Word: pinkertons
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Pinkerton's National Detective Agency, the firm that made "private eye" a popular phrase, finally went public last week. Under fourth-generation President Robert A. Pinkerton II, the family-owned firm, which has used "We Never Sleep" as a motto and an unblinking eye as its trademark while running up a record for running down all sorts of criminals, is now a quarry itself-for investors. Pegged at $23 a share when it went on sale, $6,900,000 worth of Pinkerton stock soon sold...
Less Derring-Do. That nice price reflects the fact that the agency, presently known as Pinkerton's Inc., is profiting from the growing demand for unblinking private police services. Revenues last year reached $71,379,000 and profits were $1,936,000, owing less to derring-do involving rustlers and train robbers than to routine protection services for industrial plants and exhibitions. The return was particularly significant because it exceeded special revenues of the previous two years when Pinkerton, under the largest single contract ever negotiated by a detective agency, provided as many as 4,500 people...
...Pinkerton's present roster of 13,000 employees, of whom 10,000 are guards, spend most of their time on just such mundane assignments. They not only patrol plants for corporations but also undertake security checks or theft investigations inside the gates. Other agents, in a longtime arrangement with the Jewelers' Security Alliance, investigate jewel thefts and losses; under an agreement with Eastern race tracks, the Pinks guard thoroughbreds and chase away bookies and purse snatchers. Uniformed Pinkerton men stand watch at annual corporate meetings, and have been known to haul obstreperous stockholders out bodily on orders from...
Hammett could write. Into his bony prose went the conscientious effort of the craftsman whose best work escaped the literary basement where most mystery books belong. His Continental Op (for operative), based on the author's own experience as a Pinkerton detective, is authentically tough. All mystery stories are implausible, and so are Hammett's. But in his case the reader accepts their implausibility because the characters, particularly the Op himself-a fat, stubby, middle-aged man who never got a name and needed none, being an archetype-seem so real. "He put these people down on paper...
Early-bird students must have been at Lamont, because very few people actually checked out books. It made a quiet day for the Pinkerton man hired as a door security guard--he mostly gave directions to the people gliding around in the unfamiliar surroundings...