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Pinkerton, Fred. Fred Pinkerton appeared in the German dime novel Fred Pinkerton, Amerikas Meisterdetektiv #1-140 (1920-1921).

Fred Pinkerton is a Great Detective. Fred Pinkerton is the son of Nat Pinkerton and takes after his father in being a great detective. Like his father, Fred Pinkerton is in the Nick Carter (I) mold, and travels across the United States in the course of his cases. He battles murderous cultists, Gostin the Lupin, Li Tschung, a Yellow Peril teahouse owner, the Suicide Club, the Black Airplane, Jill Prost the Prison Warden, a haunted house, the Sleepwalking Thief (a reference to Dr. Caligari), the Uncanny John Bratt, and a Professor Moriarty-like “Genius of Crime.” Pinkerton is helped by his bloodhound Lord.

Pinkerton appears in stories with titles like “On the Murderer’s Trail,” “The Devil’s Captain,” and “A Daring Flight.”  

* I'm including the Fred Pinkerton stories in the Best of the Encyclopedia list because of their imaginative content. Fred Pinkerton, Amerikas Meisterdetektiven was, of course, an unauthorized spinoff of the Nat Pinkerton stories, one of several to appear in the 1910s and 1920s. Nat Pinkerton was just that influential. What's unusual about Fred Pinkerton, however, is how successful it was. There are darned few pulps or heftromane which are unauthorized naked spinoffs of other pulps which find success for longer than twenty issues or so; Fred Pinkerton lasted for 140. The reason for this unusual success is partly the name "Pinkerton" (the Nat Pinkerton pulps were just that successful) and partly that, like the Nat Pinkerton stories, the Fred Pinkerton stories had an array of ideasplosions in them. In a sense Fred Pinkerton is really only an average ideasplosion pulp, but as I've said elsewhere even that is enough to make it to the Best of the Encyclopedia list. 

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