The Case of the Vanishing Private Eyes
How 19th-century America's biggest, most dogged detective agency went on to get unceremoniously acquired 100 years later by a Swedish conglomerate
Benjamin Welton
Benjamin Welton is a freelance writer and the author of Hands Dabbled in Blood.
Latest
Shutterstock/Everett Collection/The Atlantic James Bond's World War I Origins
England's best espionage writers found fame after World War II, but the spy-fiction genre was born when popular British detective fiction was infused with pre-WWI invasion anxieties.
The Man Arthur Conan Doyle Called 'America's Sherlock Holmes'
Newspapers called William J. Burns “the greatest detective America has produced,” and his sad fate illustrates what might have awaited the fictional Holmes if he'd been real.
