A. Frank Pinkerton

A. Frank Pinkerton was a late nineteenth-century American author of detective dime novels. His works include Dyke Darrel the Railroad Detective, Jim Cummings, and Five Thousand Dollars Reward, and he is known for stories about train robberies and manhunts. The original editions were published around 1886 by F. C. Laird in Chicago as part of the Pinkerton Detective Series. Public information about his life is limited: his nationality and dates of birth and death remain unconfirmed. Some modern editions treat the name as a pen name, and it cannot be confirmed that he was the same person as Allan Pinkerton (1819–1884), founder of the Pinkerton Detective Agency. His works nonetheless remain typical examples of railroad-adventure detective dime novels in late nineteenth-century America.