By the time the train was to pass through Baltimore, Pinkerton and his detectives had uncovered a plot to assassinate Lincoln before he could take the oath of office. As the Lincoln Special chugged east, the nation was ripping in two. Her most important case came in February 1861 after Abraham Lincoln was elected president and had to journey by train from Illinois to the White House. “As a detective, she had no superior,” Pinkerton wrote, “and she was a lady of such refinement, tact, and discretion, that I never hesitated to entrust to her some of my most difficult undertakings.”
Pinkerton described Kate Warne as a master of disguise and, along with Timothy Webster, one of the finest operatives he ever employed. So I relied on his detective books, penned later in his career and looking back on the agency’s early adventures. Pinkerton was meticulous about documenting his accounts, his cases and his operatives, but Chicago’s Great Fire in 1871 wiped out much of his writings. One of the hazards of writing historical fiction is that records don’t always survive. He hired her the next day, convinced that she could go, as she said, where no male detectives could by befriending the wives and girlfriends of criminals and crooks and worming out their secrets.
“True, it was the first experiment of the sort that had ever been tried,” Pinkerton said, “but we live in a progressive age, and in a progressive country.”
Pinkerton wrote that he’d assumed she was there for a secretarial position, but that she gave excellent reasons why he should hire her as a detective. Her story begins when, as a young widow, she walked into Allan Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency office in downtown Chicago and inquired about a job. America’s first woman detective? And she had a role in thwarting an assassination plot against Abraham Lincoln? Really it was just a single sentence about her while researching another story from the same year, 1856, but the moment I read about her I knew I had to learn more. Researching and writing The Detective’s Assistant has been a giddy, wind-in-the-hair thrill since the moment I stumbled onto Kate Warne’s name. Chicago author and former journalist Kate Hannigan shares more about the exciting real-life figure at the heart of her new book, The Detective's Assistant. The character of Aunt Kitty is based on real-life Kate Warne, the first female detective in the United States. But when Nell discovers her aunt is a detective for Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency, the two end up tracking down thieves and murderers in this fun historical tale. In the summer of 1859, a recently orphaned girl named Nell arrives on the doorstep of her Aunt Kitty, whose "pickled onion" face offers her sorrowful niece a less-than-warm welcome.
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