Twenty Years a Detective in the Wickedest City in the World

Clifton R. Wooldridge spent twenty years walking the meanest streets in America, and in this memoir he pulls no punches about what he found there. Chicago in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was a city where graft reigned, con men prospered, and an army of 60,000 criminals made war on honest citizens. Wooldridge, hailed as "the incorruptible Sherlock Holmes of America," logged an almost unbelievable 20,000 arrests, and this book is his ledger of how the city's thieves, swindlers, and grifters operated: fake mines and oil wells, bucket shops, matrimonial bureaus that were fronts for prostitution, fortune tellers who cleaned out widows, and the endless variations of the get-rich-quick schemes that still flourish today. But this isn't just a catalog of crimes. It's a fierce, unapologetic voice from inside the machine of justice, a man who saw society's vulnerabilities up close and spent two decades exploiting them. The prose is rough, the moralizing can be heavy, and the world it describes is long gone. What remains is an indispensable time capsule of American grift and the men who fought it.