Allan Pinkerton: The First Private Eye »

JAMES MACKAY is an award-winning author and historian, widely regarded as the world's leading authority on the life and works of Robert Burns. His other books include the biographies: William Wallace: Brave Heart and Michael Collins: A Life.

Allan Pinkerton The First Private Eye Around the world, his name is synonymous with security and protection. The legendary agency he began nearly one hundred and fifty years ago is still in operation today, as are many of the surveillance and infiltration techniques he originated. His company’s trademark symbol, a large, unblinking eye, inspired the term private eye. As befits a man who spent so much of his life working behind the scenes, Allan Pinkerton’s life has been shaded in mystery and misinformation. Now, after a decade of painstaking research, award-winning biographer James Mackay pierces the web of contradictions, half-truths, and myths to reveal, for the first time, the true story of the life and career of this colorful, complex, and controversial man. Born in Scotland, Allan Pinkerton arrived in America with a solitary silver dollar in his pocket and—as legend has it—the law hot on his heels. A cooper by trade, he might have spent his life making barrels but for a fateful trip in the summer of 1846. On an uninhabited island, where he had gone to cut saplings for barrel staves, Pinkerton happened upon a thicket where a blackened patch suggested a recent fire. To Pinkerton, it also suggested something was amiss. In what became his very first case, the young cooper employed his acute powers of deductive reasoning, patience, and perseverance that would become the hallmarks of his modus operandi. His dogged determination (and several damp, cold, lonely nocturnal vigils) paid off when a gang of counterfeiters was discovered. The modern detective was born. Through four decades of tumultuous history, Allan Pinkerton left an indelible mark. From the Underground Railroad to the Chicago underworld to Pennsylvania and the civil unrest of the notorious Molly Maguires, he took on bandits, bank robbers, kidnappers, spies, and even Jesse James himself. His role in the Civil War was critical: as Lincoln’s spymaster, he managed a network of spies who worked behind Confederate lines and tackled espionage at the highest levels in Washington itself. In particular, James Mackay’s scrupulously balanced account challenges the conventional view of the controversy surrounding Pinkerton’s role in the Peninsular campaign of 1862. Was poor intelligence responsible for prolonging the war? A man of firm beliefs and principles, Allan Pinkerton could be a fair-minded employer—and an absolute tyrant as a husband and father. As intriguing as any of the detective’s countless cases, Allan Pinkerton: The First Private Eye is a masterful look at an extraordinary figure, filled with the rich, revealing details that distinguish the best biographies.

Publishers Weekly

Mackay's story of Pinkerton (1819-1884), founder of the famous Pinkerton Detective Agency is much more than a biography. It is a colorful history of 19th-century America that is told through the prism of one life that intersected with many fascinating characters and unlikely, though true, events. The Scottish-born Pinkerton fled to the U.S. after being hounded by the police as a radical militant. In Pinkerton's own telling, he and his 15-year-old bride were shipwrecked near the coast and then robbed by Indians after they made shore. Eventually, they arrived in Dundee, Ill., where Pinkerton worked as a cooper. Not long after, on a trip to find timber for his barrels, Pinkerton discovered and helped capture a band of counterfeiters. He then joined the regular constabulary for a few years before striking out on his own in 1850. Pinkertons would be involved in many of America's great criminal cases; they clashed with the James gang, pursued Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, infiltrated the Mafia and investigated the Lindbergh baby kidnapping. But Pinkerton also left his mark in a larger arena: he hired the first women detectives, helped to create the idea of a secret service while protecting President Abraham Lincoln, and was instrumental in Civil War espionage for the Union. Although the agency is still active today in international police work, for most Americans, the Pinkertons are indelibly linked to the suppression of various labor actions. Mackay, the Scotch author of entertaining biographies of Michael Collins, William Wallace and Robert Service, provides plenty of details of the man and his times, but without sacrificing his fluid narrative. (Sept.) FYI: Allan's son William Pinkerton was a major player in Ben Macintyre's Napoleon of Crime: The Extraordinary Story of Adam Worth, the World's Greatest Modern Criminal from FSG. (Forecasts, May 26)

The Gorbals, 1819-38.
The Young Militant, 1839-42.
Emigrant, 1842-47.
Chicago, 1847-59.
The Road to War, 1859-61.
Setting Up the Secret Service, 1861.
The Wild Rose of the Confederacy, 1861-62.
Behind Enemy Lines, 1861-62.
Major Allen, 1862-64.
Aftermath of War, 1865-68.
Diplomatic Incident, 1868.
Intimations of Mortality, 1868-77.
Last Years, 1876-84.
Notes.
Select Bibliography.
Index.