America's Sherlock Holmes: The Real Story of William J. Burns

the job is to find a killer in a place where murder has become common it's nineteen twenties oklahoma and the osage nation is bleeding from its people and its oil wealth a desperate woman molly burkhart hires a private detective named william j burns he's supposed to be the best but in the cinematic retelling of this story killers of the flower moon he is found and he is severely beaten an ignominious end to his investigation a footnote in a tragedy this scene of course is a dramatization a fiction built around a real name but it's the version of burns many now know it's a brutal direct form of opposition a world away from the bureaucratic maze that trapped elliot ness the man we followed last week the real william j burns is harder to find and that is the

central mystery newspapers once called him the greatest detective america has produced arthur conan doyle the man who literally invented the world's most famous detective looked at burns and called him america's sherlock holmes imagine the weight of that it's not just a compliment it's a coronation it creates an image of a man of pure logic of brilliant deductions of justice delivered from a cloud of pipe smoke but when you go looking for the cases that earned him that title the archives are strangely quiet instead of case files you find fragments

like a single murky episode during the san francisco graft prosecutions the city was a hornet's nest of corruption the special prosecutor francis haney had just been shot in open court the police chief william biggie was blamed for the lapse biggie who was holding the city's political boss in custody suddenly found himself on the wrong side of his powerful backers he grew paranoid he felt he was being watched he was right the detectives tailing him noting his every move worked for a special agent to the prosecution that agent was william j burns this isn't a case about a stolen necklace or a locked room murder this is something else entirely there were no clues to decipher

no brilliant deductions to be made the man called america's sherlock holmes wasn't solving a crime he was participating in a political power play his operatives weren't hunting a killer they were surveilling a police chief who had become an obstacle it's a single documented moment that fractures the entire legend the clean intellectual hero of the public imagination dissolves and in his place stands an enforcer so what are we left with a man crowned by the creator of sherlock holmes whose most accessible documented action feels more like something from one of holmes' adversaries the magazine the atlantic suggested his story shows what happens when a fictional hero becomes real perhaps or perhaps it shows how legends are made and how easily they come apart

under scrutiny we have the fictionalized victim from a movie we have the grand empty title and we have the shadow of his men on a dark san francisco street watching another man of the law the real william j burns remains an enigma a ghost rattling inside a famous name his sad fate wasn't a beating in oklahoma it was to become a brand a hollow vessel for a story that it seems was never really his the name just hangs there now a question without an answer