Posted by Matt Kuhns on Mar 27, 2013
Fun time in Cleveland Heights last night. Did some talking, listened to two other very interesting authors talk, signed & sold a few books, didn’t get lost on the east side. Also answered some questions, which I enjoyed very much; I have been looking forward to opportunities to engage a bit with others’ ideas and questions.
One of the best questions really went right to a core theme of my book: why have these remarkable figures been forgotten? It is mysterious, on its face, I think; crime, mystery and detection are all still popular themes in fiction, and even if real-life detection has changed such that there is no longer scope for achieving the kind of celebrity that top investigators enjoyed in the 19th century, shouldn’t the fact that “they don’t make ’em like that any more” make them even more memorable rather than less?
I spend time considering various answers to this in Brilliant Deduction, though I can’t really claim to have any definitive, certain “solution.” One more possible answer did occur to me, after thinking about it again last night, though.
It might be that public amnesia about the great real-life detectives is at least somewhat less mysterious than it seems, and not that different from the eventual fate of most celebrities. It occurs to me that the rate of attrition for celebrity recognition is likely very, very high, especially beyond the edge of living memory. Out of the nine men profiled in my book, one (Allan Pinkerton) still commands at least some broad, if thin, public awareness. Is that ratio enormously different from other famous figures of the same era? My vague impression from a few decades of leisured study of history is that it isn’t.
It seems likely that for every one famous Victorian individual still remembered today, there are quite a few athletes, performers, artists, explorers, tycoons, kingmakers, etc., etc., now settled alongside “Paddington” Pollaky in obscurity. John Wilkes Booth was one of the most recognizable men in American in the 1860s… but would anyone know his name today if he hadn’t assassinated the president? One suspects not.
I suspect a number of factors explain the great real-life detectives’ disappearance for public memory, but it does seem one of them is that time effaces most celebrity, and too much time has passed. Most of them, as well as the real golden age for their type, came and went more than 80 years ago. What’s more, they came and went before modern media; a few minutes of audio or video of William Burns might survive in some dusty archive, but he and his peers basically missed out on the television age entirely, to say nothing of the internet age. They can’t be found in searches of online news archives that begin around 1995; there are no video clips to post on YouTube. Even if anyone still thought to look.
Still, history’s judgment is not necessarily final, and it just may be that something of a comeback is yet a possibility.
Tags: event, fame, obscurity, Q&A
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Posted by Matt Kuhns on Mar 25, 2013
A reminder, I will be appearing at Mac’s Backs in Cleveland Heights this week for their “True Crime evening.” Tuesday, March 26, 7-8 p.m. Here is information at their site, and here’s where to find their store.
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Posted by Matt Kuhns on Mar 22, 2013
I end Brilliant Deduction with a select bibliography of suggested “further reading,” which I hope some people will actually explore. But I also kind of hope the book may inspire some further research and further writing, as well. Most of my subjects have at least one full-length biography, but a few are still waiting on one; some of the others are also still worth further attention, in my opinion. If I were to draw up a List of Priorities for great-detective biographies, it would probably be the following:
- “Paddington” Pollaky. As I note in the book, in all modesty Brilliant Deduction is the closest thing to a full biography this extraordinary but elusive man has, to date. My single chapter is certainly not a complete biography but I hope it is, at least, a convincing argument for why one is worth attempting. During my research I encountered a hint that someone is, or at least was, working on just such a project; unfortunately, this single dozen-year-old post on a genealogy forum is the only evidence I’ve encountered. (Though for those interested in the man, it’s still a fascinating, flickering glimpse of the Pollaky family’s later history.) I can only hope that the unnamed Maryland author’s project has been delayed, rather than abandoned. Update 8/6/15: Cross this one off the list! Bryan Kesselman has written a Pollaky biography, reviewed here. (Among other things, he reveals that the “Maryland author” was probably Baltimore journalist Barney D. Emmart, who died in 1989 with the work never completed.)
- Read more…
Tags: Burns, Kate Warne, Pollaky, Robert Pinkerton, to-do, William PInkerton
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Posted by Matt Kuhns on Mar 20, 2013
Though Ignatius Paul “Paddington” Pollaky, once one of the most remarked-upon detectives in the English-speaking world, is mostly forgotten there are a few people still taking an interest, beyond my own humble efforts.
One such chronicler has thoughtfully posted a photo of the great detective’s one-time headquarters (and perhaps the third-most famous address in detective history), 13 Paddington Green, at flickr. This is particularly considerate as, per the notes on the photo, Number 13 was pulled down just in the past few years after standing proudly for at least a century and a half.
A correspondent of this blog has kindly supplied another image of the site, post-demolition:
Fare thee well, old friend
A bit sad. (Though time does move on, and in fairness much of central London strikes me as almost a Monument Valley, so I can’t get too worked up about the past being carelessly discarded.)
Pollaky’s final address, meanwhile, has also been photographed and shared on the interweb, for those interested. Though IPP actually spent more time in Brighton, during his long retirement, than at Paddington Green, he apparently returned to the general area for his last rest at Kensal Green Cemetery.
I can’t help recalling one of the many memorable lines in a story of certain other much-remarked figures in Victorian London criminology, Moore and Campbell’s From Hell. “That’s all done with though. That’s all gone. All that’s left is what people can read about. Chapbooks and tombstones… chapbooks and tombstones.”
Tags: great photos, London, mortality, new information, Paddington Green, Pollaky
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Posted by Matt Kuhns on Mar 18, 2013
The stars of Brilliant Deduction are “forgotten” figures in the sense that they were once prominent figures, regularly in the news, at least regionally. Isaiah Lees, once a name familiar to nearly the entire city of San Francisco, is now almost vanished; William Burns, in his day perhaps the most famous real-life detective in history, has thoroughly lost out to his great rivals the Pinkertons (the exception to the rule) in popular memory. Ellis Parker, though the last to depart the stage, has fared little better; despite a recent biography, my efforts to acquire a photo of the man via the same newspapers that regularly featured his picture within living memory met with zero recognition of him.
Still, it’s more accurate to describe the reduced profiles of Parker et al. as “obscure,” because none of them is entirely forgotten. Since publishing Brilliant Deduction, in fact, I have heard from various others interested in one or another of its heroes, beyond those biographers and other chroniclers I found during my research. Just recently, their number has been joined by two gentlemen working to restore a little of the faded reputation of The Garden State’s greatest sleuth.
The first of these, attorney and local historian George R. Brinkerhoff, has written an excellent feature article on Ellis Parker for JerseyMan Magazine. Having spent a good deal of thought and effort on how to condense down Parker’s life and career, myself, I feel I may say with fair qualifications that Mr. Brinkerhoff has succeeded admirably. Parker’s origins, key information about his most remarkable cases, a good sense of what he was like as a person, and a thoughtful analysis of his story’s unhappy ending; it’s all there.
Having also observed how published reminiscences of Parker grew fewer and farther between since his death, I’m glad to see at least one local periodical taking note of his fascinating story again. Better still, there may be more to come, from the second gentleman; as noted in the JerseyMan story, Parker grandson Andrew Sahol has been preparing to write his own account of “Pop” as few other living people could.
Read more…
Tags: comeback, Ellis Parker, family, New Jersey
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Posted by Matt Kuhns on Mar 14, 2013
William Burns (at right) and family with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Read more…
Tags: Arthur Conan Doyle, Burns, family, great photos
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Posted by Matt Kuhns on Mar 12, 2013
The latest notices from Midwest Book Review are in, and Brilliant Deduction scores again:
From old hands in the crime game trading in their black hat for a white one, spy hunters turning their focus home, freelancers who helped the police bring justice, “Brilliant Deduction” is a must for anyone who loves true crime or wants to learn more about how Sherlock Holmes and his ilk have more connection to reality than we truly know.
Cheers!
Just to dispel confusion (which has now manifested in multiple reviews), though, I should emphasize that Brilliant Deduction is published by Lyon Hall Press. Which has absolutely nothing to do with Lyons Press, of Guilford Connecticut. Nor is the name any direct reference at all to Lyon, the French city that (Wikipedia informs me) is in fact spelled “Lyons” by Anglophone society but not by the community’s own residents…
Still, the book’s the thing, and I always appreciate positive notices.
Tags: Lyon, reviews
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Posted by Matt Kuhns on Mar 11, 2013
The title of this post could almost be an alternate title for Brilliant Deduction, I sometimes think. If the stories of Henry Meyer(s) are the strangest coincidence of names out of the many I encountered in my research and writing, the stories of William, William and more Williams ad infinitum deserve some sort of record for sheer volume.
Admitted, William is not a particularly unusual name, at any rate in the Euro-American societies to which my book is largely confined. Nonetheless, the frequency with which it turns up in Brilliant Deduction is almost ludicrous. Just among the individuals associated with William Pinkerton and William Burns, alone, we have:
- William Hazen, Burns’s chief at the Secret Service before he was replaced
- William Pinkerton, grandfather of the later National Detective Agency director
- William Barton and William Taylor, associates of the Farrington gang pursued by Pinkerton
- William Edson, “inside man” in a major bank robbery investigated by the Pinkertons
- William McKinley, whose inauguration Pinkerton provided security for and whose Treasury Department employed Burns
- William R. Hunt, biographer of Burns
- William Sheridan, Burns’s partner in the short-lived Burns and Sheridan Detective Agency
- William Randolph Hearst, whose media empire bedeviled both Burns and Isaiah Lees
Plus even more Williams connected one way or another with the stories of their peers
Tags: Burns, name game, Pinkertons
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Posted by Matt Kuhns on Mar 8, 2013
In the conclusion to my chapter about San Francisco’s great 19th-century detective Isaiah Lees, I wrote that
Lees faded relatively quickly from memory… That disappearance was undoubtedly hastened by the great earthquake that leveled much of San Francisco within a few years of his death; in many ways the city he had known and protected was gone and relegated to the past along with Lees himself. Today, a visitor to San Francisco would struggle to find any traces of either one.
Last year, though, one such trace did turn up as part of construction work at the city’s Civic Center. Per the Chronicle, itself another rare survivor of Lees’s era,
Crews working on a building project in San Francisco’s Civic Center have unearthed the massive foundations of the old City Hall, a ghostly reminder of San Francisco’s greatest disaster.
The imposing old City Hall collapsed in a shower of bricks, stone and steel in the 1906 earthquake. It was the largest municipal building west of Chicago and was so elaborate it took 25 years to build. The City Hall was supposed to be earthquake proof, but it collapsed in seconds after the great quake struck. It had been open for less than 10 years.
Its ruins were demolished in 1909, but workers digging under the sidewalk on Hyde Street near Fulton Street for a landscaping project struck something big Sept. 14 – bricks and concrete and steel reinforcing bars. They called archaeologists from the federal General Services Administration… It was the [1897] City Hall, all right.
The story quotes Rebecca Karberg, of the GSA, as remarking that “You really never know what’s under the surface.” Based on my own experience researching and fitting together the histories of Isaiah Lees and his peers—I couldn’t agree more.
Tags: earthquake, Lees, San Francisco
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Posted by Matt Kuhns on Mar 5, 2013
Last night I finished up The Dagenham Murder, the story of a Victorian police constable’s mysterious and violent death and its investigation by, among others, our estimable Mr. Whicher. Quite enjoyed the work. I’ve posted a book review at Goodreads, but I also want to note a few things from the perspective of my own little project.
First, commendable research by the authors. Having performed a limited amount of real, primary-source Victorian-era archival research for Brilliant Deduction—mostly in trying to reconstruct the life of Whicher’s contemporary “Paddington” Pollaky—I have a deep appreciation and respect for what Rhodes, Shelden and Abnett accomplished. They bring to life more than a dozen people, most of them humble figures without anything like the press coverage trail available for Pollaky, aside from their involvement in this one sensational crime and its aftermath.
Meanwhile, I was nonetheless especially interested in one of the few individuals with notoriety beyond the context of the Dagenham case, i.e. Jack Whicher. For those who share my interest, The Dagenham Murder is a must-read. Whicher’s role in the story is limited, but significant, certainly in the context of his own career. His investigation into George Clark’s murder, with its many similarities and curious differences compared to the Road Murder investigation that rerouted his career years later, offers almost limitless material for interpretation and speculation. Other little details also enrich the picture of Whicher and his work, including contextual history such as how detection in Australia (relevant to The Tichborne Affair, the great case of Whicher’s PI career) compared with the British analogue, as well as personal notes such as those revealed by Whicher’s last will. (For those interested, The Dagenham Murder is available via Amazon.)
Read more…
Tags: other books, The Dagenham Murder, Whicher
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