Allan Pinkerton

The Expressman and the Detective Allan Pinkerton

The first of the many Pinkerton volumes, with historical significance as the American counterpart of Vidocq - the nineteenth century's most celebrated detective. Pinkerton wrote many volumes of stories and memoirs. The Expressman and the Detective recounts the unraveling of a case of theft involving an Alabama banking express mail service. Allan Pinkerton (1819-1884) was the world's first private detective. Emigrating to Chicago from Glasgow, Scotland, he discovered a gang of counterfeiters and assisted in their capture. He became deputy sheriff of Kane County, then Cook County, resigning from the police to form the Pinkerton Detective Agency in 1852. The Pinkerton logo, the All-Seeing Eye, inspired the phrase "Private Eye". The mental characteristics of Allan Pinkerton were judgment as to facts, knowledge of men, the ability to concentrate his faculties on one subject, and the persistent power of will. A mysterious problem of crime, against which his life was devoted, presented to his thought, was solved almost in an instant, and seemingly by his intuitions. With half-closed eyes he saw the scene in which the wrong was done, read every movement of the criminals, and reached invariably the correct conclusion as to their conduct and guilt.