Between the Lines: Secret Service Stories Told Fifty Years After — A Closer Reading

The Voice of the Investigator

Smith’s narrative voice is notably double-voiced. In the report on Deegan’s bounty-jumping ring, he writes in the first person, detailing his movements and observations with a detective’s precision: “I visited these places until yesterday, when I became satisfied that Deegan is too badly scared to remain about.” The tone is matter-of-fact, almost clinical, yet it conveys the tension of undercover work. Elsewhere, in the dedicatory and prefatory material, Smith adopts a wry, self-deprecating tone, calling his stories “fifty-year-old” and suggesting he is “inflicting” them on friends. This contrast between the urgent, present-tense reporting of the war years and the relaxed, retrospective frame of 1911 creates a layered reading experience.

Pace and the Structure of Suspense

The pacing in Between the Lines is uneven by design. Smith often interrupts a narrative thread with a document—a letter, a report, a list of names—that slows the forward momentum and forces the reader to shift from story to evidence. For instance, the Deegan episode begins with a summary of the case, then shifts into the full text of Smith’s official report, complete with its numbered paragraphs and recommendations. This documentary insertion creates a pause, a moment of bureaucratic stillness, before the narrative resumes. The effect is to mimic the rhythm of detective work itself: bursts of action followed by periods of analysis and waiting.

Setting and the Geography of Suspicion

Smith’s geography is precise and laden with meaning. He moves from Fort McHenry to New York’s “haunts” of bounty jumpers, from Philadelphia’s Callowhill Street to the Chesapeake Bay. These locations are not just backdrops but active elements in the investigation. In his report, Smith notes that the jumpers “pay this Department quite a compliment, i. e., they say if they can only get clear from Baltimore they are all right.” The city becomes a node in a network of evasion and pursuit. Smith’s attention to the physical spaces of the underworld—groggeries, boarding houses, paymasters’ offices—grounds his narrative in a tangible, dangerous landscape.

Readers approaching Between the Lines should attend to the interplay between Smith’s two authorial selves: the young lieutenant who wrote terse reports and the older major who frames them with rueful hindsight. The book rewards those who read the documents as carefully as the narrative, noticing what is said and what is left out. Smith’s insistence on the exact wording of his reports, and his occasional admission that a plan “would have been more successful,” invites a critical reading of both the war’s secret history and the act of remembering it.

Reading Smith’s record of undercover work, I kept thinking how rarely we glimpse the quiet hours behind the dramatics. His patience echoes something in Reminiscences of service with the Twelfth Rhode Island Volunteers, and a memorial of Col. George H. Browne — Text and Context—a soldier’s worn, unshowy devotion. Both books feel like old letters saved in a drawer, their details dusty but tender.