Pinkerton's Secret Author Talks about his Research
Read our review: http://reviews.armchairinterviews.com/reviews/pinkertons-secret
Submitted by Eric Lerner, author
Every novel has a story behind the story. Pinkerton’s Secret, has a back story that begins in Chicago in the nineteenth century, wends its way through Hollywood in the twentieth, and continues in New York where Henry Holt & Co. will publish the novel on March 4, 2008.
Ten years ago, while browsing the new arrivals shelf at my public library, I spotted a biography of Allan Pinkerton. The name conjured up images of wraiths in long black coats hunting down Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and crushing striking steel workers in Homestead, Pennsylvania.
What I discovered instead was a man who contradicted the myths, but whose life created one of those tantalizing historical mysteries that can only be unraveled in the imaginative realm of fiction.
Pinkerton, I learned, was not just America’s original Private Eye, nabbing forgers,railroad thieves, and confidence men, he was a political radical who was passionately involved in the cause of Abolitionism. In the 1850’s his home in Chicago was a station on the Underground Railroad, and he counted John Brown and Frederick Douglass among his close friends. On Abraham Lincoln’s railway journey to his inauguration in 1861, Pinkerton saved the president-elect from an assassination plot in Baltimore. During the Civil War, he established the first Secret Service, hunting down rebel spies in Washington and sending his agents behind Confederate lines.
In all of these adventures, the biographer informed me, Allan Pinkerton was ably assisted by Mrs. Kate Warne, the first female detective, whom he’d hired when he first started his detective agency in 1856. The biographer assured me that despite the rumors at the time, Pinkerton’s relationship to the “attractive widow” was strictly professional.
Strictly professional?
I read all the other biographies of Pinkerton, as well as Allan’s own autobiographical account of his exploits in the Civil War, “The Spy of the Rebellion.” I obtained a rare copy of Kate Warne’s actual logbooks, recounting how she accompanied Lincoln on the secret train from Philadelphia to thwart the Baltimore assassins. But I couldn’t find any clue to an involvement between Pinkerton and the female detective that wasn’t strictly professional.
Then I came upon a photo of Pinkerton’s grave. Buried on one side is his wife, and on the other, just over his shoulder, Kate Warne rests for all eternity. None of his biographers had mentioned that fact.
I began to wonder if the novelist does not have a better opportunity than the historian does to uncover certain truths that are buried in the available documents known as the historical record. As a writer of fiction I could easily imagine that Allan Pinkerton, a detective by profession who literally invented the modus operandi of investigative disguises, would go to great lengths to disguise himself in order to protect his professional reputation while he was alive as well as for posterity. I realized I had a great story in hand.
At that time, however, I turned my stories into screenplays for a living. Among my credits were the hit movie Bird on a Wire, starring Mel Gibson and Goldie Hawn, and a serious film, Kiss the Sky, starring William Petersen (now of CSI), which I wrote and produced.
I pitched Pinkerton’s story to a studio and they loved it, but before I’d even finished the first draft, as often happens in the movie business, all the executives involved in the project got fired. My script sat in a drawer for years through regime changes until the rights finally reverted to me. By that time I was ready to put my screenwriting career behind me and return to my first writing love-novels.
While many novelists dream of seeing their work on the silver screen, I had spent twenty years compressing the novels in my mind to fit that tight frame, and now I could finally restore to my work what I had so professionally deprived it of-a narrator’s voice.
To me, of all the differences between movies and novels, this is the one that most clearly defines each medium. A movie is a play, and the story is told through the actions and words of the characters. Using a voice over is a device of last resort. A novel, however, is a story told to the reader, and each novel’s identity arises from the unique quality of the narrator’s voice.
The particular problem I confronted in the unusual conversion of Pinkerton’s Secret from a play to a novel was finding the right voice to tell the story. I had a cast of characters that included not only the real life detective and his partner and lover Kate Warne, but the American icons Abraham Lincoln and John Brown. My initial attempts at a third person narrator sounded stagy and false to me, like a stuffy period piece. I knew this story had the potential to engage the reader in a kind of emotional mystery, but I still didn’t know how. I couldn’t hear it.
Then one night I was awakened at three a.m. by the voice of Allan Pinkerton. I had read that late in his life he suffered a devastating stroke, and here is how he described it to me: Most people don’t think being paralyzed hurts, because they can stick people pins in you and you don’t feel anything. But as I’ve made abundantly clear, most people are utter morons.
It was the voice I had encountered in his letters and the directives that poured out of the office of The General Superintendent of The Pinkerton National Detective Agency, a voice that brooked no opposition or tolerance for anyone who did not understand, as he did, the difference between right and wrong. And was willing to fight for it.
It was the only voice that could narrate his own story, defend the choices he had made in his causes and his love affair, even if he was defending his actions to himself, and to others whose identities become known only at the end of his story.
Once I had the voice it still took me a couple of years to work through several versions, until I completed the final one with a great editor, Jack Macrae at Henry Holt & Co. If you want to check out an intriguing representation of the novel in words and images, go to the website: http://www.PinkertonsSecret.com