The Old Sleuth Mysteries were created by Harlan P. Halsey and began with “Old Sleuth, the Detective; or, The Bay Ridge Mystery” (Fireside Companion no. 241, June 10, 1872). Halsey (1837-1898) was a prolific and popular dime novelist and publisher of dime novels.

The Old Sleuth is Harry Loveland, a detective in New York City. Loveland’s career as a detective changes in the stories. In the first story, he is a young man posing as an old man, the “Old Sleuth,” which is Loveland’s favorite disguise. But soon after his debut he was changed into an old man who was also a detective. Two years after Old Sleuth’s debut he gained a skilled younger assistant, “Young Badger.” On other occasions, in The Old Sleuth Library, he teamed up with other detectives (including “Old Electricity, the Lightning Detective,” “the Gypsy Detective,” and “the Irish Detective”) who had appeared in stories in the Old Sleuth Library written by “Old Sleuth.”

Loveland lives with a rich wife and varying numbers of children in a posh mansion in a good section of New York City. Loveland is from the upper classes. He is charismatic, cultured, and well-educated, and he speaks French and German fluently. But the crimes and criminals he investigates vary from the Gothic to the dime novel to the sensation novel, including everything from Indian Thugs to rapists to scheming Romany thieves to men trying to murder their way into an inheritance.

As a detective Loveland is not exceptional. Most of the clues he discovers come his way through coincidence or authorial contrivance. In investigating crimes his methods are basic. However, he is extraordinarily skilled at disguise, enabling him to become, with the help of a little grease paint and facial putty, anyone from a down-and-out tramp to an “evil, wizened Oriental” to a sanctimonious old millionaire. Loveland is also superhumanly strong, able to keep going where more human men and women flag. Like Old Cap. Collier (see: The Old Cap. Collier Mysteries), Loveland is able to throw grown men around like pillows. Unlike Collier, however, the source of Loveland’s strength and abilities is his moral superiority. Loveland neither smokes nor drinks and never entertains an unchivalrous thought about the fairer sex. He is always in complete control of every situation, even when threatened with fists, knives, clubs and guns. Loveland is able to fight and shoot his way out of any situation, regardless of seeming difficulties.

Old Sleuth was the first recurring, serialized detective in the dime novels and was sufficiently popular that for a generation the phrase “Old Sleuth” was identified with fictional detectives. The first “Old Sleuth” story is one of the earliest written uses of the word “sleuth” for detective. Halsey shortened the previous existing phrase, “sleuth hound,” and Halsey’s usage stuck and became popular. In addition to being the first recurring detective character in the dime novels, Old Sleuth was also the first detective character whose physical abilities and skills were superhuman. The Great Detective tradition had many characters, from Poe’s Dupin (see: The C. Auguste Dupin Mysteries) through Sherlock Holmes (See: The Sherlock Holmes Mysteries) whose intellect and deductive skills were nearly superhuman. But the Old Sleuth stories began the (mostly dime novel and pulp) tradition of detectives whose strength and agility were greater than human and whose ancillary detecting skills, like the ability to instantly change disguises, were also greater than human. The Old Sleuth novels also began the shift in American popular fiction from adventure stories set on the Western frontier to adventure stories set in the urban frontier. The content of these stories remained the same, but the setting changed and detectives began to supplant cowboys as the most popular character type.

Ironically, the appearance of Old Sleuth in 1872 signals a general movement in American detective fiction toward a segmented youth market that portrayed detective heroes as very young men or boys in their middle teen years. Old Sleuth appeared on the tide of a rising youth culture, and in 1873, one year after publication of Old Sleuth. George Munro established the first weekly story paper specifically designed for young people, Munro’s Girls and Boys of America…and other publishers soon followed. Youth story papers and detective stories became so popular that in 1877 detective stories in youth papers outnumbered detective stories printed in publications intended for the general public.¹

Print: Gary Hoppenstand, ed. The Dime Novel Detective. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1982.

¹ Dawn Fisk Thomsen, The Creation and Production of Detective Fiction in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America: A Developmental History of “The Idea of Detective,” 1837-1880 (PhD diss., University of Maryland at College Park, 1999), 143.