Once upon a time, it seemed that 80% of mysteries that I read were Private Eye Novels.
Now it seems like almost 100% are police procedurals.
I grew up on Spenser, Elvis Cole, Matt Scudder, Amos Walker, Travis McGee,the Nameless Detective, and Harry Stoner which were who followed the oldies Sam Spade, Phillip Marlowe, Mike Hammer, and Lew Archer.
With the exception of a recent Elvis Cole book, I can’t remember the last time I saw one.
Is it just that guys like Robert Parker have passed on?
I think the private eye protagonist faded out when people learned that most modern PIs just do a lot of contract work checking records and identities for credit companies and lawyers, as well as the occasional spying on adulterers. Rarely do they ever get involved in a murder, and if they do it’s after the fact because the a lawyer has hired them to find something.
That’s why I think Chinatown is the best PI story, I love that Jake is a small-time investigator mostly getting by catching cheating spouses and gets caught up in a much larger legal and moral quandary. It’s peak PI, to my way of thinking.
The best books, in my opinion, are Hammett’s Continental Op series. Hammett was himself a private eye with the Pinkerton agency before he started writing and his work just oozes authenticity. I’m a big fan of the Thin Man movies based on his books too.
Maybe, but you’ve got all this technology that kind of obsoletes the work a PI does. Don’t need all the footwork if you can just hack someone’s iPhone and listen in on all their conversations.
I wasn’t much of a fan of the genre - old Bogart movies aside - but I did get hooked into the Cormoran Strike novels by Robert Galbraith (aka JK Rowling). The author does a pretty good job of showing that the PI’s “day job” is catching cheating spouses and doing seedy surveillance work.
And I think that’s been pretty clearly part of the PI mystique since the 1930s – the “hardboiled” detective who has seen so much that they’re willing to take on virtually any job to make ends meet… but are secretly pining to “do right” and/or redeem themselves.
I was going to mention that myself but then I thought that’s not terribly unique to PI stories. Hell, you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a half dozen stories about a lawyer or assassinnor somebody striving for some kind of redemption. One of my favorite 90s movies, Grosse Pointe Blank is basically all about this, and I could name many more.
Yea, but those things are pretty much illegal without a warrant. The private dick still needs to stake out the perp and wait for them to do something, whether it be a divorce case or an insurance fraud case.
That’s a valid point, you probably couldn’t really advertise as a “hacker/PI” if your tools are illegal. But in a story, it’s probably easier to just set the whole thing in an era before all these internet-enabled gadgets existed.
Jim Butcher writes Hollywood blockbusters in novel form. Fight scenes, fantastic creatures, and explosions. I don’t say any of that as a bad thing because his novels are really enjoyable to read, but I really hesitate to call them “private investigator/wizard” novels.
Well, I do apologise for the misunderstanding. Again, I thought you were looking at the broader genre as a whole, but I guess the setting is important.
Now, me, I am always interested in more SciFi or Fantasy Private Eye novels.
