Reprint of the original, first published in 1875.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1875.

Two narratives written by Allan Pinkerton; highly fictionalized accounts ostensibly or loosely based on actual crime cases.

This book reveals subversive representations of gender, race and class in detective dime novels (1860-1915), arguing that inherent tensions between subversive and conservative impulses—theorized as contamination and containment—explain detective fiction's ongoing popular appeal to readers and to writers such as Twain and Faulkner.