From Samantha Seiple, the award winning author of Ghosts in the Fog, comes the first book for young adults to tell the story of Allan Pinkerton, America's first private eye. Lincoln's Spymaster tells the dangerous and action-packed adventures of Allan Pinkerton, America's first private eye and Lincoln's most trusted spymaster.Pinkerton was just a poor immigrant barrel-maker in Illinois when he stumbled across his first case just miles from his home. His reputation grew and people began approaching Pinkerton with their cases, leading him to open the first-of-its-kind private detective agency. Pinkerton assembled a team of undercover agents, and together they caught train robbers, counterfeiters, and other outlaws. Soon these outlaws, including Jesse James, became their nemeses. Danger didn't stop the agency! The team even uncovered and stopped an assassination plot against president-elect Abraham Lincoln! Seeing firsthand the value of Pinkerton's service, Lincoln funded Pinkerton's spy network, a precursor to the Secret Service. Allan Pinkerton is known as the father of modern day espionage, and this is the first book for young adults to tell his story!

The Original Private Investigator's Handbook and Almanac is designed to provide the essential knowledge and procedure needed to identify, locate, and understand how to become a private investigator. It is both an instructional guide for those individuals desiring a career as a private investigator, and a resource manual that can be an invaluable reference. The approach is direct and concise, which facilitates comprehension by novices as well as experienced private investigators, and makes possible competent and professional reference of all private investigation in the United States and internationally.

The hard-bitten PI with a bottle of bourbon in his desk drawer--it's an image as old as the genre of hard-boiled detective fiction itself. Alcohol has long been an important element of detective fiction, but it is no mere prop. Rather, the treatment of alcohol within the works informs and illustrates the detective's moral code, and casts light upon the society's attitudes towards drink. This examination of the role of alcohol in hard-boiled detective fiction begins with the genre's birth, in an era strongly influenced and affected by prohibition, and follows both the genre's development and its relation to our changing understanding of and attitudes towards alcohol and alcoholism. It discusses the works of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Mickey Spillane, Robert B. Parker, Lawrence Block, Marcia Muller, Karen Kijewski and Sue Grafton. There are bibliographies of both the primary and critical texts, and an index of authors and works.

From Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade to Jake Gittes, private eyes have made for some of the most memorable characters in cinema. We often view these detectives as lone wolves who confront and try to make sense of a violent and chaotic modern world. Bran Nicol challenges this stereotype in The Private Eye and offers a fresh take on this iconic character and the film noir genre. Nicol traces the history of private eye movies from the influential film noirs of the 1940s to 1970s neonoir cinema, whose slow and brilliant decline gave way to the fading of detectives into movie mythology today. Analyzing a number of classic films—including The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, Chinatown, and The Long Goodbye—he reveals that while these movies are ostensibly thrillers, they are actually occupied by issues of work and love. The private eye is not a romantic hero, Nicol argues, but a figure who investigates the concealments of others at the expense of his own private life. Combining a lucid introduction to an underexplored tradition in movie history with a new approach to the detective in film, this book casts new light on the private worlds of the private eye.

This book is based on interviews with eight top investigators with different specialties, describing how they became private eyes and solve their cases. It's a behind the scenes look at investigating murder and mayhem, using high-tech listening or spying devices, tailing someone, going undercover, conducting interrogations, using public records, and working with police and government agencies.

Private Eyes is the complete map to what Raymond Bhandler called "the mean streets," the exciting world of the fictional private eye. It is intended to entertain current PI fans and to make new ones.

Former international hostage rescue commando, Dr. Mama Africa remembers when queens walked as living goddesses in her native Egypt. Only it's today, and hate flows freely as this female sleuth psychotherapist and her video camera capture intrigue and danger all around her. A former hostage rescue commando, Dr. Mama Africa is a family court judge, forensic psychologist, best-selling author, radio and TV personality, and private eye. But can she adopt the teenage boy who is filled with hate and fear, or help his family when she makes housecalls with her video camera in the wealthiest mansions of Hollywood and La Jolla to find out why dysfunctional families act as they do, and what makes people tick anywhere in the world?

Despite efforts of contemporary reformers to curb the availability of dime novels, series books, and paperbacks, Pioneers, Passionate Ladies, and Private Eyes reveals how many readers used them as means of resistance and how fictional characters became models for self-empowerment. These literary genres, whose value has long been underestimated, provide fascinating insight into the formation of American popular culture and identity. Through these mass-produced, widely read books, Deadwood Dick, Old Sleuth, and Jessie James became popular heroes that fed the public’s imagination for the last western frontier, detective tales, and the myth of the outlaw. Women, particularly those who were poor and endured hard lives, used the literature as means of escape from the social, economic, and cultural suppression they experienced in the nineteenth century. In addition to the insight this book provides into texts such as “The Bride of the Tomb,” the Nick Carter Series, and Edward Stratemeyer’s rendition of the Lizzie Borden case, readers will find interesting information about: the roles of illustrations and covers in consumer culture Bowling Green’s endeavor to digitize paperback and pulp magazine covers bibliographical problems in collecting and controlling series books the effects of mass market fiction on young girls Louisa May Alcott’s pseudonym and authorship of three dime novels special collections competition among publishers A collection of work presented at a symposium held by the Library of Congress, Pioneers, Passionate Ladies, and Private Eyes makes an outstanding contribution to redefining the role of popular fiction in American life.

This Companion covers British and American crime fiction from the eighteenth century to the end of the twentieth. As well as discussing the 'detective' fiction of writers like Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie and Raymond Chandler, it considers other kinds of fiction where crime plays a substantial part, such as the thriller and spy fiction. It also includes chapters on the treatment of crime in the eighteenth-century literature, French and Victorian fiction, women and black detectives, crime on film and TV, police fiction and postmodernist uses of the detective form.