Case Files of the Wilkinson National Detective Agency (HARDBACK)

INTRODUCTION

When I was young, I used to watch a lot of Westerns with my Dad, who was a huge John Wayne fan.

Imagine if you can, a small, drunk man with a broad Glaswegian accent shouting “Howdy pardner,” adjusting his imaginary Stetson as he performed his best party trick.

I expect he sounded exactly like John Wayne in his head.

And through him, I was introduced to the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, whose agents were commonly known as Pinkertons.

I’ve been fascinated by the Pinkertons since I was small. Which is kind of funny because they’re American and we’re not.

But there’s something exciting about a detective agency that’s kind of like I imagine a detective agency headed by Sherlock Holmes would be like.

An agency solving crimes with deductive reasoning, and guns.

Maybe, just maybe, Conan Doyle (1859 – 1930) was a little inspired by Alan Pinkerton (1819 – 1884).

Pinkerton set up his agency in 1850, and originally specialised in train robberies, but was mainly known for thwarting an assassination attempt on President-elect Abraham Lincoln.

Not that Pinkertons were crime solving masterminds like Sherlock Holmes, or even, for the want of a better term, uniformly “good” men and women.

And not that the organisation didn’t do some things I think were kind of awful. Like infiltrating and intimidating unions, and strike breaking for those who could afford to pay them.

The Pinkertons existed at a particular time, and wouldn’t have the same kind of mystique at any other time than right there in the wildest times of the wild wild west.

And I suppose, if you wanted justice, you were kind of stuck with them as there wasn’t much in the way of Police forces as we know them now.

Australia, being a penal colony, was policed by English marines; there to keep the convicts down.

Though in our early days, the country’s currency supply was so short, the marines were paid in goods, the most popular being rum. And while the 1808 Rum Rebellion was more of an uprising by the civil and military elites against the Governor, than about the rum…

As a country populated mainly by unionists, Fenians and petty thieves, we were the kind of people who lionised the underdogs; taking bushrangers to be political rebels or freedom fighters.

With established police forces, there wasn’t much of a demand for private investigators until around the 1880s.

Generally, they focused on divorce cases, where corroborated evidence of adultery was pretty much the only way you were going to get a divorce.

Though without any regulation or licensing, it’s not hard to imagine the social scene was ripe for a bit of blackmail, perjury and criminal trespass.

It wasn’t until 1951 that private investigators were required to register and obtain a license to work.

Nowadays, they specialise in investigations of fact, surveillance and missing persons, mainly for insurances, financial losses, and contractual disputes. Most of them work in larger firms.

But I still wonder what an Australian version of the Pinkertons might be like now.

So, I invented the Wilkinson National Detective Agency, established in 1889.

I think working in an established corporate environment would be quite different to working for yourself…

So, for this mystery collection, I’ve tried to imagine working within corporate guidelines and policies. And how they might protect and hinder you.

First, Dot Sayers on her first job, doing background checks discovers something’s not quite right about the target.

Then former cop Phoebe Swan, hired by the parents of a dead girl to solve the case that got away.

Followed by Shirley Weaving who’s not cut out for normal investigations, but when something’s not quite right, she’s your girl.

And Susan Murray’s following a crime kingpin until he starts following her!

Finally, Lily White investigates her grandfather’s mysterious gangland murder.

So, here are five brand new private eye mysteries. I hope you enjoy them.

–

Alexandria Blaelock
Melbourne, Australia
July 2021

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P.S., in case you wondered, the Pinkertons still exist today, as a subsidiary of Swedish based security services group Securitas AB.

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