A few adventures of Dashiell Hammett, who worked for the Pinkerton Detective Agency before turning to fiction:

• “I know a man who once stole a Ferris-wheel.”
• “I was once engaged to discharge a woman’s housekeeper.”
• “I was once falsely accused of perjury and had to perjure myself to escape arrest.”
• “A man whom I was shadowing went out into the country for a walk one Sunday afternoon and lost his bearings completely. I had to direct him back to the city.”
• “Three times I have been mistaken for a Prohibition agent, but never had any trouble clearing myself.”
• “I know an operative who while looking for pickpockets at the Havre de Grace race track had his wallet stolen. He later became an official in an Eastern detective agency.”
• “I know a detective who once attempted to disguise himself thoroughly. The first policeman he met took him into custody.”
• “In 1917, in Washington, D.C., I met a young woman who did not remark that my work must be very interesting.”
• “The chief of police of a Southern city once gave me a description of a man, complete even to a mole on his neck, but neglected to mention that he had only one arm.”

Interestingly, he notes that “the chief difference between the exceptionally knotty problem confronting the detective of fiction and that facing the real detective is that in the former there is usually a paucity of clues, and in the latter altogether too many.”

(“From the Memoirs of a Private Detective,” The Smart Set, March 1923.)