Real-Life Private Eye
(1882-1959)
For almost fifty years, he wallowed in his celebrity status, living it up and regularly appearing on television and in countless “true crime” magazines and newspaper articles and interviews celebrating his biggest cases — some written by Schindler himself. The man knew how to toot his own horn.
Not that his horn wasn’t worth tooting.
Still, his early life was nothing special. He was born in Mexico, New York, the son of a preacher and a prison librarian. He attended high school in Milwaukee. Still a young man, he drifted from place to place, seeking work — as an insurance agent, as a typewriter salesman and various other jobs. He eventually landed in California, to try his hand at prospecting.
At the ripe old age of twenty-four, he arrived in San Francisco, and answered an Help Wanted ad placed by the San Francisco Police Department who were seeking a college graduate to do historical research. He landed the gig despite the lack of a college degree, but quickly discovered he had a knack for the work, helping to uncover a major scam. It was while he was working for the SFPD that he met Secret Service Agent William J. Burns, who was impressed enough by the young man that when he started his own national detective agency in 1909, The William J. Burns International Detective Agency, he hired Schindler, still in his twenties, to run his New York office, and was soon counting on the young man’s aid in establishing several other offices around the country.
In fact, one of Schindler’s biggest cases played out while he was still an employee of Burns.
In 1910, a ten-year-old white girl, Marie Smith, was murdered and raped in the seaside town of a pre-Bruce Asbury Park, New Jersey, and Tom Williams, “a Negro known as Black Diamond” was promptly arrested and charged with the crime, relying mostly on local gossip, dubious evidence and shoddy police work. Burns sent Schindler off to work on the Williams’s defense, and the young detective, employing a variety of scams and psychological tactics, not only had the man released with all charges dropped, but probably prevented him from being lynched. Schindler and his operatives also managed to track down and help convict the real killer, even landing a confession after a lengthy investigation that involved some nifty undercover work and more than a little chicanery.
“It is not so much a detective’s business to catch a criminal,” he would later remark, “as it is to make the criminal catch himself.”
The case made headlines nationally, and was retold again and again, inspiring newspaper and magazine articles, books and films over the years. Seizing the moment, the ambitious Schindler struck out on his own, and by 1912 had founded his own Schindler Bureau of Investigation, which became one of the nation’s premier detective agencies for over fifty years.
Other cases followed, with many plenty of high-ranking cases.
He solved the 1916 murder of millionaire John Edward Peck and his wife Hannah who had been poisoned with arsenic by their son-in-law Arthur Warren Waite, who had planned to kill his wife next.
But undeniably the most high profile case Schindler worked on, was one he didn’t exactly solve: the Harry Oakes murder case in 1943.
Oakes, an American millionaire who had made his fortune in northern Ontario, Canada, was found bludgeoned to death in his Nassau home in the Bahamas, which had been set on fire. Oakes’s son-in-law, Alfred de Marigny, already unpopular with the locals, was charged with the murder, but was eventually acquitted, largely due to the work of Schindler, who had been hired by Nancy de Marigny (Oakes’ daughter) to work on her husband’s defense. The real murderer, however, was never found, and Schindler was reportedly still working on the case for the rest of his life. Although some believe Schindler actually knew the identity of the killer — which was a neat enough hook for Max Allan Collins to use in his 1994 novel Carnal Hours, wherein Schindler is reimagined (partially) as fictional Collins’ PI Nate Heller.
Schindler worked for the American government during both World Wars, hunting down spies. he served as an advisory editor for a true crime magazine,
He became one of the founders and members, along with Perry Mason creator Erle Stanley Gardner, of The Court of Last Resort, pretty much The Innocence Project of its day, which became dedicated to reversing wrongful convictions owing to poor legal representation, prosecutorial abuses, biased police activity, bench corruption, unreliable witnesses, and careless forensic-evidence testimony, and counted on the help of police, private detectives (including Schindler, of course), and other professional experts. Gardner had first met Schindler when the writer was assigned to cover the Oakes murder case for the New York Journal American.
The Court spawned a popular monthly Argosy column written by Gardner, which began in 1948, and ran for years. Many of the most intriguing cases were rounded up by Gardner and published in The Court of Last Resort, a 1952 bestseller that won the Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime, and in 1957, a dramatized court TV show with the same title was aired by NBC. It featured various members of the Court, portrayed by actors during the episode, but often included the actual members at the conclusion of each episode, reflecting on that week’s case. Gardner was portrayed by Paul Birch, and Schindler by Robert H. Harris. The show was produced by Gardner’s Paisano Productions, which had launched the long-running hit Perry Mason show the same year.
None of which lessened Schindler’s fame, and it didn’t hurt that super-popular mystery writer Gardner frequently touted him as “America’s most famous private detective.”
To be sure, Schindler was some kinda eye, working tirelessly and often on behalf of defense attorneys, employing all sorts of psychological trickery to solve cases, relying on elaborate stings that included fake newspaper stories, planted gossip, undercover work and disguises, up to and including the faking of a murder. But he was also always on the cutting edge, unafraid of modern investigative technologies. He pioneered the use of the dictograph, and even claimed exclusive rights at one point to the recording device.
So, if he enjoyed his fame, so be it. He liked good food and good company, he made a lot of money and loved spending it, and became a New York bon-vivant and local character. He served as president of the The Adventurers Club of New York (twice), the president of the International Investigators, a fellow of the American Geological Society, the British Detectives Association and the American Polar Society, and lived out his final years in The Spratt, a mansion over-looking the Hudson River in Tarrytown, New York.
Schindler died of a heart attack at the age of 76, and according to his New York Times obituary, “He had been at work in New York Monday.”
REFERENCE: MAGAZINES & NEWSPAPERS
- “Profiles: Private Detective 1”
— Alva Johston (July 3, 1943, The New Yorker) - “Profiles Private Detective 2”
— Alva Johston (July 10, 1943, The New Yorker) - “Profiles Private Detective 3”
— Alva Johston (July 17, 1943, The New Yorker) - “The Talk of the Town, “Overstrain””
— Raymond Schindler and Harold Ross (December 15, 1945, The New Yorker) - “The Mysterious Lover”
— Raymond C. Schindler (January 1949, Black Book Detective) - “The Fewell Case: To a Private Eye”
— as told to Gene Lowall (May 1958; Argosy) - “The Case of the Murdering Detective”
— Alan Hynd (September 1956, Cavalier; reprinted in February 2025, The Men’s Adventure Quarterly #12)
Recounts the 1910 Marie Smith murder case.
BOOKS
- The Complete Detective: The Life And Strange and Exciting Cases Of Raymond Schindler, Master Detective (1950; by Rupert Hughes) | Buy this book | Kindle it!
Includes a foreword by Erle Stanley Gardner. - The Court of Last Resort (1952; by Erle Stanley Gardner) | Buy this book | Buy the audio | Kindle it!
True stories of miscarriages of justice, legal battles, and landmark reversals, and how the Court took them on. - Carnal Hours (1994; by Max Allan Collins) | Buy this book | Buy the audio | Kindle it!
A fictionalized retelling of the Harry Oakes murder, with Nate Heller stepping into the gumshoes of Schindler. Collins, as usual, offers a credible, fact-based solution. - The Murder at Asbury Park (2003, by Peter Lucia) | Buy this book
Told from anecdotal “amazing detective” articles, the 1910 rape and murder of Marie Smith is retold in “almost unbelievable day-by-day detail—constructed in such a way that over half of the story is told in the words of the people involved in it.” - The Rope (2021; by Alex Tresniowski) | Buy this book | Buy the audio | Kindle it!
Subtitled “A True Story of Murder, Heroism, and the Dawn of the NAACP,” this ambitious split screen biography covers both white private detective Raymond Schindler and Black journalist Ida Wells and their involvement in the Marie Smith/Tom Williams case and their fight against racial prejudice and the “wrongful imprisonment and arbitrary hanging of Blacks,” Unfortunately, the two never met, and the alternating chapters approach doesn’t serve either subject particularly well.
TELEVISION
- GOODYEAR THEATRE
(aka “Award Theatre” “Golden Years of Television”)
(1957-60, NBC)
Anthology series
55 30-minute episodes- “Raymond Schindler, Case One” (January 20, 1952)
Teleplay by Irving Wallace
Starring Frank Maxwell as RAYMOND SCHINDLER
Also starring Rod Steiger, Joseph Sullivan
- “Raymond Schindler, Case One” (January 20, 1952)
- THE COURT OF LAST RESORT | Buy the DVD | Watch it now!
(1957-58, NBC)
Co-produced by Erle Stanley Gardner’s Paisano Productions
Starring Robert H. Harris as Raymond Schindler
Carleton Young as Harry Steeger
S. John Launer as Marshall Houts
John Maxwell as Alex Gregory
Robert J. Anderson as Park Street Jr.
Lyle Bettger as Sam Larsen
Paul Birch as Erle Stanley Gardner
and Charles Meredith as Dr. LeMoyne Snyder - PASSION AND PARADISE | Buy the DVD | Watch it now!
(1989)
Made-for-television two-part mini-series
185 minutes
Premiere: February 19, 1989
Based on the book Who Killed Sir Harry Oakes by James Leasor
Written by Andrew Laskos
Directed by Harvey Hart
Music by Hagood Hardy
Starring Armand Assante, Catherine Mary Stewart
and Wayne Rogers as RAYMOND SCHINDLER
Also starring Rod Steiger, Mariette Hartley, Kevin McCarthy, Michael Sarrazin, Andrew Ray, Linda Griffiths
Frothy but mostly pointless Canadian production, with M*A*S*H’s Wayne Rogers as Schindler pushed to the edges of the case. This is the second time Steiger was in something based on one of Schindler’s cases, although never as Schindler. - MURDER IN PARADISE
(2006, Lion Vision/Channel 4)
Written, directed and produced by Matthew Wortman
Starring Rebecca Joerin-Sharp as Nancy Oakes von Hoyningen-Huene
This made-for-television documentary from the UK reveals the findings of a five-year investigation into the 1943 murder of Sir Harry Oakes, resulting in a “a completely new angle,” according to the writer/director.
FURTHER INVESTIGATION
Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith. And, as far as I can tell, that’s an actual photo of Schindler.
