Fifty Years a Detective: 35 Real Detective Stories

Before forensics, before the FBI, before modern profiling, there was Thomas Furlong. This book is his unvarnished account of fifty years chasing criminals across an America still inventing itself. Furlong began his career in 1862, pulled from a Pennsylvania rifle regiment for special service, and never stopped working until well into the twentieth century. The thirty-five cases recounted here are not fiction. They are the actual investigations of a man who witnessed American law enforcement evolve from informal posses to organized detective bureaus. Here are murderers caught through sheer persistence, con men exposed by their own vanities, and stolen fortunes recovered from hideouts that no longer exist. Furlong writes without sentimentality about the mechanics of his work: how he tracked men across state lines, how he earned the trust of informants, how he sat across from killers and waited for them to talk themselves into prison. This is a primary source document, one of the earliest memoirs from an American detective, and it reads like it: direct, unsanitized, and utterly without modern pretension. For readers who want to understand where detective work came from, and what it cost the men who did it, there are few books this raw.