The man who made the American style of detective fiction international and who, according to his peer and contemporary Raymond Chandler, “gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse,” was born a poor farm boy in St. Mary’s County, Maryland. Samuel Dashiell Hammett, better known to friends as “Sam” and later known to the world as Dashiell Hammett, lived for a time like one of his wild-eyed and dangerous characters. He dropped out of school at age 13, lived hand-to-mouth doing various odd jobs around Baltimore and Philadelphia (which were tough towns, even then), consorted with gamblers, thieves, and prostitutes, and, by the standards of the class he was most comfortable with, did the unthinkable when he joined the Pinkerton National Detective Agency.
Now a glossy, white-collar company that deals in things like “protective services” and “crisis management,” the Pinkertons were once the most powerful investigative agency in the United States. With branches scattered throughout major American cities and even a few foreign locations, the Pinkertons once rivaled the active duty U.S. Army in size, with 2,000 active officers and as many as 30,000 reserve detectives. While Allan Pinkerton’s men protected presidents, caught serial killers, and oversaw an impressive criminal database that was more or less copied by the later FBI, they also broke up strikes and fought pitched battles on behalf of the companies and masters of industry that hired them. For the unions and their workers during the early twentieth century, “Pinkerton” was something only properly said with spit and from the side of one’s mouth.
