Detectives - the dominant characters of the 20th Century Discuss
- Thread starter IdleRich
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version
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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.
version
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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
lala
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?
version
Well-known member
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.
version
Well-known member
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.
version
Well-known member
Anyone into Sciascia? Currently reading The Moro Affair. It's not what I expected - thought it was going to be a novel rather than literary nonfiction - but I'm into it. I've another of his here, Equal Danger, which is definitely a novel, and which was turned into a great film.
sufi
lala
The most epic detective tale of the 20th C
Quintissential 80's London
Corrupt cops, bad suits, dodgy motors, dodgy geezers, fat blokes in shady boozers
tangles with the Freemasons, the Krays, Brinks Matt, supergrasses, bent cops setting up other bent cops, planted drugs, bugs and countersurveillance, News of the Screws, all the way to Cressida Dick, who caught herself out lying to cover up the menezes killing so no surprise there that the report implicates her in 30 years of shabby incompetence and blatant corruption
The Report of the Daniel Morgan Independent Panel
daniel morgan the detective found with an axe in his head in the carpark of a catford pub in 1987
webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk
the panel enquiry was toothless in that it couldnt summon witnesses or prosecute, so this 1200 odd pages of dense officialese represents the culmination of its work over 8 years. It's very readable with jawdropping twists and turns throughout & right up to the end, scrupulously written but scattered with very pointed comments bluntly condemning decades of sharp practices and impunity as well as providing masses of details of all sorts of skullduggery
obviously noone was caught for the killing and the prime suspects got paid handsomely by the courts for all the failed prosecutions - millions and millions were spent, dwarfing the petty sums that the murder was over, the murder itself reputedly cost only £20K (80s rates obvs) payable in instalments
if it were fiction you'd say it was overblown but it's not, in fact the ft recently characterised it as the real face of the deep state
the layers and strata of criminal conspiracies is like ellroy, and actually the style is where that terse truncated prose should go next - pure procedural
a great read unputdownable page turner a classic of the genre 10/10
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Quintissential 80's London
Corrupt cops, bad suits, dodgy motors, dodgy geezers, fat blokes in shady boozers
tangles with the Freemasons, the Krays, Brinks Matt, supergrasses, bent cops setting up other bent cops, planted drugs, bugs and countersurveillance, News of the Screws, all the way to Cressida Dick, who caught herself out lying to cover up the menezes killing so no surprise there that the report implicates her in 30 years of shabby incompetence and blatant corruption
The Report of the Daniel Morgan Independent Panel
daniel morgan the detective found with an axe in his head in the carpark of a catford pub in 1987
UK Government Web Archive
This Page is [ARCHIVED CONTENT] and shows what the site page https://www.danielmorganpanel.independent.gov.uk/ looked like on 31 Mar 2022 at 10:39:28
webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk
the panel enquiry was toothless in that it couldnt summon witnesses or prosecute, so this 1200 odd pages of dense officialese represents the culmination of its work over 8 years. It's very readable with jawdropping twists and turns throughout & right up to the end, scrupulously written but scattered with very pointed comments bluntly condemning decades of sharp practices and impunity as well as providing masses of details of all sorts of skullduggery
obviously noone was caught for the killing and the prime suspects got paid handsomely by the courts for all the failed prosecutions - millions and millions were spent, dwarfing the petty sums that the murder was over, the murder itself reputedly cost only £20K (80s rates obvs) payable in instalments
if it were fiction you'd say it was overblown but it's not, in fact the ft recently characterised it as the real face of the deep state
the layers and strata of criminal conspiracies is like ellroy, and actually the style is where that terse truncated prose should go next - pure procedural
a great read unputdownable page turner a classic of the genre 10/10
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
sufi
lala
The most epic detective tale of the 20th C
Quintissential 80's London
Corrupt cops, bad suits, dodgy motors, dodgy geezers, fat blokes in shady boozers
tangles with the Freemasons, the Krays, Brinks Matt, supergrasses, bent cops setting up other bent cops, planted drugs, bugs and countersurveillance, News of the Screws, all the way to Cressida Dick, who caught herself out lying to cover up the menezes killing so no surprise there that the report implicates her in 30 years of shabby incompetence and blatant corruption
The Report of the Daniel Morgan Independent Panel
daniel morgan the detective found with an axe in his head in the carpark of a catford pub in 1987
UK Government Web Archive
This Page is [ARCHIVED CONTENT] and shows what the site page https://www.danielmorganpanel.independent.gov.uk/ looked like on 31 Mar 2022 at 10:39:28
the panel enquiry was toothless in that it couldnt summon witnesses or prosecute, so this 1200 odd pages of dense officialese represents the culmination of its work. It's very readable with jawdropping twists and turns throughout & right up to the end, scrupulously written but scattered with very pointed comments bluntly condemning decades of sharp practices and impunity as well as providing masses of details of all sorts of skullduggery
obviously noone was caught for the killing and the prime suspects got paid handsomely by the courts for all the failed prosecutions - millions and millions were spent, dwarfing the petty sums that the murder was over, the murder itself reputedly cost only £20K (80s rates obvs) payable in instalments
if it were fiction you'd say it was overblown but it's not, in fact the ft recently characterised it as the real face of the deep state
the layers and strata of criminal conspiracies is like ellroy, and actually the style is where that terse truncated prose should go next - pure procedural
a great read unputdownable page turner a classic of the genre 10/10
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Former police detective from Great Yarmouth area wins compensation battle over axe murder arrest
A former detective who spent four months in jail after he was accused of corruption in a notorious murder inquiry has won a substantial compensation…
www.edp24.co.uk
kid charlemagne
Well-known member
woody allen should adapt some chandler