Word: pinkertons
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...Pinkerton operative in his 20s. In 1921 he shadowed Comedian Fatty Arbuckle, implicated in the death of a starlet, and noted: "His eyes were the eyes of a man who expected to be regarded as a monster ... I made my gaze as contemptuous as I could." It could have been the stuff of hard-boiled detective literature; instead it was the stuff of hard-boiled detective life: the life lived by Dashiell Hammett, creator of The Thin Man and The Maltese Falcon. A voracious reader of Henry James, before he switched to the school of hard knocks, Hammett wrote four...
...boom in corporate espionage has triggered a corresponding explosion in the business of guarding secrets. Revenues of security consulting firms topped an estimated $200 million in 1981, and should double that amount this year. New shops are springing up across the landscape, and Burns International, Pinkerton's and other traditional protection companies are rapidly expanding. The Washington-based American Society for Industrial Security now has more than 18,000 members...
Robert A. Pinkerton...
...Pinkerton code, as filtered through such greats as Sam Spade, consisted of three parts--anonvmity, morality and objectivity. None of them were quite what they seemed. A good detective had to be anonymous, but not only so he wouldn't be seen--the less personal information there was, the less anyone could hold against him. A Pinkerton operative, or "Op" as he was known, was identified by number, and his final report to his client was ofter rewritten by someone else entirely. Morality was similarly skewed. In simple terms, his job was to protect good people from bad people...
...probably remains, a strange lifestyle and one very close to the self-imposed exile one would need to be a writer. Not much is known about Hammett's work for Pinkerton, aside from the fact that he was involved in the strange case of tracking down a man who had stolen a Ferris Wheel, and that he was involved in the most famous of the 1920s West Coast celebrity trials--the case of Fatty Arbuckle, in which Arbuckle, a famous film comedian, was accused of raping a woman and subsequently killing her by the sheer weight of his enormous bulk...