Detectives - the dominant characters of the 20th Century Discuss
- Thread starter IdleRich
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I watched one of the lesser known baggy stoner ones last night: The Big Fix. Richard Dreyfuss is an ex-radical turned PI who gets roped into working on behalf of a political campaign by an old girlfriend whilst juggling a failed marriage, two kids and various people coming after him. Bit all over the place tonally and I'm sick of hearing about the 60s, but it was decent enough. Lithgow and F. Murray Abraham are in it too.
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I looked into working as a private detective recently and it seems really unpleasant. The agencies near me were exclusively corporate things with bland websites, staffed by ex-police and military mostly using digital surveillance tech to spy on people's wives and "nuisance" employees.
IdleRich
IdleRich
Actually one of the guys I used to play football with did something in that line. His main job was "forensic computing" for the police, I guess basically going through recovered laptops and phones to find deleted financial records and dodgy photos or anything that might be relevant to a committed crime. But he decided to make some more cash doing roughly the same thing in his spare time - in fact, honestly I think he did it just to see what it was like - he put a listing in those weird small ads in the back of Private Eye and he called it "mobile phone investigations" or something. He bought a pay-as-you-go phone which couldn't be connected to him and basically people would contact him and he would make some clandestine arrangement with them, normally he would wait somewhere and a phone - presumably "borrrowed" from the partner of the person who contacted him - would arrive in the back of the cab. He would then link the phone up to his stuff and basically find all the deleted texts and so on and pass them on to the client. It was a kinda weird thing, he never really knew what he was looking for specifically, and he didn't do it for very long but, like him, I did find it quite interesting and kept quizzing him about it. I suspect that even in the fifteen or so years since then technology has chnaged so much as to maybe make that whole idea redundant, or very different.
sufi
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I just gulped down Cory Doctorow's 2023 book "Red Team Blues" in an evening, the main character is a Forensic Accountant (semi-retired) it's very Chandler/Marlowe, though heavily in SF rather than LA - you might like it @IdleRich
Lots and lots of tech angles in the tale, as you would expect from Cory D (previously memorably characterised in these parts as "an idiot"), it often felt like like i was reading W Gibson or N Stephenson, but it's a lot less annoying than a lot of his other writing = more than just a tech scenario with added characters (like a lot of scifi)
is there a "tech in lit" thread yet?
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I'm on The Big Sleep at the moment. Never read him before. Loved the thunderstorm descriptions at the start, and the sweltering greenhouse.
This is a great bit of writing:
"At seven-twenty a single flash of hard white light shot out of Geiger's house like a wave of summer lightning. As the darkness folded back on it and ate it up a thin tinkling scream echoed out and lost itself among the rain-drenched trees. I was out of the car and on my way before the echoes died."
IdleRich
IdleRich
Never read Doctorow actually.
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His scene setting's one of his strongest qualities. There's just been a bit in the one I'm reading atm where Marlowe's hired as security for some sort of exchange and is told to drive out to this woodland at the foot of a cliff next to the sea. I could picture it perfectly. The trees, the fog rolling in, the lights of the beach club from across the water. Brilliant.