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 agency's later reputation for anti-labor activities, Pinkerton himself was heavily involved in pro-labor politics as a young man. Though Pinkerton considered himself pro-labor, he opposed strikes and distrusted labor unions. Allan Pinkerton was so famous that for decades after his death, his surname was a slang term for a private eye. The "Mr. Pinkerton" novels, by American mystery writer Zenith Jones Brown (under the pseudonym David Frome), were about Welsh-born amateur detective Evan Pinkerton and may have been inspired by the slang term. Pinkerton produced numerous popular detective books, ostensibly based on his own exploits and those of his agents.