Discussion Post: The Valley of Fear, Pt. 2, Chaps. 5 - Epilogue

[scfrankles.livejournal.com]

This week, the canon story we’re looking at is The Valley of Fear (Pt. 2, Chap. 5 - Epilogue) and the chosen topic is the Pinkerton Detective Agency.

A few facts:

🔎 Allan Pinkerton was born in Scotland in 1819 but emigrated to America in 1842.

🔎 Pinkerton first got interested in criminal detective work… when he came across a band of counterfeiters... After observing their movements for some time, he informed the local sheriff who arrested them. This later led to Pinkerton being appointed, in 1849, as the first police detective in Chicago… [Wikipedia]

🔎 In 1850, he partnered with Chicago attorney Edward Rucker in forming the North-Western Police Agency, which later became Pinkerton & Co, and finally Pinkerton National Detective Agency, still in existence today as Pinkerton Consulting and Investigations, a subsidiary of Securitas AB. [Wikipedia] And it has offices all over the world.

🔎 In 1856 Pinkerton hired a young widow, Kate Warne, who became the first female detective in the US. [pinkerton.com] Warne’s biggest case came in 1861, when she proved a key operative in Pinkerton’s successful thwarting of an assassination plot being hatched against then-president-elect Abraham Lincoln. [Gizmodo]

🔎 The Pinkertons spied for the Union Army during the American Civil War. [history.com]

🔎 In 1861, Pinkerton hired the first African-American Union Intelligence Agent, John Scobell. Scobell was a former slave. Pinkerton was a “staunch and vocal” supporter of the abolition of slavery and was known to frequently help fugitive slaves on the Underground Railway to Canada… [thrillingdetective.com]

🔎 Pinkerton and his agents become legendary during their relentless pursuit of Jesse James - the Younger Gang, the Dalton Brothers and Butch Cassidy's Wild Bunch. [pinkerton.com]

🔎 The James brothers murdered a Pinkerton detective who’d been sent to investigate them. Pinkerton vowed vengeance on the outlaws but the following raid went very wrong. An incendiary device was thrown into their mother’s house wounding Zerelda [Samuel, the James brothers’ mother] and killing [their] eight-year-old half-brother Archie. [It's possible the device was thrown by one of the locals that made up the raiding group, rather than one of the detectives.] Public opinion turned against the agency, and Pinkerton gave up trying to bring Jesse and Frank James to justice.

🔎 The agency’s iconic logo—a large, unblinking eye accompanied by the slogan “We Never Sleep”—gave rise to the term “private eye” as a nickname for detectives. [history.com]

🔎 In contrast to the public police of the time, Pinkerton and his private operatives quickly gained a reputation for toughness, thoroughness and relentless professionalism. They compiled huge files on suspects, and were credited with creating the first rogue's gallery and being the first to use photographs to identify criminals. [thrillingdetective.com] The agency also used the practice of clipping and filing newspaper stories for reference in investigations. [pinkerton.com]

🔎 After [Pinkerton’s] death [in 1884], the agency continued to operate and soon became a major force against the labor movement developing in the US and Canada. This effort changed the image of the Pinkertons for years…[Wikipedia] Industrialists used them to spy on unions or act as guards and strikebreakers, and detectives clashed with workers on several occasions. [history.com] It was the bloodshed during the strike at Andrew Carnegie's Homestead Mill in 1892 that led to laws in 26 states that banned bringing in outside guards during labor disputes. [pbs.org]

🔎 Despite his agency's later reputation for anti-labor activities, Pinkerton himself was heavily involved in pro-labor politics as a young man. Though Pinkerton considered himself pro-labor, he opposed strikes and distrusted labor unions. [Wikipedia]



Some useful resources:

Pinkerton (detective agency) On Wikipedia.

Allan Pinkerton On Wikipedia.

Allan J. Pinkerton On The Thrilling Detective Web Site.

History of the Pinkerton Detective Agency On the Pinkerton website.

How America's First Female Detective Helped Foil An Assassination Plot An article about Kate Warne by Cheryl Eddy on Gizmodo.

Celebrating Women’s History: America’s First Female P.I. By Erin Allen on the Library of Congress website.

Black Dispatches Contains a biography of John Scobell. On Wikipedia.

Slaves, freedmen spied on South during Civil War On CBS News website. Mentions John Scobell amongst others.

10 Things You May Not Know About the Pinkertons On history.com

Allan Pinkerton's Detective Agency On PBS.org



Please feel free to discuss this topic in the comments.

Please also feel free to comment about the canon story itself or any related aspects outside this week’s theme. For example, any reactions, thoughts, theories, fic recs, favourite adaptations of the canon story… Or any other contribution you wish to make. And if you have any suggestions for fic prompts springing from this week's story, please feel free to share those in the comments as well.

Comments

[laurose8.livejournal.com]

That's most interesting. I had no idea about Pinkerton's anti-slavery work, and his affirmative hiring. Thank you.

[scfrankles.livejournal.com]

I had no idea either - I learnt quite a bit.

The Mollie Maguires and the Detectives, Allan Pinkerton

[sanguinity]

I adore these link round-ups you've been doing for us. Thank you so much. :-)

So, I read some of Pinkerton's Mollie Maguires account (it's 420 pages long!), and I can totally see why ppl say it was Doyle's main source for the VALL backstory. There were times that I lost track of which book I was reading, some of the phraseologies or emphasized points are so similar.

Random observations:

• Pinkerton is SOOOO much more florid and romantic than Watson. At the beginning Pinkerton tells us about the initial meetings between him and the railroad/coal magnates, and the magnates hand-wring for pages and pages about the poor colliers, their simple-but-heartfelt dreams to be able to leave for work every morning without worrying that they'll never see their wives again, etc. The coal magnates just want the colliers to be happy, y'all. (That's literally what they say! "We want the miners to go forth cheerfully to the slope, or the shaft, for labor in the breast or gangway, wherever it may seem to him for the best, void of the fear in his heart when he parts from his wife at the cottage-gate in the morning, that it may be their last farewell on earth, and by evening his bullet-riddled corpse may be taken back to his home the only evidence that he has encountered the murderer -- the agent of those who would compel him to refuse all employment unless [unintelligible] order were complied with...")
  
  
• Pinkerton agonized about finding the right agent. For chapters, he agonized. He needed someone who was strong and brave and clever and had no family and was Irish right down to his bones but the good kind of Irish, the kind who understands that all those other kinds of Irish are traitors to Ireland! (No true Scotsman, much?) Up until about here I was reading great gobs of this aloud to grrlpup, for the purposes of mocking/entertainment, but then I realized that she hadn't been spoiled for the McMurdo/Edwards reveal yet, and so I had to bite my tongue hard. For the record, this book became a lot less enjoyable when I couldn't mock it to grrlpup anymore.
  
  
• The guy Pinkerton finally decided on, McParland, assumed the name of McKenna and headed up into coal country. I started skipping ruthlessly in here, because omg so much detail about every convo he ever had with anyone, all written in a thick brogue, very 'atmospheric.' McParland didn't have any initial info about the Maguires, certainly didn't know the handsigns and signals, and kept having to fake passing-out from drunkenness right at the moment that he was supposed to give the countersign. So a lot of people were initially suspicious of him and it was all a bit touch-and-go, but then he took the signs and countersigns that he had picked up and went to another part of the valley, and used them to pass there just fine.
  
  
• McParland/McKenna lucked into meeting right off a guy named McAndrew, who was jockeying to become the next Bodymaster, and they became fast friends. This was super-fortunate for McParland/McKenna, because McAndrew was illiterate, so when McAndrew became Bodymaster, he appointed McParland/McKenna to be the lodge secretary, so our Pinkerton agent had access to all the written records of everything. It also fell to him to read all the murder-order missives that came in from other lodges, because McAndrew couldn't.
  
  
• Oh, I skipped over the initiation. Aside from kneeling to make his loyalty oath, it was just learning the signs and countersigns, no branding or anything. (Pinkerton is into florid atmosphere; Watson is into high drama.) Most people in the lodge were a bit iffy on the signs and countersigns -- most signs changed every three months, and others didn't get used much except during initiations -- but McParland/McKenna impressed everyone with how this eager neophyte was always RIGHT ON TOP OF whatever the sign currently was. He was really into being a Mollie Maguire!!

...continued in another comment, because LJ length limit.

Re: The Mollie Maguires and the Detectives, Allan Pinkerton

[sanguinity]

• McParland/McKenna had a romantic thing going with a "Miss Higgins," who was the sister-in-law of the bodymaster of another lodge. The text see-saws wildly between Watson-esque, heart-fluttery, love-at-first-sight and "hey, what a super-convenient excuse to spy at the next lodge over!"
  
  
• McParland/McKenna was in daily contact with Pinkerton by letter, and sometimes would go down into Philadelphia to meet with him personally. There was a slip-up at one point where a clerk at one the coal companies wrote to him using his Pinkerton name -- McParland -- and the local PO guy said, "I don't know who this 'McParland' bloke is, but I'm just going to give it to you, because I recognize the stationary, return address, and handwriting as that one person who writes to you all the time," and then McParland/McKenna had to quick make up a cover story on the spot about why someone was sending him mail under two different names.
  
  
• Also, apparently the valley was crawling with detectives and agents, all part of the official operation? (So many, many names, and I was skimming.) At some point, they started arresting people and making the arrests stick, and so word got out that there had to be a spy in the organization somewhere, nothing else made sense. So then everyone was on the lookout, trying to figure out who the inside man was.
  
  
• Eventually suspicion fell on McParland/McKenna, and instead of just getting out like a sensible person, he decided to try to stay and beat the rumors. His personal friendship with McAndrew became super-handy here, because McAndrew refused to carry out the murder-orders he was getting from other lodges about McParland/McKenna, and would even act as a personal bodyguard for him. (Also handy: his romance with Miss Higgins, because he had a great not-spying excuse to have spent so much time poking around at Kerrington's right before Kerrington got arrested.)
  
  
• McParland/McKenna tried to get all the Bodymasters of all the lodges to come together in one place to 'try' him -- allegedly so he could clear his name, but mostly so he could do the arrest-them-all-at-once thing in VALL -- but the Bodymasters mostly used it as an opportunity to try to make McParland/McKenna show up at a particular time and place for the purposes of being murdered. Lots of stuff about deliberately getting off at the 'wrong' train stop or taking 'shortcuts' through the swamp in order to avoid people lying in wait to murder him. When it finally came clear that the Bodymasters weren't having it, McParland/McKenna ran for Philadelphia. He didn't take Miss Higgins with him, nor was there any mention of wanting to.
  
  
• McParland/McKenna wasn't supposed to testify at the trials -- that was part of Pinkerton's original deal with the coal/railroad magnates, that no Pinkerton agent would appear on the stand -- but there's a whole chapter about everyone's EXAMINING OF PERSONAL CONSCIENCE that led to McParland deciding to testify against the Maguires. Pinkerton makes it SUPER CLEAR that there was ABSOLUTELY NO PRESSURE from him of ANY KIND on McParland to do so.
  
  
• I'm not quite done with the book -- I'm drowning in the endless speech-making by the prosecuting attorneys during the trials -- but there's a line in here about McParland living and travelling with a pair of full-time bodyguards, and the hypothetical about what would have happened if he didn't. You can totally see the instant at which Doyle's fic-writing brain lit up.

So! That's the 100% scientific capsule summary of Pinkerton's not!novel about James McParland and the Mollie Maguires!

Re: The Mollie Maguires and the Detectives, Allan Pinkerton

[scfrankles.livejournal.com]

*applauds wildly* ^___^

Thank you so much for reading the book so we didn't have to ^_^ And crikey - thank you so much for the thorough summary. That must have taken you a while ^^"

It really is fascinating stuff comparing Pinkerton's version with ACD's wholly fictionalised version.

Re: The Mollie Maguires and the Detectives, Allan Pinkerton

[sanguinity]

Well, I'd been curious -- it's been sitting on my Nook since last year, when I first read VALL -- but I was never going to get around to it on my own. Having ppl to share it with is much more fun. :-)

One has to wonder if Watson was fictionalizing Holmes' cases as much as Doyle fictionalized this one. If so, no wonder Holmes was always bellyaching about it. :-D