Before Rebus, McWatters was Scotland's original detective

The Herald Scotland

26-07-2025

That is, until a brawl broke out at a gaming table. Amid the chaos, one sharp-eyed man in the shadows with carefully honed detective skills recognised Jacobs for who he truly was.
The vital clue? His prosthetic finger made of hardened wax, of course.
Soon Legate – or was it Jacobs? – was in custody, another criminal case cracked by a Scottish detective with dogged determination and knack for solving even the trickiest challenge.
Kilmarnock-born US crime fighter, George S. McWatters (Image: The Project Gutenberg)
It sounds like the kind of twist you'd find in a Rebus novel — Edinburgh's flawed detective whose knack for untangling webs of lies and last-minute revelations has crime fiction fans hooked.
So popular is the latest television reboot of Ian Rankin's Edinburgh detective, now played by Outlander star Richard Rankin, that it's just been commissioned for a second series and been picked up by Netflix, opening the door to a new international army of fans.
But the tale of The Gambler's Wax Finger didn't play out in the brooding dank closes of Edinburgh's Old Town.
And it wasn't fiction.
An illustration of a fraudster's capture, taken from Kilmarnock-born detective George McWatters' book (Image: The Project Gutenberg)
Rather, this was almost 150 years ago, and the incident on board a Mississippi riverboat was just one of many detailed by Kilmarnock-born real-life detective George S. McWatters in a gripping memoir that kept readers on both sides of the Atlantic, at the time, engrossed.
Long before the latest reinvention of Rebus, McWatters' tangled tales of how he brought Victorian criminals to justice was every bit as anticipated by readers as today's fans of Ian Rankin's gruff and rule-breaking DI.
Meanwhile, his cases, drawn from his true experiences as a real-life detective in mid-19th century New York, show little has really changed down the years: money, greed and power motivated criminals then, just as they do now.
Rebus and McWatters encountered the same drugs, guns, violence and human misery, while the Victorians memoir – clumsily titled Knots Untied: Or, Ways and By-Ways in the Hidden Life of American Detectives – contains as many twists and turns as any modern detective thriller.
Penned in 1871, by which time McWatters was in his late fifties, its dramatic retelling of cases read like fanciful crime fiction: there are fraudsters masquerading as spiritualists, big money forgery rings stretching across state lines, and deadly poisoners hiding in plain sight.
Jail awaited many criminals captured by Kilmarnock-born detective George McWatters (Image: The Project Gutenberg)
Yet despite being a bestseller of its times and McWatters described among New York journals as "the Literary Policeman', few today will have heard of the Scottish-born crime buster.
Born in Kilmarnock in around 1814, his family moved to Northern Ireland where he became a mechanic.
It was a short-lived career. McWatters, said to be 'full of the spirit of adventure', soon left for London, where he met and married his wife.
His memoir tells how the bustling streets and the diverse population – rich and well-heeled on one hand, desperately hard-up on the other – offered an education in human behaviour that laid the foundations for his future career as a New York detective.
(Image: BBC) Richard Rankin stars as Rebus.'London is a world-school in itself,' he wrote. 'What a man cannot learn there of arts, sciences, and literature and of all the various phases of humanity, from the worse or lower than the barbarian, up to the highest type … he would be unable to learn in any other spot of Earth.'
Before long though, he'd be tempted by the 'Land of Promise' and head for a new life on the other side of the Atlantic.
In Philadelphia, he studied law only for his boss to give him the task of collecting debts – too much for his 'soft heart'.
Having found himself required to deceive his way into a poor shoemaker's home to seize his only furniture – his bed – as payment for outstanding debts, he decided his future lay elsewhere.
It set him on course to become one of America's early detectives, cracking crime in an era just as policing was finding its feet, led by another Scot, Glasgow-born Allan Pinkerton and his detective agency.
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They were also days when detectives worked by instinct, grit, and bravado, often stepping into roles that blurred the lines between enforcer and actor, all of it documented in fine detail in a memoir which had readers gripped.
The cases McWatters encountered dealt with timeless topics that fascinated and intrigued readers then and still do now.
One involved snaring a deceptive so-called spiritualist who claimed superpowers to summon the dead. The schemer targeted bereaved families, charging for supposed messages from deceased loved ones.
Spiritualists and mediums who preyed on vulnerable victims appear in McWatters' book of crimes (Image: The Project Gutenberg)
When the spiritualist encountered a timid young woman, fearful that her lack of personal wealth and the age gap between her and her rich husband-to-be might lead to to the marriage being short-lived, she offered to perform an elaborate charm to secure his affection forever.
If the worried young woman could gather precious items – an expensive watch, gold cutlery and other expensive personal items – place them in a box and deliver them to her, then she could bewitch the marriage and ensure it would be forever happy.
The charmed box and valuables would be returned to the anxious bride-to-be on condition that it be opened only when the mystic Mrs Seymour – the spiritualist – was many miles away.
Naturally, once opened, it was found to contain not the precious items but stones and bits of junk.
McWatters had doubts he would ever be able to track down the cunning Mrs Seymour.
And yet, working undercover and using patient surveillance, he traced her from Brooklyn to Boston, where she was found continuing her cruel scams among upper‑class clients.
Posing as a grieving husband, McWatters infiltrated her parlour and allowed her to proceed with her attempt at yet another scam.
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Having watched her make contact with the spirit of his 'dead' wife – knowing she was perfectly healthy at home, looking after their family – McWatters revealed his identity.
With the stolen goods recovered, he mused at how susceptible the well-to-do often were to sometimes ludicrous cons and scams aimed at depriving them of their wealth.
'(I) came to a knowledge of the great extent to which mediums are consulted by people of the first classes; and was astonished to find how readily they fall through the superstitious element in their composition, victims to the sorcerer's arts,' he wrote.
Rebus creator, Ian Rankin
But McWatters didn't only unmask con artists and fraudsters. His book notes his various acts of selfless heroism: protecting the vulnerable public from harm was just another part of the police officer's role.
One March day in 1861, he 'immersed" himself in the Hudson River to rescue a six-year-old boy who had fallen off the dock.
Five weeks later, he was back, aiding in the rescue of another boy from a watery grave, and another time he plucked a grown man at risk of drowning, to safety.
An illustration from George McWatters' memoirs showing the rescue of a drowning woman (Image: The Project Gutenberg)
And when not cracking crime or carrying out daring rescues, readers learned of his acts of immense generosity: he helped provide aid for suffering and starving people of Kansas, supported injured soldiers and was outspoken against slavery.
But it was his detective skills that gripped readers on both sides of the Atlantic: there was the case of a gang of forgers who passed counterfeit bank drafts, a triple murderer caught only after McWatters risked his own life to disarm him, bogus lottery scams and stolen diamonds.
His knack for observation meant each account is packed with tension, high stakes and larger than life characters.
While, unusual for the time, his exploits were brought to life in his book by illustrations showing him in full crime-fighting mode - including one showing him fighting off would-be robbers by brandishing his silver spectacle case like a knife.
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Although Knots Untied sold well in its day, McWatters' name was overshadowed by the likes of Pinkerton, whose famous detective agency spanned the country and snared some of the most famous criminal gangsters of the day, such as Jesse James.
McWatters eventually faded into obscurity, and his crime tales were overtaken by the rise of fictional detectives such as Sherlock Holmes.
He died in 1886 of pneumonia, aged 74. An obituary in the New York Times sang his praises as Chief of the Lost Children's Bureau, and one of a handful of policemen who defended the newspaper's offices during draft riots, sustaining wounds in the process.
He was, it noted, a key figure who supported aid for destitute ex-Union soldiers, their widows and orphans.
An illustration from George McWatters' book shows him fighting off would-be robbers using a spectacle case (Image: The Project Gutenberg)
The Rebus of his day, his book, which can be read for free on The Gutenberg Project website, shares a common denominator with the crime books and characters of today – readers love a crime mystery.
'Detective stories speak to readers' hearts and minds,' says Jess Faraday, author of the award-winning Ira Adler historical mysteries and a spokesperson for the Crime Writers Association.
'We love to challenge ourselves to find the clues and see if we can beat the sleuth to the solution.
Richard Rankin stars in the latest reboot of Edinburgh detective, Rebus (Image: free)
'And seeing justice served helps us to bring order to a sometimes chaotic world.'
From McWatters' crime tales of 1871 to new versions of Rebus today some might wonder if there are any crime stories left to tell?
'It's true that the types of crime are finite, and most mysteries focus on only one — murder,' she adds.
'At the same time, within these limitations, the combinations of means, motive, opportunity, and character are limitless.'