The Origin of the True Detective Story

Of all the genres of popular literature, the one in which Chicago was first to have a national impact was in juvenile literature; a result of the successful publication of the Little Corporal from 1865 to 1875. There has been a near continuous existence of a literary publishing community specialized in juvenile literature in Chicago since the Little Corporal became the first journal for children with a broad national circulation.

While children’s literature is the most abiding Chicago literary tradition, mystery stories are not far behind. A decade after Little Corporal’s premiere, a small Chicago publisher began publication of Allan Pinkerton’s crime memoirs and the format for a “true detective story” was begot. During the 1880’s, a substantial community of Chicago literary publishing houses issued hundreds of true detective mystery novels. The books were targeted to the traveling public as Chicago had become the transfer point for Americans crossing the continent in any direction. Likely as not, a train traveller in the 1880’s passing time reading a book, was reading a novel published in Chicago. Certainly not all the novels published in Chicago during the Gilded Age of the later nineteenth century were detective stories. The same publishers offered other genres of popular fiction for different demographic groups but it was the true detective stories that defined a new genre of American popular fiction and became another abiding Chicago literary tradition.

For more about the True Detective tradition of Chicago continue here

For those interested in reading Allan Pinkerton's The Detective and the Expressman we have converted it to digital form in a pdf file which you can view or download.