THE PINKERTONS: THE DETECTIVE DYNASTY THAT MADE HISTORY by James D. Horan. 564 pages. Crown. $7.95.
From Cotton Mather to J. Edgar Hoover, America's best vice fighters have displayed an unappeasable fervor for coming to grips with evil that might be described as a Moby Dick complex. Allan Pinkerton and his sons William and Robert—founder and scions of a family whose name is synonymous with sleuthing—are no exceptions. Toward the criminals they pursued for twelve decades, from Jesse James to Willie ("The Actor") Sutton, the Pinkertons seemed to direct the same obsessive passions Melville imputed to Captain Ahab, who was a first-class tracker by any detective's standards: "He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down." Adopting a godlike motto ("We Never Sleep") the Pinkertons did not so much solve cases as play Puritan avenging angels in private duels with the devil.
From Gamblers to Greenhorns. Biographer James D. Horan, a prolific ex-journalist with an omniverous curiosity about crime (The D.A.'s Man) is not quite up to turning the Pinkertons into either a study in American character or a social history of violence. But he does mount nice rogues' gallery snapshots of such Pinkerton-defying sinners as Confederate Spy Rose O'Neal Greenhow (whose charms earned her a peek at the blueprints of various forts around Washington) and "Old Bill" Miner, who held up his first stagecoach in 1866 and his last train in 1911. He also manages a rough-edged portrait of Founder Allan Pinkerton, No. 1 bloodhound of heaven.
An itinerant cooper from the Glasgow slums, young Allan came to Chicago in 1842 as a fugitive, escaping the consequences of his past as a radical agitator. The time and the place could not have been more propitious for a man with an extravagant taste for self-righteousness and the sort of brawn developed by swinging a ten-pound cooper's hammer. Mid-19th century Chicago was beginning America's painful, often bloody transition from frontier to urban society. Law enforcement was faltering between mere inefficiency and dedicated corruption. Into the power vacuum stepped the indefatigable, incorruptible Pinkerton, self-made gangbuster. In 1849 he became Chicago's first and only police detective. After resigning from the force, in his own words, "because of political interference," he started the Pinkerton agency a year or two later to perform the services he had found most public law-enforcement agencies of the day only promised.
Pinkerton recruited former clerks, farmers, watchmakers and one widow, Kate Warne ("not what could be called handsome" but "decidedly of an intellectual cast"). Kate, it was hoped, would "worm out secrets in many places to which it was impossible for male detectives to gain access," and worm she did. So did her fellow infiltrators, who were first given a rigorous training course in pre-Method acting until they were able to disguise themselves as anybody and everybody from shifty gamblers to greenhorns "just off the boat."