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Comment by jmyeet | Hacker News Reader

The Pinkertons are a fascinating period of history. "Detective agency" in the modern parlance doesn't really fit. They were a private army for the wealthy that at one time was larger than the US army.

One particularly famous incident (after the founder's death) was the Homestead strike [1]. Strike-breaking was very much in the Pinkerton's wheelhouse and it's a good example of what they were actually used for [2].

There doesn't seem to be a lot of fiction that features the Pinkertons prominently. One exception is the (excellent) HBO TV series Deadwood.

It's particularly apropos at this time because the lawless violence and organized labor suppression of the robber barons in the Pinkerton era is very much the future we are careening towards.

[1]: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/carnegi...

[2]: https://allthatsinteresting.com/pinkerton-detective-agency

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>There doesn't seem to be a lot of fiction that features the Pinkertons prominently. One exception is the (excellent) HBO TV series Deadwood

There's also The Tall Target, a 1951 movie that sometimes gets played on classic movie channels, which is about the "Baltimore Plot" in which Abraham Lincoln was supposedly going to be assassinated on his way to his first inauguration in 1861. Supposedly it was prevented by the Pinkertons, although historians question if any real plot was planned.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltimore_Plot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tall_Target

> There doesn't seem to be a lot of fiction that features the Pinkertons prominently. One exception is the (excellent) HBO TV series Deadwood.

Also any of Dashiell Hammett's Continental Op stories. The Contintental Detective Agency is the Pinkertons with the serial numbers filed off. Hammett himself worked as a Pinkerton, among other things, before he got into writing.

I got into his writing because Raymond Chandler was such a big fan as I learned from his essay The Simple Art of Murder[1]

[1] https://archive.is/fi4Wz

Red Dead Redemption video game series features the Pinkertons:

https://reddead.fandom.com/wiki/Pinkerton_National_Detective...

RDR2 is a good example. I'd forgotten about that. The level of historical accuracy in that game was truly incredible. It's really the best of Rockstar whereas GTA5 was (IMHO) the worst of Rockstar (and I loved the GTA3 games and GTA4). I'll be interested to see where GTA6 lands.

Deadwood was particularly good because it not only featured Pinkertons but painted them really well as the defenders of the wealthy and basically just a large and well-funded gang.

I can see people thinking GTA5 is worse than 3, 4, and of course RDR series.

But worst game? Surely it's better than something like Manhunt 2?

Worst amongst the best, presumably.

Not the Pinkertons, but John Sayle's Matewan from 1987 features the Baldwin-Felts agency behaving similarly.

> There doesn't seem to be a lot of fiction that features the Pinkertons prominently.

There's a long Clive Cussler series about the "Van Dorn Detective Agency", which is clearly the Pinkertons.[1] Willie Sutton, the bank robber, wrote of the Pinkertons, "They were as powerful as the cops, and much better organized."

Pinkerton, the company, is still around, but they haven't done much detective work since the 1960s. Now they're mostly a security guard service.

[1] https://www.bookseriesinorder.com/isaac-bell/

There's a whole Pinkertons TV series out of Canada, from 2014. Available for streaming from the usual sources.

Dashiell Hammett was a Pinkerton before getting Spanish Flu and becoming ill and switching to writing fiction to make money.

I read up about it after watching Deadwood. The most surprising I found is that they still exist in some form: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinkerton_(detective_agency).

They were in the news in 2020 after a Pinkerton subcontracted guard shot and killed a protestor. I was surprised at the time that they still existed.

https://denverite.com/2023/03/24/pinkerton-license-renewed/

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kids left the country because they were being pursued by Pinkertons.

The Valley of Fear by Arthur Conan Doyle featured a fictionalised version of a Pinkerton agent.

The player character in Bioshock Infinite is a disgraced former Pinkerton. Great game

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