Allan Pinkerton Pinkerton in a Season 2 episode of "Drunk History". Pinkerton is also a recurring character in the 2014 series "The Pinkertons", played by Angus Macfadyen. Pinkerton is also portrayed in an episode of "The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams", by Don Galloway (1937-2009), and in the 1994 American biographical western film "Frank and Jesse" by William Atherton. In but in these cases, as in the others, he seems to be portrayed with an American accent, although he was Scottish by birth, and may still have retained his Scots accent. Hardboiled crime fiction writer Dashiell Hammett was employed by the
Allan Pinkerton Allan Pinkerton Allan J. Pinkerton (25 August 1819 – 1 July 1884) was a Scottish American detective and spy, best known for creating the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. Allan Pinkerton was born in Gorbals, Glasgow, Scotland, to William Pinkerton and his wife, Isobel McQueen, on August 25, 1819. He left school at the age of 10 after his father's death. Pinkerton read voraciously and was largely self-educated. A cooper by trade, Pinkerton was active in the Scottish Chartist movement as a young man. He secretly married Joan Carfrae (1822-1887) from Duddingston, then a singer, in Glasgow on 13 March 1842.