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True Crime: Allan Pinkerton's Thirty Years a Detective (1884)
A guide to vice and crime by the founder of the world’s largest private detective agency.
Photograph of Allan Pinkerton, President Lincoln, and Maj. Gen. John A. McClernand taken in September or October 1862 at Antietam, Maryland, on the Eastern Theatre of the American Civil War — Source. There’s no doubt that Pinkerton shaped the history of American vice, though the motley anecdotes collected in Thirty Years a Detective are mainly lighthearted curiosities, hijinks to entertain a group of chums at the bar. True crime held as much grip on the public imagination in Victorian times as it does today; grisly thrillers, cheaply printed on broadsheet, were sold at criminal executions, directly below the protagonist’s swinging feet.
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