THE SPY WITH TWO HATS: A Life of Timothy Webster

This is fictionalized biography to such an extent that it's written as if in the autobiographical, first person. Demands for authentic information on Timothy Webster must be rare however, and there is a bibliography to cover those. This book is more for adventure readers--a variant on the two popular themes of the Civil War, and spying. Timothy Webster was one of Alexander Pinkerton's agents, and he went from routine detection work to specializing in gathering vital Confederate information. He could pass the Mason-Dixon line so convincingly that the Southerners used him as their courier too, while Webster was passing the information on to the North. Eventually he was given away, tried and hung. Although the trial seems unnecessarily drawn out, this is a lively account kept moving by the details of the early years on the Pinkerton force, the methods of Civil War intelligence work, and a spot of romance.