Tag Archives: Allan Pinkerton

A Woman’s Place: Girl in Disguise

12 Monday Jul 2021

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Review: Girl in Disguise, by Greer Macallister
Sourcebooks, 2017. 301 pp. $26

Kate Warne’s up against it. Chicago in 1856 is a rough town for a young widow with no money, no job prospects, and no desire to remarry. Mistreated by parents who never loved her, exploited her, and taught her never to love or trust anyone, Kate has learned to lie and dissemble, as circumstances seem to require. That skill, at least, she picked up from her father, a down-on-his-luck actor who, when not putting on stage makeup to perform, tried his hand at con games.

Alexander Gardner’s photo at Antietam, September 1862, of Allan Pinkerton (seated, right) and a woman believed to be Kate Warne, standing behind him. (courtesy Library of Congress, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Which explains why, when Kate reads a want ad run by Allan Pinkerton looking for an operative to join his agency, she applies. After all, doesn’t she have the natural talent? Pinkerton nearly throws her out of his office; his profession is no place for a woman, he says. But Kate perseveres, of course, and Pinkerton reluctantly gives her a trial run — which doesn’t work out too well.

How that happens, and what she does about it, I’ll leave for you to find out, for Girl in Disguise is well worth your exploration. Be warned, however: Readers expecting a whodunit or thriller or even a unified plot will be disappointed, but, I expect, not for long. Such is the brio with which Macallister tells her story, and the loving attention she pays her protagonist, that it hardly matters.

Girl in Disguise is a coming-into-her-own novel, as Kate settles into her profession and masters it. Sometimes that process feels too easy, but rest assured, “no — and furthermore” resides here. The chapters represent cases, some of which are connected, especially in the narrative’s latter stages. But most stand alone, showing Kate’s progression, the professional and personal obstacles she faces, and, above all, how she handles a line of work that excites and fascinates her, yet leaves little or no room for a private life, let alone intimacy.

That, in turn, leads her toward self-discovery, because she must ask herself what she wants, and whether she’s lied so well to the world, she has fooled herself as well. As such, her character drives the narrative, an essential, given that the plot is episodic and fragmented. It’s an unusual way to approach a suspense novel, but here, it works.

Kate Warne was a real person, but little is known about her. Macallister does an impressive job re-creating her in plausible fashion. I particularly like the family history, which both brings out her character and influences the story line. Better yet, she lets Kate remain emotionally scarred. No miraculous transformations mar this book, for the author is too psychologically astute for that. The most exciting parts involve what few traces the real Kate Warne left in the historical record, and what tantalizing bits they are. She helped spirit Lincoln safely through Baltimore just before his first inauguration, foiling an assassination attempt. Later, during the Civil War, she performed surveillance on Rose Greenhow, a Washington socialite and clever Confederate spy.

Greenhow not only makes a worthy opponent, she comes across with particular vividness:

Artfully, she flirted, and I watched how she flirted. Her hands were deployed like soldiers to any front where they were needed: stroking a man’s sleeve to create intimacy, resting on the piano to reinforce her wealth, trailing along the side of her neck to draw attention to her body. She was not a young woman, but she was a beautiful one, no mistake. Her beauty alone was not all she had to offer. She gave off some kind of energy that drew men to her. Her gift, I saw, was attention. There was nothing more intoxicating to these men.

I wish Pinkerton’s characterization reached this level, but I don’t see his inner life or motivations as clearly as Kate’s or Greenhow’s. I wanted more from this major character. Lincoln’s cameo appearance provides just enough detail, I suppose, though I could have used a little more with him too, and George B. McClellan gets even shorter shrift, which I understand, yet which sets off my historian’s itch. During the war, McClellan would later command the Army of the Potomac and employ Pinkerton to run informants, who invariably offered inflated estimates of Confederate strength. McClellan swallowed them whole and used them as an excuse not to fight, driving Lincoln crazy. Maybe some other novelist will tackle that triangle.

The relative shallowness of the male characters is the most serious weakness of Girl in Disguise. With one exception, a suave, dapper colleague at Pinkerton’s agency who has a secret to protect, the men don’t measure up to Kate, Greenhow, or two women whom Kate trains as operatives.

Still, I thoroughly enjoyed Girl in Disguise, which richly imagines a complex tale based on a sketchy historical record.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Nineteenth-Century Noir: By Gaslight

10 Monday Apr 2017

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Review: By Gaslight, by Steven Price
Farrar, Straus, 2016. 731 pp. $28

William Pinkerton has much more than his reputation to make a thief uneasy. Not only is he an accomplished detective, son of the famous Allan (and director of the agency that bears his name), William grasps implicitly that revenge and justice are reverse sides of the same coin, and the difference doesn’t trouble him overmuch. If a man’s a criminal, he must be stopped, and proof or evidence are mere tools toward that end. That makes Pinkerton as relentless as he is unpredictable, and if there’s one thing a careful, professional criminal dislikes, it’s an adversary who makes his own rules with the daring calculation of a fanatic.

Allan Pinkerton’s obituary in Harper’s Weekly, 1884; even in death, he cast a deep shadow on his sons (courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

So it is that in 1885, Pinkerton has traveled to London to track down Edward Shade, a figure from his late father’s past. Why Pinkerton père spent so much effort trying to find Shade, whose elusiveness fits his name, isn’t entirely clear. But William has inherited the quest, which he pursues with every ounce of his considerable energy. And when the trail leads him to a woman believed to be connected to Shade, she literally slips from his grasp to throw herself in the Thames.

I wouldn’t dream of summarizing further. At 731 pages, By Gaslight is a weighty novel, but that’s like saying the pyramids are large and made of stone. Rather, imagine said pyramid built by dropping pebble upon pebble, and you have Price’s narrative technique. As you read, each mote falls into place as if there were no other suitable niche, and just when you think you might have uncovered the secret you’ve been waiting to see revealed, there’s another hidden inside. I defy anyone to start this novel and not finish it.

So I won’t tell you more about the plot, but I will mention three other characters. There’s Adam Foole, a gifted man of the “flash” (criminal) world, with a checkered past that has taken him around the globe, like as not in desperate straits. Master thief and con artist he is, but where most novelists would make such a character a likeable rogue, Price reaches higher. Foole’s neither rogue nor Robin Hood, though the men he robs are brutal types who amass wealth for its own sake and hide behind it, a tacit comparison that works in Foole’s favor. More importantly, though, love and friendship matter most to him, including his affection for his two partners in crime.

They are Japheth Fludd, a mountain of a man whose suspicious worldview provides a counterpoint to Foole’s more romantic nature, and whose bond to Foole seems at first hard to explain. But never fear; Price gets to it, eventually. Foole and Fludd look after Molly, a street urchin and pickpocket extraordinaire, whom Foole treats like the daughter he’s never had, and whom he patiently instructs in manners and the right way to treat people. They’re a marvelous triumvirate.

But a story of this heft wouldn’t take flight without winged prose, and this is where Price dazzles. A certain tone of voice is “cold and brutal as a steel cable”; William loves his wife’s name, “the aristocratic lace of its syllables, the knot it made of his tongue.” And then there’s London, which Price renders in its filth and splendor like a latter-day Dickens, minus the sentimentality:

He did not go directly in but slipped instead down a side alley. Creatures stirred in the papered windows as he passed. The alley was a river of muck and he walked carefully. In openings in the wooden walls he glimpsed the small crouched shapes of children, all bones and knees, half dressed, their breath pluming in the cold. They met his eyes boldly. The fog was thinner here, the stink more savage and bitter.

The novel ranges from England to India to South Africa to the United States, both the Western cow towns where desperadoes rob banks, and Virginia during the Civil War. (Allan Pinkerton runs spies for General George B. McClellan, commander of the Army of the Potomac, and William joins his father there.) But everywhere the narrative goes, you sense the place and time as if they entered through your fingertips touching the pages.

I like intricate books, though I must confess I got twisted around so that I’m not sure I understand everything in this one. But I don’t mind that as much as the two annoying tics in which Price indulges himself. By Gaslight has no quotation marks, and sometimes you have to parse out where dialogue ends and narrative resumes. He’s not alone–Lydia Peelle did the same in The Midnight Cool–but I say it’s spinach, and I say the hell with it. It’s as if the authors are pretending that they’re so good, their prose needs no punctuation. Silly. Similarly, Price uses commas so sparingly that his longer sentences sometimes have a breathless, full-of-themselves quality, like a more loquacious Hemingway. I don’t get that, either.

But By Gaslight isn’t just good; it’s spectacular, in every sense of the word.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.