Orphan Carver Young has some general fantasies about becoming a
detective, and devours novels and stories about great sleuths, as well
as serialized and sensationalized mysteries. When ex-Pinkerton
Detective Albert Hawking, cranky, contentious, eccentric, brilliant, and
crippled, offers to take Carver on as an apprentice to share all he
knows, Carver is ecstatic, even though it means living (for a reason I
never really understood) in a private floor at the top of a mental
institution, and getting more questions, half-hints, and criticism from
Hawking than direct answers. Carver's first and main "case" is to
figure out the identity and possibly location of his father based on a
scrap of a letter sent to the orphanage many years before. As part of this Hawking introduces him to the "New Pinkertons", an
underground (literally) and top-secret detective agency endowed by Alan
Pinkerton upon his death. Hawking was head of the agency until his
injuries forced him to give the reins to another former Pinkerton agent,
Tudd, who is devoted to "gadgets" and buys many, many new mechanical,
electrical inventions to help the secret agents with their
investigations, and who is obsessed with catching a murderer, convinced
it is the return of Jack the Ripper.
