Guest Post: Kate Jackson: "Top Ten Tips for Private Eyes"

Ms. Jackson's informed and engaging blog, Cross-Examining Crime, is a regular stop for me, and she is having a bit of blog tour in support of her latest book, How to Survive a Classic Crime Novel (The British Library, 2023):

Top Ten Tips for Private Eyes

Perhaps Raymond Chandler is one of your favourite authors. Or maybe you are able to quote all the best lines from the 1941 film adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon. You might even know the difference between a rye and a bourbon and can reel off all manner of private eye slang at the drop of a hat. But if you woke up one morning and found yourself inside a classic crime mystery, signed up to work as a private eye, how well would you fare? Would you just survive? Or would you thrive? Well, here are some top tips to help you out. They are by no means exhaustive, but they may increase your awareness of the difficulties private detectives can face and help to put some more titles on your to-be-read pile.

1. Does your partner or sleuthing assistant badger you when you have too much alcohol (a tendency quite a few classic crime private eyes exhibited*)? Are they trying to limit how many drinks you can have? If so, then Norbert Davis’ private detective character, Doan, knows how you feel and has his own tip for dodging such prescriptive rules. His sleuthing assistant, an enormous Great Dane named Carstairs, only allows Doan to have one drink before meals, a restriction Carstairs can easily enforce due to his physical strength. Yet, Doan is able to circumvent this rule in Sally’s in the Alley (1943) by asking the bartender for four shots to be put into one glass.

2. It is best to keep your car boot locked to avoid any unwanted corpses being deposited there, a piece of advice which Doan overlooked in Sally’s in the Alley. The same goes for offices, which it is a good idea to leave under the watchful eye of a trusted assistant. Steve Conacher failed to do this and discovered a dead body in his office at the start of Adam Knight’s mystery Stone Cold Blonde (1951).

3. It is not just corpses being added to your office which you need to worry about, as important items can also be removed from your place of business, if you’re not careful. Naturally, you might keep your money and keys in a safe place, but what about your tax return form and accompanying paperwork? This is the horror Mike Magoon faces in Ellery Queen’s ‘The Ides of Magoon’ (1947), when he finds the day before the deadline for submitting his tax return that his form and the paperwork he needed to complete it, have all been stolen. No one needs that level of drama and stress in their lives, let alone the murder and blackmail which subsequently ensue once Ellery Queen begins to investigate.

4. Private eyes, if classic crime fiction is anything to go by, have to deal with some pretty tough characters and can all too easily find themselves being physically assaulted. It is not uncommon for such a sleuth to be coshed on the head, which can render them unconscious and leave them bleeding and bruised. For instance, Steve Conacher gets hit on the head four times in I’ll Kill You Next (1956). Getting clonked on the skull had become so intrinsically linked with the life of being a private detective that it is even commented on in Christopher Bush’s The Case of the Flowery Corpse (1956). Bush’s series sleuth, Ludovic Travers says to his friend: “No longer am I the incomplete detective. This case has made me, Henry. You’ve read plenty of detective novels. Novels about British and American private eyes. You know what’s expected of them and what you always get: the real top-notchers, that is. They drink whisky by the quart, their morals areas lax as the clients are beautiful, and they’re constantly getting slugged over the head. Well, now I’m in their class. It’s taken twenty years to do it, Henry, but I’ve received the accolade. I too have been slugged.”

If this is an accolade you are not in any rush to receive, then I recommend investing in some dependable protective head gear.

5. Whilst it is advisable to not offend the official police too much (as they can all too easily find ways of making your life difficult as Mike Shayne learns in Brett Halliday’s Blood on the Stars (1948)) it is still possible to have some fun at their expense, as MacNab does in Death of Mr Dodsley (1937) by John Ferguson. For example, the police get annoyed when MacNab is cryptic about searching the bookshop floor, hoping to not find anything: ‘Crabb half turned away, his disdain reviving. This was the sort of thing one would expect from a private detective – words that looked more astute but really meant nothing […] A little rift of irritation seemed about to develop. Mallet’s professional dignity had no doubt been wounded on seeing the other man go down to look over a floor he himself had already examined […]."

6. Don’t let your boss hear you grumbling that your cases are too easy, which is an error Elliot Oakes makes in P. G. Wodehouse’s ‘Death at the Excelsior’ (1914). He works for the Paul Snyder Detective Agency and his employer decides to cut his ego down to size after Elliot criticises the methods of the agency and ‘complain[s] of the infantile nature and unworthiness of the last two cases to which he had been assigned.’ To do this Paul assigns him a baffling, locked room murder in a boarding house, which involves a victim bitten by a snake. Naturally Elliot heads towards an embarrassing failure, perpetuated by his own arrogant nature. Conversely if you are the boss of a private eye firm and you have an annoying employee then you might consider copying what Paul Snyder does with Elliot. Paul can certainly recommend it, as he thoroughly enjoyed reading Elliot Oakes’ report:

‘He liked the substance of it, and above all, he was tickled by the bitter tone of frustration that characterised it. Oakes was baffled, and his knowledge of Oakes told him that the sensation of being baffled was gall and wormwood to that high-spirited young man.’

7. Whilst many of your cases, as a private detective, will be routine work, involving missing persons, cheating spouses and stolen property, always be prepared for the unexpected, particularly if you find yourself working within a science fiction styled private detective novel. After all, in such a story, you could be expected to investigate a killer aardvark which instills suicidal depression in its victims, a situation Davis faces in Arthur Bryan Cover’s ‘The Aardvark of Despair’, which is published in the collection: The Platypus of Doom and Other Nihilists (1976).

8. Make sure you pick a sleuthing assistant who can pull their weight when it comes tothe detective work. I would argue that Frances Crane’s Pat Abbott fails to do this, as Jean (who he eventually marries) is reluctant to follow up leads and even refuses to search a suspect’s room in The Golden Box (1942), due to its untidiness and scuffed furnishings.

9. It is important to get paid first (either in full or a retainer) as in classic crime fiction there is always the chance of your client being bumped off before the case has been concluded. No client, no fee. John J. Malone encounters this problem in ‘His Heart Could Break’ (1943) by Craig Rice. In addition, I would suggest that clients who refuse to tell you all the key details straight away (and usually insist on you meeting them in person later on to hear more) are more likely to have an early demise, as evidenced in Roman McDougald’s The Deaths of Lora Karen (1944).

10. Remember as a private detective you are never off the clock. New clients and cases do not confine themselves to working hours and have the annoying habit of popping up during your social hours. John J. Malone certainly discovers that they can ruin your date night in ‘Shot in the Dark’ (1955) by Craig Rice. There’s nothing more romantic than a distraught man nearly collapsing on the front of your date’s car yelling: “Violet! She’s dead! He killed her!”

* Not every private eye in fiction struggles with alcohol dependency. For example, Humphrey Campbell in Geoffrey Holmes’ And Then There Were Three (1938), drinks nothing stronger than milk. Moreover, Mike Magoon in ‘The Ides of Michael Magoon’ (1947) by Ellery Queen ‘neither smoked nor drank – asthma barred the one and, as for the other, his good wife had the nasal infallibility of a beagle.’

(Copyright 2024 by Kate Jackson)

Kate Jackson blogs at www.crossexaminingcrime.com and she is a member of the Crime Writer’s Association. Kate is compiler of the puzzles in The Pocket Detective (2018) and The Pocket Detective 2 (2019). She also contributed to the publication: The 100 Greatest Literary Detectives (2018), edited by Eric Sandberg, writing on Juanita Sheridan’s Lily Wu. Her latest publication with the British Library is How to Survive a Classic Crime Novel (2023). This work was shortlisted for the H. R. F. Keating award for Best 2023 Biographical or critical book related to crime fiction.