the stains look old as though rain had fallen since it had laid there. I also found a piece of a collar band from a black stripped shirt. It had been partly torn and cut away from the shirt and had the letters “Ben” on the band but this was too old to have belonged to anyone connected with this crime.9
