It will not do to follow a person on the opposite side of the street, or close behind him, and when he stops to speak to a friend stop also; or if a person goes into a saloon, or store, pop in after him, stand staring till he goes out, and then follow him again. Of course such a “shadow” would be detected in fifteen minutes.
—ALLAN PINKERTON1
A well-trained Pinkerton could keep shadowing in his sleep, when he was allowed any. Even while drugged with laudanum, Hammett’s hard-traveled character the Continental Op trudges the dozens of American streets he’s seen for the agency, names that Hammett likely unearthed from his own humble experience: Gay Street and Mount Royal Avenue in Baltimore, Colfax Avenue in Denver, McKinney Avenue in Dallas. Hammett seems to have been an adept shadow man from early on, as he was later happy to explain to his editor:
[A] detective may shadow a man for days and in the end have but the haziest idea of the man’s features. Tricks of carriage, ways of wearing clothes, general outline, individual mannerisms—all as seen from the rear—are much more important to the shadow than faces. They can be recognized at a greater distance, and do not necessitate his getting in front of his subject at any time.2
For young shadow men starting out when Sam Hammett did, Pinkerton’s had company pamphlets to explain the house style for every surveillance setting, from basic street shadowing to “railroad checking”: “[operatives] should be provided with a suitable pretext such as salesman.”3 Separate pamphlets detailed the methods of stealing from streetcar boxes, how to examine steamer trunks on trains or monitor a railroad commissary for waste, theft, or doctored checks.4 Every aspect of a Pinkerton’s appearance was thought through, down to his luggage: “A brief case will often answer the purpose for daylight runs, but no operative should travel in a Pullman without a bag or suitcase.”5
In Hammett’s story “Who Killed Bob Teal?” a younger detective who is “well along the way to expertness” after only two years at the agency is killed by a bullet. Hammett survived his own apprenticeship, and one of the first men to help him along the way to expertness may have been his supervisor in the Baltimore office, an experienced Pinkerton whom Hammett later called James or Jimmy Wright and sometimes credited as the model for his fictional Continental Op. Many biographies and treatises have cited the importance of Wright to Hammett’s development as a man and, ultimately, a writer. The trouble with this view is that no one has ever found proof of the elusive mentor Jimmy Wright. There seems little doubt that Hammett learned many of his skills and codes of detective conduct while employed with the Baltimore Pinkerton office, but Wright himself might be a bit of misdirection, a character as fictitious as Bob Teal.
In fact, “James Wright” had long been a popular alias with Pinkertons working undercover.6 The code name appears as far back as 1874, when a St. Louis Pinkerton (John Boyle) traveling as “Mr. James Wright” rode with a former Chicago police captain (Louis J. Lull) going by W. J. Allen (echoing Allan Pinkerton’s wartime alias). With a local lawman as guide, the two Pinkertons posed as land prospectors while trailing the Younger brothers in Missouri the same month that operative J. W. Whicher was murdered there by the James-Younger gang. The Youngers were staying in a rural farmhouse in St. Clair County, watching from the attic, when they noticed three well-armed strangers passing on the country road. Riding hard, the Youngers came up behind James Wright and his two colleagues. Wright galloped away as guns were drawn and had his hat blasted off by the Youngers as he rode out of view.* He left the other two men behind to face the brothers; one of them, Lull, produced a hidden Smith & Wesson and shot John Younger through the throat before being hit himself. Younger and Deputy Ed Daniels, the agent’s guide, were killed in the melee, but Lull crawled away and lingered long enough to give a sworn account of the showdown before he died.
“James Wright” lived to ride another day for Pinkerton’s.
* * *
As a detective, Hammett was a company man like his Op, a foot soldier in an army of detecting. During Hammett’s time, an operative might see a whole case through or merely snippets of it, as the Pinkerton agency rotated its scores of regional operatives in and out as needed. “Ninety-nine per cent of detective work is a patient collecting of details—and your details must be got as nearly first-hand as possible,” says the Op in Hammett’s story “One Hour.”
Operative reports were meant to show clients how much daily investigating they were getting for their fee. As in news writing, the reports captured the “who, what, when, and where,” with more expansive characterizations reserved for office memos such as this 1901 sketch of a post office thief: “‘Figgsey’ Lyons has made his home in Newark for some time and can be found any day in the Newark City Library, reading over the Cincinnati Inquirer for western news in regard to the doings of crooks.”7
The Pinkerton archive at the Library of Congress lives in the Madison Building, near the Capitol, and holds sixty thousand documents and several hundred boxes of operative reports, along with agency employee records, memos on field agent salaries, cipher books, cables to clients, brochures for early listening devices (the Burns agency’s “Detecti-Fone”) or the patented Pinkerton “Photo Cabinet” (1917), a roll-top affair that law enforcement agencies could buy and fill with thousands of the latest mug shots.
As rich a trove as the archive is, no writing by Hammett has ever been identified within it; his reports either were submitted anonymously to client companies or have since been lost to fire or time. All materials from the offices where he worked longest, Baltimore and San Francisco, are also sadly missing, and very few unflattering records of strikebreaking cases were included when the collection was donated. (These purges could have been made in the 1930s, when the Agency was worried about being called before Congress for union busting under the new National Labor Relations Act.)
But even an hour spent reading through the reports of other operatives gives a good idea of the experiences and format that formed Hammett as a writer. For a general education in the details of a typical Pinkerton’s life, there are many letters and directives out of the New York and Chicago offices (the latter in spite of the Great Chicago Fire) and memorable paperwork from ops working out of the Kansas City, Pittsburgh, or Spokane branches, enough to make plain what was expected in Hammett’s day.**
Pinkertons were cautioned not to begin a case with a hasty theory, and their reports were written to a certain understated standard, presenting a collection of rogues rendered matter-of-factly, with a surprisingly light touch, though often their work was edited before being sent on to the client.
Pinkerton supervisors routinely functioned as editors, revising operatives’ reports to please clients, somewhat the way a rewrite desk in a newspaper city room polished the eyewitness stories filed by “legmen.” As Hammett explained, “A detective official in San Francisco once substituted ‘truthful’ for ‘voracious’ in one of my reports on the grounds that the client might not understand the latter. A few days later in another report ‘simulate’ became ‘quicken’ for the same reason.” It is not surprising that a writer who was later proud of his ability to sneak bits of gamey street parlance past his editors would have started out learning to improve his reports for Pinkerton clients. In Red Harvest, his Continental Op grouses about dressing up field reports for his old-school boss, “I might just as well have saved the labor and sweat I had put into trying to make my reports harmless. They didn’t fool the Old Man. He gave me merry hell.”
A single celebrated murder case from just before the Great War makes clear the breadth of investigation the Agency could bring to bear, and the kind of shadow work expected in Hammett’s day. As an operative, Hammett did jobs just like these: watching a wealthy gentleman’s Pullman berth overnight, tipping a porter to pluck a telegram from a subject’s trash basket, chatting up gossipy landladies, or minding the driveway of a robbery suspect who was dumb enough to return home. Months and years were spent sharpening the habits of suspicious observation. Combined from multiple op reports, the investigation of the Rice murder makes an interesting detective story on its own.
William Lowe Rice was a successful corporate lawyer living in an elegant subdivision he’d helped pioneer, Cleveland Heights. He was an athletic man nearing fifty whose wife and daughters had gone ahead of him to the family’s summer house on Cape Cod. On the evening of Friday, August 5, 1910, after playing nine holes at the Euclid Golf Club and dining and drinking there with friends until about ten thirty, he started to walk the five hundred yards along Overlook Road to his pillared brick colonial home, Lowe Ridge. On the road, Rice encountered several men beneath a street lamp who were described by others as having dark, curly hair and soft hats.
An altercation followed and the lawyer lay dying minutes later, when two automobiles stopped to investigate the still figure lying by the road. His jewelry and more than a hundred dollars cash were left on him; his body cut, bruised, and shot; a gold penknife lying open as if from a slashing fight. (His panama hat was also found nearby, with two bullet tears in it.) Two doctors out driving with their wives brought Rice to the hospital, where he died without a word. Rice’s law partner then sent a telegram to a Pinkerton supervisor: PLEASE SEND FIRST TRAIN YOUR VERY BEST AND MOST EXPERIENCED MAN TO PUT IN RICE CASE. NO ORDINARY MAN, BUT ONE ACCUSTOMED TO SUCH CASES.
Operatives interviewed streetcar workers who might have seen the bloodied killer in the hours after William Rice died. “I can see it in my mind’s eye just like a picture,” a brakeman recalled. “He was sitting on the south side of the car in the smoker just behind me, leaning his head on his hand.’”8 On learning that dark, “foreign”-looking men had been seen on the road just before Rice was killed, Pinkerton’s sent in its own Sicilian agents to secure rooms in Italian boardinghouses.
On August 7, a day and a half after the crime, operative C. Y. Riddle arrived in Cleveland Heights with a flourish: “I alighted from a Euclid car at Lake View and walked up through Mayfield Road, known as Little Italy, to Overlook Road and over the scene of the murder.” An experienced op like those Hammett would later sketch, Riddle cast a cold eye over clues that proved irrelevant, even a bloodstained handkerchief:
The handkerchief is of a cheap variety with blue and white border, but the stains look old as though rain had fallen since it had laid there. I also found a piece of a collar band from a black stripped shirt. It had been partly torn and cut away from the shirt and had the letters “Ben” on the band but this was too old to have belonged to anyone connected with this crime.9
After kicking through some bushes, Riddle learned about a burlap bag full of seven dead chickens found 150 feet west of where Rice had died. Examining the bag, he noticed a copper band on a hen’s leg from the coop of one of Rice’s neighbors.
The discovery of the dead chickens led the Pinkertons to theorize that the killers were a group of Italian laborers who had been out grabbing hens for the upcoming Festival of San Giuseppe when they were discovered by Rice, which led to a fatal struggle. Operatives took the burlap bag around to Italian dry goods stores to trace its ownership. But to some people, given Rice’s wealth and impressive collection of enemies, the chicken-thief theory seemed too random and squalid a death, especially to Rice’s family. When it came out at the inquest that another of his neighbors, John Hartness Brown, had appeared at the crime scene moments after the killing and unceremoniously helped get Rice’s body into the doctor’s car, he became a more fitting suspect.
Brown’s rivalry and business grievances with Rice were gossiped about, and so, two weeks after the crime, on the night of Saturday, August 20, 1910, Pinkerton operative J. V. O’Neill shadowed Brown, a thickset, red-faced man about forty-five years old and six feet tall, on an overnight train from Cleveland to Boston:
During the night I kept close watch on Mr. Brown’s berth in anticipation of his leaving the train. However, I did not see him until after the train had left Albany, N.Y. He then arose, made his toilet, and had his breakfast in the dining car … I interviewed the conductor with a view of learning for a certainty Mr. Brown’s destination.”10
At Springfield, Brown sent a telegram advising someone when he’d arrive in Boston. Operative O’Neill learned from the porter that Brown had begun a separate telegram announcing he’d be at the Hotel Touraine, and then substituted the other message. When the train stopped at Worcester, Massachusetts, two other Pinkertons boarded the car, instructed to look for a florid-faced man wearing spectacles and a split straw hat. O’Neill pointed out their subject, and operative C. B. Patterson started his watch:
The train arrived in Boston at 11.50 A.M. and Brown, carrying a black suit case, a black bag and a tan leather extension bag like a steamer trunk, boarded a taxicab at the South Station, rode to Hotel Touraine, and registered at 12.05 P.M.11
After ordering some liquor to be sent to Rockland, Maine, Brown returned to his hotel with another man in a straw hat and gray suit, then began a complex series of maneuvers, as if aware of his shadow, before leaving Boston on the night train to Rockland. The investigation moved back to the chicken thieves.
A murder weapon eventually was found in the Rice case—the softness of the recovered bullet had suggested a foreign make—and over the coming months, through constant shadowing of the suspects’ wives, two Cleveland men, Vincenzo Pelato and Pietro Tomasello, were traced to Brooklyn, New York, and Black Diamond, California.
Pelato broke first, placing the blame for the shooting on Tomasello, who was interrogated for eight hours in February 1912 in the Columbus, Ohio, penitentiary. Having countered the suspect’s every denial, at 5:00 P.M. Francis Dimaio, the arresting Pinkerton superintendent who spent two years working the Rice case, produced the big foreign pistol that had shot William Rice. “When was the last time you saw this?” Dimaio asked Tomasello, who collapsed into “hysterics,” according to witnesses, until the prison doctor had to calm him with a “sleeping potion.”
The men were convicted of robbery before murder charges could be brought. Whether Rice’s neighbor William Hartness Brown had hired the killers or Rice just died confronting a gang of chicken thieves was never proven in court.† (Brown survived public suspicion and moved to England.) But Dimaio cleared it up late in his life, nearing ninety when he wrote to his old agency colleagues about the real shooter:
[County Detective]Doran and I traced the [chicken] bag … to a feed store in East Cleveland who told us that the bag in question had been sent to the Sciarabba brothers … When we went to find them, I secured from an Italian informant, a neighbor of the Sciarabba brothers, that they were the actual murderers of Attorney Rice, but had left town and were then in Brazil.”12
One of the Sciarabbas had fired as Rice wrestled and traded knife slashes with his first attacker. But having no extradition treaty with Brazil, they prosecuted the two witnesses to the murder (Pelato and Tomasello), who were eventually released despite their confession.
Beyond the collective failure of all those hardworking Pinkertons, it is interesting how familiar such reports sound from the Hammett style they later inspired: hopping streetcars, watching houses, quizzing neighbors, blind turns taken that nevertheless seem to add momentum, investigative failures that lend realism. Before he could write his fictional Op stories, Hammett read and submitted scores of such memos on the job. “Thanks to my ability to write pleasing and convincing reports,” he said, “my reputation was always a little more than I deserved.”13
* Shorter accounts often give this honor to Jesse James, but the authoritative biography by T. J. Stiles, Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War, (New York: Vintage, 2005), gives it to the Youngers, pp. 255–56.
** Documents were returned if the client was a private individual, an archivist who worked on the collection told me. The stated company policy was to return documents to the client once the case was closed.
† When the Cleveland Plain Dealer revisited the infamous case in 1941, the writer offered the theory that Rice had been killed because he was changing his will, as well as a possibility that he’d been mistaken for neighbor Brown, the alleged true target of the Italian assassins.