Their sleuthing also tended to be a one-time outing.
The characters that detected in Gothic, sensation, and other crime stories had a personal motive for their involvement. Detectives solved cases for many reasons, but personal satisfaction in exercising their logical minds and their professional expertise figured boldly in ways not seen in earlier crime fiction. Though many books took crime as their subject, the detective story placed at its core the singular figure of the detective, as well as the investigation and resolution of a crime, usually murder. He worked hard to build an image of his agency and of detection as a serious profession, and made himself and his operatives, like Warne, the country’s foremost private eyes. Unlike most crime writers, Pinkerton was a real detective with actual life experience. He saturated audiences with tales of his escapades, tapping public interest in adventure, mystery, and rational problem solving. Just a few years into his business, Allan Pinkerton would enflame Americans’ enthusiasm for detection with his high-profile cases and fantastical detective novels. Little is known of Warne, except that she joined the Pinkerton National Detective Agency at a critical time.
Under Pinkerton, she became America’s first-known female private eye and one of his finest sleuths. Warne offered something Pinkerton’s male agents did not: the ability to gain the confidence of other women. She impressed him with her street smarts and intellect, so he decided to take a chance. Warne reportedly told the hesitant Pinkerton that she “could go and worm out secrets in many places to which it is impossible for male detectives to gain access.” He described her as slender with brown hair, “graceful in her movements and self-possessed” with “a broad, honest face” that invited trust. She appeared to Pinkerton to be about twenty-three years old. Warne said she was a widow in need of a livelihood. No, she wanted to be a detective.Įven though no woman sleuthed, Pinkerton agreed to hear her out. She was not, however, looking to be a secretary, as Pinkerton first thought. She introduced herself as Kate Warne and proclaimed herself in need of a job. On August 22, 1856, private detective Allan Pinkerton looked up to see a woman standing at the door of his Chicago office.
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