Detectives

I've had Detectives on my mind a lot lately. Back in July I finished my second novel-length manuscript about a Detective (and his young niece) living in 1900 London. Currently I’m two-thirds of the way through the latest Thomas Pynchon novel INHERENT VICE, which is about—you guessed it—a stoner Detective in 1970’s California.

Every since I can recall, I’ve been fascinated by Detectives. People whose job it is to right wrongs and solve impossible puzzles. Private Detectives are of course, the most romanticized. There’s something about them—I guess it’s the fact that they’re beholden to no boss or code of conduct. Even on TV, 99% of cop shows are about police detectives. After all who wants to watch guys write parking tickets?

No one.

Growing up, I really only had one friend—my little sister Amber. She and I got it into our heads somewhere between third and fifth grade that we were going to grow up and become “PI’s.” I think this partly came for a “Junior Detective Book” I had acquired via one of those school sponsored book orders (you know the kind that hawk books with tissue-paper catalogs).

With chapters on fingerprint taking, disguise making, and how to write in secret code, this book promised to teach you the basics of criminology. Our first, and only case, involved the sudden appearance of an ambulance up the street at our neighbor’s house. Amber and I were friends with the young boy who lived there, and after reading the chapter on subversive interviewing techniques, I saddled up to him and posed this sly question:

“Why was there an ambulance at your house last night?”

Later, when I told this story to my Dad he snorted and said “Smooth.”

Indeed.

It turned out that this was question, which I had asked so nonchalantly, was actually quite painful to our friend. He winced and told me that his father had had a stroke. I didn’t know what that meant exactly, but I knew that with very little effort, Amber and I solved our first case!

Of course, this triumph was short-lived, because now this poor kid was looking very upset. I hadn’t wanted to make him sad, or hurt his feelings…I was just curious and too stupid to know that it wasn’t any of my business. Children, it is often said, are some of the cruelest people on Earth, and that is sadly very true. But it’s not their fault, most of the time they just don’t know any better.

“It’ll be alright,” I told my friend, in a vain attempt to make him feel better.

But it wouldn’t be “alright.” My friend’s vital, fiery, ex-military father was now a withered shell of a human being. His speech was slurred and he shuffled around like a man decades older than he was. In the words of Pynchon’s stoner-detective: “It was a bummer man.” My friend’s father lived a fairly long time in this state, and seeing him always made me uncomfortable. Part of the reason was just simply that old people tend to freak me out (sorry), but it was also because of what an idiot I’d been when he’d suffered his stroke. Our friend up the street had enough problems at the time, he didn’t need me and my snot-nosed sister butting into it with our “sly” line of questioning.

Being a Detective wasn’t just glamorous, exciting adventure where you got to act tough and rescue “dames,” it was also hard, thankless work. Work that sometimes meant doing things that often times hurt other people (in ways other than stabbing or shooting a guy, which I also imagine is something Detectives must do, from time to time). I think that realization was what killed me and my sister’s dream of becoming Private Investigators.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it...