John Walton - The Legendary Detective: The Private Eye in Fact and Fiction

Under the laws Im labeled on the books and licensed as a private detective.... My position is not exactly a healthy one. The police dont like me. The crooks dont like me. Im just a halfway house between the law and crime; sort of working both ends against the middle.... My ethics are my own.

C ARROLL J OHN D ALY, The Snarl of the Beast (1927)

At age twenty-one, Samuel Dashiell Hammett went to work for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, continuing his private eye career from 1915 to 1922 with interruptions for service in World War I and subsequent hospitalizations. He learned the trade in Baltimore, one of the firms twenty-two regional offices at the time. Although the term private eye derived from the Pinkerton logo, the agency preferred to call its field agents operatives, a position Hammett held in Spokane and San Francisco. Known to his colleagues as Sam Hammett, he achieved an enviable reputation for his prowess at surveillance, strike breaking, and investigation. He participated in Pinkerton actions at the ButteAnaconda miners strike of 1920 in Montana and for the defense during film star Fatty Arbuckles 1921 manslaughter trial in San Francisco.

The Pinkerton National Detective Agency, a name evolved from the firms modest origins in Chicago during the 1850s, was the first and for a time the largest detective agency in the United States. It was the leader and trendsetter of a new business enterprise that burgeoned

Another seven to eight hundred agencies spread out across fifty US cities; 187 were concentrated in New York City alone. By 1935, Pinkertons great rival, the William J. Burns International Detective Agency with forty-three branch offices, had taken over the lead of an industry that employed tens of thousands of people and earned an estimated $80 million that year. In addition to the great agencies, many of the major US companies employed in-house detectives in one guise or another for the general purpose of employee surveillance. Strikebreaking was a lucrative service provided by the large firms, until it earned them a bad reputation, and by firms specializing in labor conflicts that embraced the reputation. Hotel detectives kept order among guests and expelled or managed prostitutes, while department store detectives watched for shoplifters among customers and employees. Street railways, pervasive in American cities at the time, used detectives as train spotters in search of grifting conductors.

The great agencies like Pinkerton and Burns served mainly corporate clients, but hundreds of independent firms catered to troubled individuals and local business. These small agencies typically were run by an owner-manager with the help of two or three field operatives employed case by case. Additional operatives would be added as needed, which required a large floating reserve of agents available on demand. Some independent agencies specialized in matrimonial cases (including infidelity, divorce, breach of promise, and fortune hunting), which the large corporate agencies regarded as beneath their professionalism. Independents were versatile, sometimes assisting police in criminal matters but mainly dealing in complaints of fraud, extortion, blackmail, and missing persons. Commercial enterprises sometimes hired independent agencies in preference to maintaining in-house detectives. Seldom if ever did private detectives investigate major crimes such as murder, the province of municipal police.

Sam Hammett retired from detective work in 1922 and began a career writing fiction as Dashiell Hammett while supporting himself, his new wife, and their infant child by turning out advertising copy for a San Francisco jewelry store. Drawing on his own experience, Hammett began with short stories, many featuring the otherwise nameless Continental Op, a field operative for the fictional Continental Detective Agency. The Continental Op was unglamorous, stout, sardonic, gruffa working man. He took orders from the Old Man who managed the national agencys San Francisco office, a gentle, polite, elderly person with no more warmth in him than a hangmans rope. Although Hammett was not the only exponent of the hard-boiled detective story, he was the best and rapidly gained a national reputation for his prolific contributions to the flourishing pulp magazines (known as such for being printed on cheap paper with a high wood pulp content).