Bill Hagen wrote:
>I've recently come across a first rate suspense
writer, Owen Parry, who
>centers his series (2 so far) on a special agent
employed by the Lincoln
>Administration to ferret out crimes and plots among
abolitionists...
That special agent just has to be based on Allen Pinkerton,
who had originally been hired because he himself was an
abolitionist, and who actually thwarted an early plot to
assassinate Lincoln. In fact, the founder of the Pinkertons
had been a radical activist, deeply involved in trade unions,
the suffrage movement and like, who had fled to North America
from Scotland one step ahead of the law.
Ironic then, that after his death, by the time Hammett was an
op, the Pinkertons were regularly hiring themselves out as
strikebreakers and thugs for hire, and had developed a
reputation that must have had the old leftie spinning in his
grave.
I just found this out recently, thanks to Max Collins'
honking big new slab of a book, THE HISTORY OF MYSTERY. It's
full of tons of pictures, mostly book covers and stuff, but
it's also got some great out-of-the-blue stuff in it on
Pinkerton, Chandler, Hammett and all the usual
suspects.
--
Kevin Burton Smith The Thrilling Detective Web Site http://www.thrillingdetective.com
The 2001 Thrillies are here! Vote now, vote often! Plus our annual Christmas Gift Guide and thrilling detective fiction from John Swan, D.L. Browne and Steve Kaye. -- # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
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