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The Lady Pinkerton Gets Her Man

Femme Fatale:

A femme fatale is an archetype, a recurring motif, found in all world literatures, both ancient and modern. She is often portrayed as an alluring, seductive woman, who cannot be resisted and therefore leads men into compromising situations--a dangerous woman.

Sometimes she is the villain.

More often she uses her charms to play on a man's weakness in order to trip up his villainy. She will often appear to be amoral (an anti-heroine) in the beginning of a story and later prove to be the heroine.

Less well known is L'homme fatale. Examples: Don Juan, Count Dracula, James Bond, etc.


	A New Generation of Storyslingers Stake Out America's Frontier Rocky Mountain News by Jerrie Hurd As a kid, I did what everyone my age did. When I came home from school, I flopped down in front of the television and watched westerns Bonanza, Gunsmoke, Maverick. It's embarrassing, but I'll confess that the power of that visual medium was such that I began to think of the West the way it was being presented in those series-as a place of strong men and few women. Never mind that I was growing up on a working ranch in Idaho that included horses, sheep, and three generations of women who had run that place since it was no more than a hopeful claim in a raw wilderness. What's more this wasn't distant history for me. I knew all these women, even my great-grandmother who first staked that claim and then went on to grow her 160 acre homestead into a sheep ranch that included all of Long's Valley. She lived to be ninety-four years old. I was eleven when she died, and my grandmother, who might best be described as "Auntie Mame in boots" took over from her. My mother now runs the largest remaining piece of that ranch, 1500 acres, while my father, who died several years ago, had his own land and held local political office. Books also didn't reflect the "West" I knew. Louis L'Amour, writing in the mythic tradition of Zane Grey, continued a western storytelling that had already proved successful with legend-hungry readers. read more

Some Famous Woman Spies

Mata Hari--WWI

Tokyo Rose--WWII

Vera Atkins--WWII

Belle Boyd--Civil War

Emiline Pigott--Civil War

Antonia Ford--Civil War

Lydia Barrington Darragh--Revolutionary War

Ann Bates--Revolutionary War

Nora Slatkin--Director CIA

The Lady Pinkerton Gets Her Man
Discussion Questions:

In the 1880s there were real Lady Pinkerton Detectives. The emphasis was on "Lady." These women were not to disgrace the Pinkerton Detective Agency by dressing "unseemly" or doing anything that might reflect badly on the company and yet accomplish daring feats as spies and agents. How did women of that time balance those conflicting demands? Do women today have to deal with similarly conflicting demands?

Because Hollywood westerns have given most people the impression that the American West of the 1880s was mostly a place where cowboys roamed, most people don't know that there were Chinese miners or Lady Pinkerton detectives. What do we miss when we settle for too narrow a story of our past?

This book is based on a real incident that happened in Rock Springs, Wyoming, when hundreds of Chinese miners were killed in a labor dispute. The Pinkertons always worked for those who could afford to hire them--in this case, the mine owners. The Lady Pinkerton, in this novel, faces the moral dilemma of discovering that she's working for the wrong side. Is that a common moral dilemma, even today? What would you do if you discovered that you were working for a large corporation that's doing things you consider morally wrong?

Here's an interesting footnote to this discussion. Allan Pinkerton wrote several detective novels that were bestsellers in his day. These novels were supposedly based on famous cases that his agency had solved. He took liberal dramatic license with these stories while calling them "true accounts." Is that Ok or a fancy way of lying?

Novels are about fictionalized characters. Why do readers care about made-up people and situations? What do you learn from a novel that you couldn't learn from reading a non-fiction account of the same event?

An interesting tidbit:

While famous women spies are real and their stories well-known, famous women detectives are almost all fictional.

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