The Expressman and the Detective

This is detective fiction before Sherlock Holmes. Allan Pinkerton, who founded America's first detective agency and literally saved Lincoln's life, here turns his investigative methods into narrative gold. Set in Montgomery, Alabama in the 1850s, the novel opens on a prosperous Southern city built on cotton and railroad money, a world of gentleman gamblers, corrupt officials, and hidden debts. When $10,000 vanishes from the Adams Express Company, suspicion immediately falls on Nathan Maroney, a respected clerk whose only weakness is horseracing. The South's finest detectives have already failed. They found nothing. Pinkerton doesn't trust the obvious answer. He sends his best agent, Mr. Porter, undercover into Montgomery's elite society to find the truth. What follows is a fascinating period piece that invented the detective genre decades before Poe's Dupin became famous. Pinkerton's real methods, surveillance, infiltration, psychological intuition, drive a narrative that's part courtroom drama, part social portrait, and wholly absorbing as a historical artifact.