With a recent story of the Pinkertons going after a Magic: The Gathering player because he got some wrong cards sent to him, one can't help but reflect upon Conan Doyle's very different treatment of the Pinkerton Agency and the Mormon Church in his two split-story novels.
In A Study in Scarlet, the church members are definitely the baddies, even though a serial killer is stalking and murdering them. In The Valley of Fear, the private "detective" agency is shown to be practically an official police force, working on the same side as Sherlock Holmes, Scotland Yard, and good folks everywhere, with Professor Moriarty stalking and killing their agent. Both entities have had their good and bad days, though one has shown some improvement as the years past, while the other . . . well, recently sent by a corporation to intimidate a card game fan.
One of the great parts of the Sherlock Holmes stories has always been how they are interwoven with historical detail. It gives them a sense of reality, and has sent legions of Holmes fans to the history books to find out more about a great many things. Yet, at the same time, Conan Doyle was definitely not an objective news source or place to learn accurate historical detail. His defense against being called "the Fox News of the Victorian era," as one might be tempted to do, was that he was writing fiction, pure and simple. His name was attached. to each story and not that of John H. Watson, his narrator. (And the guy who actually wrote the stories. Yes, I have to add that complete conspiracy theory -- it's my Sherlockian "brand" as the kids like to say.)
The lone agent of The Valley of Fear, Birdy Edwards, a.k.a. John McMurdo (Spoiler!), a.k.a. John Douglas (Spoiler again!) acting as an anti-terrorist James Bond is definitely an extremely one-sided portrayal of the Pinkerton's history of union infiltration on behalf of corporate entities, even though it is based on James McParland's infiltration of the violent Molly Maguires -- Conan Doyle definitely didn't come back to write a second novel based on the 1892 "Battle of Homestead" where the Pinkertons just sent in a larger force to break a strike.
It's interesting to compare Sherlock Holmes's work as a British private agency, who did work for the government or the rich when he felt the cause was good, with the American Pinkerton's work as a private agency with a bit more strictly profitable agenda. Holmes definitely comes out looking better.
Of course, Sherlock Holmes always had Conan Doyle writing on his side of any matter, so even there we might want to question Watson's literary agent's biases in reporting the Holmes-front news.
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