Nick and Nora Charles the bantering, romantically involved detective duo has become a well-used trope in literature, stage, screen, and television ever since. The characters first appear in Dashiell Hammett's best-selling last novel "The Thin Man" (1934). Nick is an alcoholic former private detective who retired when he married Nora, a wealthy Nob Hill heiress. Hammett reportedly modeled Nora on his longtime partner Lillian Hellman, and the characters' boozy, flippant dialogue on their relationship. (The novel also mentions that Nick was once a Pinkerton detective, as was Hammett.) The novel is considered one of the seminal texts of the hard-boiled subgenre of mystery novels,
Allan Pinkerton Greenhow. In the HBO series "Boardwalk Empire", an agent of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency runs an undercover operation to coax a murder confession out of a major character. Pinkerton is a major character in the 2001 film "American Outlaws", portrayed by Timothy Dalton. Pinkerton's role in foiling the assassination plot against Abraham Lincoln was dramatized in the 2013 film "Saving Lincoln", which tells President Lincoln's story through the eyes of Ward Hill Lamon, a former law partner of Lincoln who served as his primary bodyguard during the Civil War. Pinkerton is played by Marcus J. Freed. Charlie Day portrayed