SSoP Podcast Episode 64 — Detective Agency: Discreet Inquiries, Mysteries Solved

This is a transcription of Detective Agency: Discreet Inquiries, Mysteries Solved

David: Hello. Welcome to Strong Sense of Place.

Melissa: In each episode, we focus on one destination and discuss what makes it different than any other place on Earth.

David: Then we recommend five books we love that took us there on the page.

Melissa: I’m Melissa Joulwan.

David: I’m David Humphreys.

David: We’re going around the world one great read at a time. Thanks for joining us.

[cheerful music]

David: Welcome to Strong Sense of Place. Today we get curious about Detective Agencies.

David: If you’re listening to this on launch day, Bloody Scotland starts up today. That’s an international crime-writing festival in a charming town called Stirling in Scotland. They have a really fun line-up of authors this year. Richard Armitage, who’s an actor who was a lead in ‘Berlin Station,’ will be talking about his new book. Ann Cleeves created the series ‘Shetland.’ She’ll be there. Peter May, who wrote The Blackhouse, which we talked about in our Scotland episode, also there.

David: But. The thing that really makes me want to attend Bloody Scotland is this. They have a tradition. And the tradition is that, on the first night of the festival, they gather by a local church — several hundred people — they hand out torches, and they march through the streets to the venue. Nothing brings people together quicker than skulking through a quaint Scottish village, torches high.

David: Today on Two Truths and a Lie, we’re going to talk about the remarkable life of the man who founded the first private detective agency. He packed about three lives worth of adventure into his one. Then we’ll talk about five books we love.

David: I’ve got a book that will get you started on your way to becoming a private investigator. But first, Mel’s going to bring us up to speed with the Detective Agency 101.

Melissa: One of my favorite things about doing these themes is that we get to have a super nerdy conversation about how we’re defining it. Like, does a book about carnivals work for the circus show? Are archives included in the episode about libraries? That kind of thing.

Melissa: For this episode, we had to categorize all the different kinds of detectives to determine which ones meet our criteria. For example, there are amateur sleuths with no official credentials whatsoever —

David: Like Miss Marple in Agatha Christie or Nancy Drew.

Melissa: Or the charming group of nosy neighbors in ‘The Thursday Murder Club.’ There are police detectives with entire departments behind them.

David: Like Harry Bosch!

Melissa: Or insurance investigators and journalists poking into fraud and corruption.

David: Like the movie ‘Spotlight.’

Melissa: Such a good movie. I also really like the Tuva Moodyson books by Will Dean… about a journalist in rural Sweden. There are bounty hunters just trying to earn a dollar

David: Like the main character in those books… ‘One for the Money,’ ‘Two for the Dough.’

Melissa: Yes! Stefanie Plum. She’s great! And there are medical examiners who take their curiosity outside their labs.

David: Like the TV show Quincy!

Melissa: Oh, man. I loved Quincy. And in books, there’s Kay Scarpetta in the series by Patricia Cornwell.

Melissa: Those are all so good! And we’re not talking about any of them today.

Melissa: This show is all about PIs, private investigators. The gumshoes who work outside the pesky laws of search warrants and bureaucracy. Maybe they have an office with a frosted glass door and a dame with great gams pecking away at a typewriter. Or maybe they’re the gal with moxie, out there hunting down bad guys. The common thread is that they’re independent, and they are very bad at risk management. And that’s what makes it so much fun.

Melissa: I want to tell you all about America’s first lady detective. But to do that, we first have to talk about the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. Pinkerton was the first detective agency in the United States. It was founded around 1850 in Chicago by Allan Pinkerton. He was a rabble-rouser from Glasgow, Scotland. He was forced to emigrate to America in 1842 because of his quote, ‘radical politics.’ He and his wife settled in Chicago, where he worked as a barrel-maker.

Melissa: According to PBS, he accidentally discovered the lair of a counterfeiting gang and had them arrested. That made him an instant celebrity, and he parlayed it into other crime-solving gigs.

Melissa: When he opened the Pinkerton Agency, he gave it the motto, ‘We Never Sleep’ and and a logo with an unblinking ey. That’s what lead to independent detectives being called as private eyes.

Melissa: OK! You know how a classic, noir detective story starts when a pretty dame walks into the detective’s office with a lot of attitude and a mysterious background?

David: Sure.

Melissa: What if I told you that happened in real life? Sort of.

Melissa: Imagine the US in 1856. Men wore frock coats and top hats. Women wore bell skirts that reached to the floor. There were only 31 states, and Franklin Pierce was the president. The agriculture in the south was still built around enslaved labor, although the abolitionist movement was gaining traction. And the north boomed with factories, railroads, and urbanization. The California Gold Rush had ended the previous year, and the country was just five years away from the election of Abraham Lincoln and the start of the US Civil War.

Melissa: On a hot August day, a young girl named Kate Warne presented herself to Allan Pinkerton and requested a job. She was 23 years old with long brown hair, pulled back in a smooth bun; a somber long dress; and an open, curious face. In my imagination she looks a lot like Jane Eyre.

David: Is she played by Ruth Wilson?

Melissa: Of course! Pinkerton barely paused before explaining that he didn’t need another secretary. And Warne replied, in what Pinkerton later described as a ‘very pleasant tone,’ that she was not there to be a secretary. She was there to be a detective.

Melissa: At this point in history, the private detective had only been a thing for six years, and there had never been a LADY detective. To his credit, Pinkerton asked Kate Warne why she thought she could be a private eye. And she said, ‘Women have an eye for detail and are excellent observers.’ She went on to explain that no one would expect a woman to be an undercover detective. That she could befriend the wives of suspected criminals to ferret out information. What she didn’t tell Pinkerton that day was back at home, in Erin, New York, she’d wanted to become an actress. The role of detective would put her honest face and acting skills to good use.

Melissa: Pinkerton wrote in his memoir, ‘I finally became convinced that it would be a good idea to employ her. True, it was the first experiment of the sort that had ever been tried; but we live in a progressive age and in a progressive country. I therefore determined at least to try it.’

Melissa: One of Warne’s first successes was an embezzlement case. One Mr. Maroney, an employee of the Adams Express Company, had stolen $50,000 of company funds. For context, that’s about $1.8 million today. Warne set out for Montgomery, Alabama, and swapped her Yankee accent for the persona of a southern belle. She became fast friends with MRS. Maroney, joining her at social events and secretly gathering evidence. Warne eventually finagled a full confession out of Mr. Maroney and found the buried cash. He was convicted and sentenced to 10 years in an Alabama lockup. Pinkerton said taht Warne succeeded far beyond his utmost expectations, and he put her in charge of his new Female Detective Bureau.

Melissa: But her biggest case was still to come: Protecting President Lincoln from an assassination attempt. To celebrate his inauguration in 1861, Lincoln had planned an 11-day, whistle-stop tour from Springfield, Illinois, to Washington, D.C., including a stop in Baltimore. Clues pointed to an attempt on his life being planned for Baltimore, so Pinkerton sent his best agent, Kate Warne, to Baltimore to foil the plot.

Melissa: She again adopted a southern accent and went undercover as either Mrs. Cherry or Mrs. Barley. She wore a black-and-white ribbon pin on her dress, a sign of her allegiance to the South’s cause, and mingled with secessionists at their headquarters — the swanky Barnum’s City Hotel.

Melissa: Kate learned of multiple plots to kill the president-elect. The most likely was an attack while Lincoln transferred from his Pennsylvania train to the one that would take him to Washington. Pinkerton pleaded with Lincoln to cancel his multiple stops, but Lincoln refused. At one point, Lincoln’s body guard wanted to arm him a with a revolver and Bowie knife. Pinkerton talked them out of it.

Melissa: Instead, he and Kate Warne put together an audacious plan that would read like a farce, if it hadn’t been so dangerous. Posing as Mrs. Barley, Kate bought four tickets for a sleeping car from Philadelphia to Washington, via Baltimore. The wholly respectable and demure Mrs. Barley would be traveling with her invalid brother — Lincoln disguised in a soft hat pulled low over his brow, an old overcoat, and possibly a shawl over his shoulders. Accounts vary on that last point.

Melissa: The fake family of four — Warne, Pinkerton, Lincoln, and his weapons-crazy body guard — snuck onto the Baltimore train in the middle of the night — with a little extra help from the conductor, thanks to a half-dollar tip from Kate. By 6:00 the next morning, they’d all arrived safely in Washington, D.C. A week later, Lincoln became the 16th president of the United States.

Melissa: Pinkerton and Warne continued their work during the Civil War, posing as a married couple to infiltrate gentile Southern society and gather Confederate secrets for the Union.

Melissa: After the war, Warne continued her undercover work, posing as a fortune teller and befriending a murder suspect’s wife. She died of pneumonia in January 1868. According to reports, Pinkerton was at her bedside when she died, and he arranged for her to be buried in his family’s cemetery plot in Chicago.

Melissa: In his book, ‘The Murderer and the Fortune Teller,’ Pinkerton wrote, ‘It has been claimed that [detective] work is unwomanly; that it is only performed by abandoned women; and that no respectable woman who becomes a detective can remain virtuous. To these theories… I enter a positive denial… I have no hesitation in saying that the profession of a detective, for a lady possessing the requisite characteristics, is as useful and honorable employment as can be found in any walk of life.’

Melissa: If you want to know more about the great Kate Warne, I can recommend two books.

Melissa: For nonfiction: The book ‘The Pinks: The First Women Detectives, Operatives, and Spies with the Pinkerton National Detective Agency’ by Chris Enss is well-reviewed. I’ve read only the introduction and the first chapter so far, and I thought it was really good.

Melissa: For fiction: I read the novel ‘Girl in Disguise’ by Greer Macallister a few years ago. I loved the bits about Warne’s detective work, but was less enamored of a romance subplot. Having said that, the author does a nice job of fleshing out the known facts with some flights of imagination where there are holes in the history.

Melissa: And Allan Pinkerton wrote several memoirs that include Warne’s exploits. I’ll put links in show notes to all of that. That is the story of America’s first lady PI and the detective agency 101.

David: I’m about to say three statements. Two of them are true. Mel doesn’t know which one is the lie. First statement: The man credited with starting the modern detective agency was a cardinal who worked with the Pope in the 1800s.

David: Second statement: A French detective once solved a murder that he himself had committed.

David: As you’re probably aware, ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe. It’s considered one of the earliest examples of detective fiction and helped establish many of the genre’s conventions. Here’s the statement: Poe scholars don’t like to talk about the culprit in ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue.’

Melissa: Those are good ones!

David: Let’s take them one at a time. ‘The man credited with starting the modern detective agency was a cardinal who worked with the Pope in the 1800s.’ I suspect that men in power have always had agents that have some things in common with a modern detective — get out and work with the people, collect intelligence, serve authority — but the man credited with starting the modern detective agency was not a pious man.

David: Eugene Francois Vydocq was French. Maybe you got that from the name. Eugene Francois Vydocq led a very full life. He was born in 1775, and he started out as a criminal. There’s a story that when he was about 14 he and his buddy convinced his parents to leave the house. They were bakers, so the kids said, ‘There’s a problem at the bakery. A fire. You need to go!’ With the parents away, they took the family’s money. The two brats headed to a den of iniquity where they spent the next three days — only to leave penniless and without their clothes.

David: As a young man, Vydocq joined the circus, and worked his way up from stable boy to performer. He had an act where he played a Caribbean cannibal. He’d wear makeup and eat raw meat on stage.

David: For a while, he was a soldier. He was an expert fencer. He did well enough in the military that he was promoted. But at his promotion ceremony, he challenged an officer to a duel. The officer refused to engage with him, so Vydocq struck him. You could get the death sentence for that kind of thing then. So, instead, he deserted, and then re-enlisted in a different unit under a false name.

David: By the time he was 34, Vydocq had been in and out of prison several times — sometimes for fraud, frequently because he was sleeping with a woman and the husband would find out. And then he would get out. He’d escape. He escaped jail once by dressing as a prison guard, and another time as a nun. He once left a courthouse by jumping out of a window into a river.

David: He tried to go straight once, but that only led to his ex-wife blackmailing him — I’ll tell them who you really are, unless you hand over some money — and his fellow former convicts forcing him to fence some items for him.

David: By 1809, he was 34 and in jail again. He’s facing a death sentence. He comes up with an idea. He decides that what he’s going to do is turn informant to the police. He’ll dig up information in the jail and tell the cops; he stays alive, they arrest some people, everybody wins. And the police go for it.

David: That works. He stays in jail for the next two years and helps the police. The law is happy with him, so happy that they release Vudocq. But! So they don’t raise suspicions, when he’s released, they make it look like he escaped.

David: As a newly released man, he continues in his line as a secret agent for the Paris police. He gets information, and he turns it over. He even took part in crimes only to suddenly turn on his partners.

David: This is all successful enough that Vydocq realizes he has more business than he can handle – so he organizes a plainclothes unit. A year later, Emperor Napoleon I made the unit a state security police force. They called themselves the Surete Nationale. This would go on to be today’s French National Police. Vydocq would hire a few dozen agents for this force, most of whom were ex-criminals. Eventually there were some politics that were bad for VEE-doc, and, after 20 years of leading the Surete, he resigned.

David: And it is here, now, finally, that Vydocq goes into business for himself. At 58, he establishes The Office of Information, the first known detective agency. And, again, he hires his old ex-convict buddies to help.

David: Trouble follows Vydocq for the rest of his life. He’s in and out of jail, he continues to have affairs, he continues to anger people in power, he survives cholera. He finally dies in 1857 at the age of 81.

David: This little chaos gremlin left a long shadow. He’s credited with introducing undercover work, ballistics, and criminology. He made the first plaster cast impressions of shoe prints. He was once able to identify a thief by examining how a door had been jimmied. He’s also credited as a philanthropist; he claimed he never informed on anyone who stole from genuine need.

David: There is a Vydocq society that was founded in Philadelphia. They are a group of professionals from the law enforcement world: forensic experts, FBI profilers, homicide investigators, and the like. They meet and try to solve cold cases from around the world. The membership rolls are closed, and the number of members never exceeds the number of years in Vydocq’s life.

David: Vydocq inspired a number of writers. Both of the main characters in Les Miserables are modeled after Vydocq. Jean Valjean is the younger version; Police Inspector Javert is the older one. Vydocq’s name appears in Moby Dick and Great Expectations, and he’s said to be the inspiration for both Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle. More recently, Vydocq appeared in our friend Richard Kadrey’s series, Sandman Slim — alive, immortal, and living in modern-day Los Angeles.

David: Second statement: A French detective once solved a murder that he himself had committed.

David: I had trouble verifying this. I found an article printed with the details by the Washington Post in 1983, but I have not found anything since. Which feels weird. Still. They have fact-checkers, right?

David: What I’m saying is that we might have two lies in the episode about detectives, I don’t know. Somehow that seems appropriate.

David: The story is about a famous detective in Paris in the late 1800s, Robert Ledru. He’s made a reputation for himself by catching a few murderers and breaking up a circle of anarchists. In 1885, he gets a call from the police in Le Havre. Several sailors have gone missing. So he takes the train, arrives late, and checks into a hotel.

David: The next day, he goes to the police station to start working on the sailor case. But the locals are distracted. They are excited because they’ve just found a murder victim. The victim is a dress-shop owner who’s been shot on the beach. Andre Monet.

David: So, Ledru and the local police go out to the beach. They examine the corpse. They find footprints. They find a bullet. Ledru looks at the footprints. He looks at the bullet. He pulls out his own revolver and checks it. In my imagination, Ledru says, ‘Gentlemen, you need look no further for your killer. He is right here. I am the man who killed Andre Monet.’

David: He points out that the footprints match his own; they are the same size and the same missing toe. He shows the police that his revolver is missing a bullet, and that it’s a match for the firearm used in the murder. And he confesses that, when he work up that morning, his socks were wet. But he has no memory of the shooting. Apparently, he was sleepwalking when he shot Monet.

David: As the story goes, Ledru was stressed from his work in Paris. He served time for the murder and then retired to the countryside. It all seems very clean, like an Encyclopedia Brown mystery for adults. But! – In cases as recent as 2008, individuals who committed murder while sleepwalking have been acquitted. So … maybe?

David: Last statement: Poe scholars don’t like to talk about the culprit in ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue.’

David: I’m about to read you a story. I found this story online. I only know that it was written by a user named ‘whinchysteria’. I have no idea when it was written or why or where it’s from. But it’s such a great story, I am going to deliver the whole thing in almost its original form. I have softened some curses.

My American lit professor went to this Poe conference. Like, to be clear, this is a man who has a doctorate in being a book nerd. He reads ‘Moby Dick’ to his four-year-old son. And Poe is one of the cornerstones of american literature, right, so this should be right up his alley?

Wrong. Apparently Poe scholars are like, advanced. There is a branch of Edgar Allen Poe scholarship that specifically looks for coded messages based on the number of words per line and letters per word Poe uses. My professor, who has a phd in american literature, realizes he is totally out of his depth. But — he already committed his day to this so he thinks: screw it! And goes to a panel on racism in poe’s works, because that’s relevant to his interests.

Some background info: Edgar Allen Poe was a broke white alcoholic from Virginia who wrote horror in the first half of the 19th century. Rule number 1 of horror academia is that horror reflects the cultural anxieties of its time (see also: My other professor’s sermon about how zombie stories are popular when people are scared of immigrants, or that purge movie that was literally about the election). Since Poe’s work is a product of 1800s white southern culture, you can safely assume it’s at least a little about race. But the racial subtext is very open to interpretation, and scholars believe all kinds of different things about what Poe says about race (if he says anything), and the Poe-stans get extremely tense about it.

So my professor sits down to watch this panel and within like five minutes a bunch of crusty academics get super-heated about Poe’s theoretical racism. Because it’s academia, though, this is limited to poorly concealed passive aggression and forceful tones of inside voice. One professor is like ‘this isn’t even about race!’ and another professor is like ‘this proves he’s a racist!’ People are interrupting each other. Tensions are rising. A panelist starts saying that Poe is like writing a critique of how racist society was, and the racist stuff is there to prove that racism is stupid, and that on a metaphorical level the racist philosophy always loses — then my professor — perhaps in a bid to prove that he too is a smart literature person — loudly calls: ‘but what about the orangutan?’

Some more background: In Poe’s well- known short story ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue,’ two single ladies — a lovely old woman and her lovely daughter who takes care of her, aka super vulnerable and respectable people — are violently killed. The murderer turns out to be not a person, but an orangutan — brought back by a sailor who went to like burma or something. And it’s pretty freakin’ racially coded, like they reeeeally focus on all this stuff about coarse hairs and big hands and superhuman strength and chattering that sounds like people talking but isn’t actually.

If that’s intentional, then he’s literally written an analogy about how black people are a threat to vulnerable white women, which is classic white supremacist.

But if he really only meant for it to be an orangutan, then it’s a whole other metaphor about how colonialism pillages other countries and brings their wealth back to europe and that’s really gonna bite them in the ass one day.

Klansman or komrade? It all hangs on this.

Much later, when my professor told this story to a Poe nerd friend, the guy said the orangutan thing was a one of the biggest landmines in their field.

He said it was a reliable discussion ruiner that had started so many shouting matches that some conferences had an actual ban on bringing it up.

So the place goes dead silent as every giant ass Poe stan in the room is immediately thrust into a series of war flashbacks: The orangutan argument, violently carried out over seminar tables, in literary journals, at graduate student house parties, the spittle flying, the wine and coffee spilled, the friendships torn — the red faces and bulging veins — curses thrown and teaching posts abandoned — panels just like this one fallen into chaos — distant sirens, skies falling, the dog-eared norton critical editions slicing through the air like sabres — the textual support! O, the quotes!

They gaze at this madman in numb disbelief, but he could not have known. Nay, he was a literary theorist, a 17th-century man, only a visitor to their haunted land.

He had never heard the whistle of the mortars overhead. He had never felt the cold earth under his cheek as he prayed for god’s deliverance. And yet he would have broken their fragile peace and brought them all back into the trenches.

My professor sits there for a second, still totally clueless.

The panel moderator suddenly stands up in his tweed jacket and yells, with the raw panic of a once-broken man: WE! DO NOT! TALK ABOUT! THE ORANGUTAN!

[laughter]

Melissa: My first recommendation is ‘The Verifiers’ by Jane Pek. This book seamlessly blends a snappy detective caper with a family story — specifically, what it’s like to be a second-generation American daughter in a Chinese family.

Melissa: The story is set in New York City at an unusual detective agency called Veracity. Veracity is an online-dating detective agency — they work for clients on a referral-only basis to snoop around and see if a romantic partner’s online profile is legit or filled with lies.

Melissa: Are they telling the truth about their job? Are they really single? How many online dating profiles do they have — and how many potential partners are they stringing along at once?

Melissa: Our heroine and narrator is Claudia Lin. She’s kind of living the dream scenario. She wrote her senior thesis on Jane Austen, and she’s a lifelong fan of mystery novels — and now she’s working at a romance detective agency! At one point she shouts out Jane Austen like this: ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single person in possession of a superlative dating profile must not be lying about anything.’

Melissa: Claudia is inquisitive and clever. She lives in Queens and rides her bike all over New York City. She’s gay, a secret she’s keeping from her mom who desperately wants her to settle down and marry a nice Chinese boy. And even though she works at an agency that’s all about the digital world, she is not super online. She’s just a curious girl who likes books and other girls.

Melissa: Claudia’s first big case is a mysterious client who’s investigating two suitors — one who’s ghosted her and one who might be lying to her. Just as Claudia is digging into the investigation, the client goes missing — in the real world and online. Poof! All of her profiles are gone.

Melissa: Claudia is sort of delighted to find herself in the middle of a mystery like the ones she loves to read. So when her bosses tell her to back off, she secretly continues the investigation — and gets herself into all kinds of sticky situations on her way to the truth.

Melissa: This book was just a good time from start to finish. Here are a four things I really enjoyed about the reading experience:

Melissa: Number one: Claudia! I loved spending time with her. She’s irreverent and scrappy, but she has tender parts, too — especially where her family is concerned. She often gets lost in her imagination, which I could really relate to. Like Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey, Claudia gets caught up in the drama of her circumstances. At one point she says, ‘I let myself think that I was the protagonist in some grand adventure… And for that I forfeited what I did have that was real.’

Melissa: The second thing I loved was the immigrant family dynamic. Claudia’s mom is a deeply unhappy, bitter woman, and she’s not afraid to spread that around. Claudia’s brother is a driven over-achiever. Their sister is stunningly beautiful. Claudia is considered to be the favorite, although that also makes her the brunt of her mom’s criticism. Everyone’s gift is also their curse. And the way the family interacts with each other felt very real to me. Their pursuit of love, the way they know just what to say to wound each other — and their very real regret about it just before they do it again. After a typically disastrous family dinner, Claudia says, ‘It isn’t a proper Lin family gathering until everyone is upset.’

Melissa: The third thing I enjoyed was the inner workings of this unique detective agency. Instead of making phone calls like old gumshoes, these modern detectives pore through text chains for clues. Instead of all-night stakeouts, they use an app to track their targets. The author uses all of this as a jumping off point to explore how technology changes our interactions with each other and how our actions online create a version of us that may or may not align with real life.

Melissa: Finally, this book is filled with literary references and the tropes of golden age and noir detective stories. Claudia uses her favorite literary detective as a touchstone throughout her investigations. And she name-drops classic fiction like Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, Anna Karenina, Othello, and others in the way only a true bookworm can.

Melissa: This is a very satisfying mystery. There are plenty of red herrings, peril that seems legit enough to have stakes, and the big reveal happens at a glitzy gala. But snuck into the fun of the mystery, this book explores how we construct personal stories to define who we are to ourselves and to others. And that means we can rewrite those stories however and whenever we want.

Melissa: That’s ‘The Verifiers’ by Jane Pek.

Melissa: I should also mention that Claudia’s adventures continue in a second book called ‘The Rivals’ that will be published this December. I’ll put a link in show notes to that, along with an interview with the author.

David: My first book is ‘IQ’ by Joe Ide. The author, Joe Ide, grew up in South Central Los Angeles, which is a tough neighborhood. This is Compton, this is where Dr. Dre and Ice Cube grew up. Kendrick Lamar. Tiffany Haddish. It is an infamously challenging neighborhood to grow up in. And Ide reports that he was part of the only Japanese family in his neighborhood.

David: From a young age, Ide escaped from that world into crime fiction. In particular, he was a fan of Sherlock Holmes. In an interview, he said he had read all 56 stories and four novels multiple times before he was in the eighth grade.

David: So in my imagination, the author was a skinny little Japanese kid, walking around Compton with a dog-eared copy of ‘Hound of the Baskervilles’ shoved in his pocket. I think ‘skinny’ might be my only leap there. And then he grew up. Then he wrote his hero.

David: Isaiah Quintabe is the detective in ‘IQ.’ He’s a brilliant, observant high school dropout. As ‘IQ’ opens, we find him working as a private detective out of his home in South Central LA. He handles cases that the police don’t or won’t take. He frequently barters for his services. He’ll take a sweet potato pie or a radial tire or have someone come and clean his yard while he tracks down deadbeat dads and cold cases.

David: A few stories are talking to each other in ‘IQ.’ The book goes back and forth between 2005 and 2013. In 2013, we get the story of a case that comes Isaiah’s way. It’s about a famous rapper whose life is being threatened. The attempted murder weapon is a large dog. It’s a mystery with a pretty standard structure; all of the characters are involved in the rap scene in 2013. The story that I found more compelling, though, is Isaiah’s origin story. That’s the story that starts in 2005.

David: There, we hear about Isaiah’s older brother, who was killed in a hit-and-run. Isaiah was with him at the time. He’s not sure if it was a murder or not. So he’s trying to get to the bottom of that. At the same time, his brother was the only semi-adult in his life. And now he’s a young kid trying to figure out how to stay in his apartment, and not alert the authorities that he’s underage and living on his own. Soon after, we meet the con who will be Isaiah’s literal partner-in-crime for a while, and then his Watson. His name is Dodson. They have a satisfyingly rocky relationship. Together, and with the voice of his dead brother, Isaiah figures out his code — the thing that drives him to be a detective instead of a criminal.

David: This book has a lot going for it. Ide’s background as a scriptwriter is fully on display here; it’s easy to visualize every bit of this book. The story is compelling. The characters are interesting and well-drawn. There’s a strong sense of LA.

David: But maybe the best thing about it is the dialog. There are some fantastic lines in this book. I want to read you a couple of paragraphs. This is from a scene where Isaiah is in a math class in tenth grade. Mrs. Washington is addressing the class. She is described as talking to the class, ‘like someone had tricked her into it.’

‘All right,’ she said. ‘Inductive reasoning. It’s what those so-called detectives on CSI, SVU, LMNOP and all the rest of them call deductive reasoning, which is wrong and they should know better. It’s inductive reasoning, a tool you will use frequently in geometry as well as calculus and trigonometry, assuming you get that far and that certainly won’t be you, Jacquon. [‘Ja’Quon’] Stop messing with that girl’s hair and pay attention. Your grade on that last test was so low I had to write it on the bottom of my shoe.’

Mrs. Washington glared at Jacquon until his face melted.

She began again: ‘Inductive reasoning is reasoning to the most likely explanation. It begins with one or more observations, and from those observations we come to a conclusion that seems to make sense. All right. An example: Jacquon was walking home from school and somebody hit him on the head with a brick twenty-five times. Mrs. Washington and her husband, Wendell, are the suspects. Mrs. Washington is five feet three, a hundred and ten pounds, and teaches school. Wendell is six-two, two-fifty, and works at a warehouse. So who would you say is the more likely culprit?’

Isaiah and the rest of the class said Wendell.

Why?’ Mrs. Washington said. ‘Because Mrs. Washington may have wanted to hit Jacquon with a brick twenty-five times but she isn’t big or strong enough. Seems reasonable given the facts at hand, but here’s where inductive reasoning can lead you astray. You might not have all the facts. Such as Wendell is an accountant at the warehouse who exercises by getting out of bed in the morning, and before Mrs. Washington was a schoolteacher she was on the wrestling team at San Diego State in the hundred-and-five-to-hundred-and-sixteen-pound weight class and would have won her division if that blond girl from Cal Northridge hadn’t stuck a thumb in her eye. Jacquon, I know your mother and if I tell her about your behavior she will beat you ‘til your name is Jesus.’

David: ‘IQ’ is the first in a series. Ide has written six of these books now. Goodreads says they’re all around 4 stars. I really enjoyed this first one, and look forward to the rest. This is ‘IQ’ by Joe Ide.

Melissa: My second recommendation is ‘Odds Against’ by Dick Francis.

Melissa: Dick Francis was a British mystery author — he died in 2010 at the age of 89 — and he’s one of the all-time greats. He wrote 44 thrillers, mostly set in the world of horse racing, and honestly, I’m surprised he’s not as beloved as Agatha Christie. The New York Times said, ‘Just about the nicest thing you can do for a person who loves mysteries is turn them on to the works of Dick Francis.’

Melissa: So this is me, turning you on to the works of Dick Francis.

David: You talked about one of his books before — in our trains episode.

Melissa: I did! In our trains episode, I recommended the book ‘The Edge.’ One of my all-time favorites. Much of that story takes place aboard a train barreling through the Canadian Rockies. The sleuth in that one is an undercover agent for the British Jockey Club named Tor Kelsey.

Melissa: The narrators in Dick Francis novels are almost always amateur sleuths solving mysteries against their will. But ‘Odds Against’ introduces Sid Halley, a hero for the ages who works at a private detective agency. Let me tell you about Sid.

Melissa: Instead of bone and cartilage, his spine is made of integrity and fortitude. Life has knocked him down plenty: his dad died before he was born, and his mom passed when Sid was just 15. He prevailed and deliberately built a life as a successful steeplechase jockey. Then he was robbed of that by a tragic accident that took his left hand.

Melissa: Despite all of that, or maybe because of it, Sid is generally good-natured and well-intentioned. The worst has already happened to him, right? But when we meet him at the beginning of the book, he’s vaguely depressed. He’s been working at a detective agency — it’s called Hunt Radnor Associates. But he drifts like a ghost through his days, still grappling with the loss of his hand and his recent divorce.

Melissa: It doesn’t help that he feels useless around the office. Radnor’s is a bustling, full-service agency. They have a missing persons department, a section devoted to divorce investigations, guard services, and the racing section. For a fee, horse trainers can check on the character of a prospective buyer, bookies can verify their clients, jockey clubs can investigate new members. The phrase ‘OK’d by Radnor’ is racing code for trustworthy.

Melissa: But Sid’s boss has never given him anything juicy to do. He’s never walked on racecourse security patrol, or kept an eye out for pickpockets on race day, or done a stakeout to protect a champion runner. He mostly hangs around the office, reading other people’s reports.

Melissa: When Sid is eventually assigned to a case, things go horribly awry, and he takes a bullet to the gut. While lying in his hospital bed, he’s feeling pretty sorry for himself. ‘Time passed slowly,’ he says, ‘The police didn’t find [the shooter], [my ex-wife] didn’t come, Radnor’s typists sent me a get-well card, and the hospital sent the bill.’

Melissa: Sid’s father-in-law Charles — whom Sid adores — visit the hospital and invites Sid to convalesce at his opulent manor house. But Charles has ulterior motives. He lures Sid back to life by tricking him into investigating a new case. Soon, Sid is using his new-found detective skills to put himself in harm’s way and ferret out the bad guys. And the bad guys are very, very bad.

Melissa: Dick Francis is a master of efficient, tidy prose. His writing is like a British take on Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett — it’s spare and descriptive, but warmer. More affable.

Melissa: He’s also really good at specificity. At Sid’s side, we learn the best way to search a room, describe a suspect, pick a lock, and misdirect someone’s attention.

Melissa: This is a high-stakes mystery, but it’s also a pretty moving character study. Sid is grappling with heavy stuff. He’s in deep mourning about his disability and the dissolution of his marriage. At one point he admits, ‘I wanted nothing… I’d had what I wanted most in the world and lost it irrevocably…. I stared at the ceiling, waiting for time to pass.’

Melissa: If you’re worried about Sid, rest assured that Dick Francis’s heroes always triumph.

Melissa: Dick Francis wrote three more books about Sid. Throughout the series, Sid continues to evolve in his detective career and come to terms with his injury. Unlike some other literary detectives who never age, Sid matures throughout the books, so reading them feels like keeping up with an old friend. After Dick Francis died, his son Felix wrote two more Sid Halley books that bring Sid up to the present.

Melissa: When I was putting my notes together for the show, I was shocked to learn that ‘Odds Against’ was first published in 1965. I had no idea it was older than I am. It’s remarkable that it doesn’t feel dated. Obviously, there are no computers or cell phones — all of the detective work is done on the phone and in person. But there’s no casual, uncomfortable racism, sexism, or ableism that you might expect from a sixties novel. Sid is empathetic and open-minded — just as I suspect Dick Francis was.

Melissa: If you want to see the inner-workings of a detective agency in the company of a wounded, flawed, but lovable hero, this book is an excellent place to start. It’s ‘Odds Against’ by Dick Francis.

David: When we picked this destination, I knew I wanted to read a non-fiction book about how to become a private investigator. I was looking for something to give me an overview of what it’s like. What’s the day-to-day? How do you get hired? If I wanted to be a private investigator, what could I expect? It took a bit to find a good one. And I read a good chunk of a half-dozen books.

David: There was only one book I recommend if you’re curious. But first, I wanted to tell you about a couple of books that didn’t quite make the cut. And why. I should warn you that most of these titles are old, some twenty years or so. And those were the latest I could find. Apparently, the ‘private investigation how-to’ market is slim.

David: A couple of the books I looked at have a very, ‘so you think you’re in a bad relationship’ vibe. ‘The Private Investigator Handbook’ by Chuck Chambers — Chuck Chambers, PI — starts with chapter one title, quote, ‘How to Catch the Cheating Bastard.’ That chapter includes a ‘cheating checklist.’ It suggests you should be suspicious if your spouse has a new interest in exercise, arrives home after work smelling of a fresh shower, or suddenly buys a pager. Yes. That would be suspicious.

David: I looked at one book that’s a college text. ‘The Process of Investigation Concepts and Strategies for Investigators in the Private Sector, Fourth Edition’ by Sennewald and Tsukayama. It’s a good book, but it is pretty academic. It’s got information on the entire investigation industry. So there’s a chapter on how to set up a room for interrogations. Another is how to gather evidence from a computer — how to capture the files so they’re legally admissible. There’s advice about managing detectives, and org charts for small and medium-sized security operations. All of which I thought was interesting — should you need to set up a security department, this is definitely your first stop — but not something that I felt like I could recommend as an introduction to the field.

David: I was surprised to find out that the book that did what I wanted — the book that gave the most complete picture of what it’s like to be a working PI — is ‘The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Private Investigating’ by Steven Kerry Brown. Steven Kerry Brown was a private investigator for twenty years, and an FBI agent for over a decade. He’s got some things to say.

David: The Idiot’s Guide covers a lot of good ground. The first section is about how to start a career. How do you get some experience, get a license, and what kind of equipment do you want?

David: The next section starts with the good stuff: how to dig for information. Brown writes about how to find someone, the surprising utility of courthouse records. He says you can make a living just knowing your local courthouse record system. Brown writes about which sites he uses for online searches, how to ‘break a number,’ which is detective-speak for how to find the person attached to a phone number. As he goes along, he dispels some ideas we’ve gotten from Hollywood. He writes about ‘The Myth of the Untraceable Prepaid Cell Phone,’ for instance. And then, section three is all about techniques. How to canvas a neighborhood, and the value of that, how to run surveillance, either on foot or from a car, alone or in a team.

David: The last two sections are about topics that relate to specific situations. So: how to bring a runaway teenager back home. How to manage electronic surveillance. What does a criminal defense case look like from the perspective of a private detective? How do you talk to a judge?

David: There are all sorts of interesting bits in this book. There are Brown’s stories, and some of his techniques. For instance, he walks you through how he would trick a hotel into giving him a receipt — someone else’s receipt — that he needed for evidence.

Melissa: Whoa! How does that work?

David: Well, okay. Let’s say a wife contacts you and says she’s sure her husband was in a Sheraton with a woman two weeks ago, August 7th or whatever. His name is Gary Fielding. And she wants you to get proof that he was there.

David: You call the hotel and you make a reservation for the next day. There’s going to be two of you: you and Gary Fielding. The next day, you check in. You tell the front desk that Fielding has yet to arrive. Can you tell him what room you’re in when he comes in?

David: An hour or so later, you ring down to accounting and identify yourself as Gary Fielding. You’re in room whatever. You stayed here last month, but you’ve lost your copy of the statement and you need to fill your expense report. Can you drop another copy by the room?

David: They deliver the copy. Now you have proof that Gary Fielding stayed there.

Melissa: Whoa.

David: There’s another bit that sounds like it’d be a great setup for a detective series. It was in the chapter on getting a PI license. In some states, you can work towards a license if you have a licensed detective managing your agency. So his advice is: start an agency, hire a cranky but lovable detective as a manager, work towards your license. He didn’t say the ‘cranky but lovable’ part, but we’re all thinking that, right? Tommy Lee Jones or Gary Oldman or Maggie Smith. Finding their way to redemption while the younger, naive wanna-be-detective figures out who murdered her parents. Do I have to write the rest of this? It’s all right there.

David: If you’re curious about the day-to-day of a private investigator, or if you’re the protagonist in my new dramedy series starring Gary Oldman and Elle Fanning, you will enjoy this. It’s ‘The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Private Investigating’ by Steven Kerry Brown. That’s definitely the title of the TV series, too: ‘The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Private Investigating.’

Melissa: My final recommendation is ‘The Manual of Detection’ by Jedediah Berry. This is a delightful mashup of noir crime and darkly whimsical fantasy. It’s like if Wes Anderson and Tim Burton joined forces to write a pastiche of a Sam Spade crime novel.

Melissa: The story includes, but is not limited to, a reluctant detective, a mysterious agency, an unnamed metropolis pelted with rain, a sinister circus, twins with more brawn and anger than good sense, and much more.

Melissa: There are two main characters in this story: the very bureaucratic detective agency and Charles Unwin, our unwitting hero.

Melissa: The agency is so vivid in my imagination. It’s housed in a sprawling building that, in my mind, is a hulking gray edifice that took the idea of architectural Brutalism and ran with it. Inside, there are clerks, detectives, and watchers, all located on separate floors, and they meet only under the direst of circumstances.

Melissa: Our man Charles has worked as a clerk to Detective Travis T. Sivart for 20 years, dutifully making sense of the detective’s reports and filing them away for posterity. Sivart is a superstar detective — known for solving cases like ‘The Oldest Murdered Man’ and ‘The Man Who Stole November Twelfth.’ He’s also run afoul of the henchmen behind Caligari’s Traveling Carnival.

Melissa: But back to Charles. He’s an unassuming fellow, happy to be a clerk in the banal safety of the fourteenth floor, among the rows of identical desks, each topped with a telephone, a typewriter, a green-shaded lamp, and a letter tray. He rides his bike to work every day, rigging an umbrella to the handlebars to protect him from the ceaseless rain.

Melissa: On the day the story opens, Charles is running late. He’s burnt his oatmeal, tied the wrong tie, and almost forgot his wrist watch. Now, as he arrives at the Central Terminal to look for a mysterious woman in a plaid coat, he realizes his socks are wet. These indignities are only the beginning of what’s about to happen to Charles.

Melissa: At the station, he has an unexpected encounter with a detective who says, ‘Forget the fourteenth flour. Report to Room 2919. You’ve been promoted.’ Then he pulls a slim, green hardcover book with gold lettering from his pocket, hands it to Charles and says, ‘Standard issue. It’s saved my life more than once.’ The title of the book is The Manual of Detection. When Charles tries to ask questions, the detective waves him off and warns, ‘If you ever see me again, you don’t know me. Got it?’ Then he disappears into the crowd.

Melissa: I love that most of the characters talk like they know they’re in a detective story. There’s a level of self-consciousness that I really enjoyed.

Melissa: When Charles reports to the Agency, he learns that HIS detective, Sivart, is missing — and then Charles finds their boss, the watcher, dead in his office. Does all of this have something to do with Sivart’s old cases? Or the femme fatale known as Cleopatra Greenwood? Or Caligari’s Traveling Carnival? Despite his desire to remain unnoticed, it’s now up to Charles to find out.

Melissa: On his mission to solve multiple crimes, Charles is joined by a plucky assistant who may or may not be trustworthy. And his efforts are guided by The Manual of Detection.

Melissa: Each chapter of the book opens with an excerpt from The Manual, and they’re a really fun. They also foreshadow the challenges Charles will face in the next phase of his investigation.

Melissa: For example, there’s this bit on corpses: ‘Many cases being with one — this can be disconcerting, but at least you know where you stand. Worse is the corpse that appears partway into your investigation, complicating everything. Best to proceed, therefore, with the vigilance of one who assumes a corpse is always around the next corner. That way it is less likely to be your own.’

Melissa: Swaths of this novel are a solid detective procedural with Charles interrogating suspects, following clues, and getting into and out of perilous situations. Other bits of it are purely fantastical. There’s a poker game at a bar called Forty Winks where people play for the right to ask questions, instead of money. There’s a horde of sleep walkers, each carrying a sack of alarm clocks. At one point, Charles is tailed by a spy with a portable typewriter that somehow types out what Charles is going to say just before he says it. It’s all kind of bananas, but also makes sense when you’re immersed in this world.

Melissa: The last 30-percent of this book is AMAZING. I can’t say why or it will ruin your fun, but suffice it to say it’s a brilliant blend of the noir and fantasy elements. It’s also a joy to watch Charles bumble his way into being a pretty good detective.

Melissa: That’s ‘The Manual of Detection’ by Jedediah Berry.

David: Those are five books we love, set in Detective Agencies. Visit our show notes at strongsenseofplace.com for links and details. We’ve got photographic evidence for some of the stories we’ve told you today. Proof! That Eugène François Vidocq was a bad ass. Proof! That you can still make a career move into private investigation.

Melissa: I found many fun blog posts, podcasts, and videos about the lives of private detectives that I just couldn’t fit into the show. There’s a detective agency name generator! And a YouTube channel run by a married couple who are PIs in South Florida. And a free online course in case you want to learn how to be a detective.

David: Mel, where are we going for our next episode?

Melissa: We’re getting curious about Saudi Arabia.

David: We’ll talk to you then.

[cheerful music]

Top image courtesy of alexey turenkov/Unsplash.