decentralized, underfunded, incompetent, and corrupt sheriff and
police departments. In literature and in the popular imagination,
the all-seeing private eye—the gumshoe, the cinder dick, the
sleuthhound, the shadow—displaced the crusading sheriff as the
archetype of rough justice. He moved across the dangerous new
frontiers of deep alleyways and roiling slums. His signature was
not the smoking six-shooter; instead, like Sherlock Holmes, he
relied upon the startling powers of reason and deduction, the
ability to observe what the Watsons of the world merely saw. He
found order in a scramble of clues and, as one author put it,
“turned brutal crimes—the vestiges of the beast in man—into
intellectual puzzles.”
Yet from the outset the fascination with private detectives was
mixed with aversion. They were untrained and unregulated and
often had criminal records themselves. Beholden to paying clients,
they were widely seen as surreptitious figures who burglarized
people’s secrets. (The term “to detect” derived from the Latin verb
“to unroof,” and because the devil, according to legend, allowed his
henchmen to peer voyeuristically into houses by removing their
roofs, detectives were known as “the devil’s disciples.”) In 1850,
Allan Pinkerton founded the first American private detective
agency; in advertisements, the company’s motto, “We Never
Sleep,” was inscribed under a large, unblinking, Masonic-like eye,
which gave rise to the term “private eye.” In a manual of general
principles and rules that served as a blueprint for the industry,
Pinkerton admitted that the detective must at times “depart from
the strict line of truth” and “resort to deception.” Yet even many
people who despised the profession deemed it a necessary evil. As
one private eye put it, he might be a “miserable snake,” but he was
also “the silent, secret, and effective Avenger of the outraged
Majesty of the Law when everything else fails.”
Hale recruited a brooding private detective from Kansas City,