author
Clifton R. (Clifton Rodman) Wooldridge
1854–1933
Best known as a hard-driving Chicago detective, he turned his years chasing swindlers and criminals into vivid true-crime books. His writing offers a firsthand look at urban crime, police work, and public corruption in the early 1900s.
1 Audiobook
Twenty Years a Detective in the Wickedest City in the World
by Clifton R. (Clifton Rodman) Wooldridge
About the author
Born in Kentucky in 1854, Clifton Rodman Wooldridge worked a string of jobs before joining the Chicago police force in 1888. Later accounts of his life describe him as a colorful and highly public detective whose reputation became tied to some of the city's best-known vice and fraud investigations.
Wooldridge wrote several books drawn from that world, including The Grafters of America, Who They Are and How They Work (1906), The Devil and the Grafter (1907), and Twenty Years a Detective in the Wickedest City in the World. These works mix memoir, crime reporting, and social warning, giving readers an energetic window into Chicago's underworld as he saw it.
He died in Chicago in 1933. Today, his books are remembered less as polished literature than as lively firsthand documents of Progressive Era crime, confidence schemes, and reform-minded policing.