“I’d make a great private investigator!” people often tell me. Some of them probably would. But the romance wears off quickly in the day-to-day grind of sweltering summer surveillance and unpaid invoices.
When my husband Hal got his PI license about 15 years ago, I got mine soon afterward. We worked mostly surveillance cases. I hid in my Honda CRV and shot video of a drunk dad picking up the kids at school, tailed a septuagenarian who met her paramour for a snog behind Applebee’s, and exchanged texts with a guy who thought he was meeting me to sell me a stolen iPad —but found himself arrested instead. The work was at moments thrilling but more often brutally tedious—and sometimes, just plain sad.
To be honest, I was glad when Hal shifted to criminal defense investigations and I became editor of Pursuit, a magazine by and for professional investigators. Much respect to surveillance operatives: That is not easy work—I’m glad to leave it to the pros with better attention spans. And I’m thrilled to now have a job that keeps me in the game vicariously, by letting me meet real-life PIs from all over the world and learn how they ply their trade.
They’re nothing like Philip Marlowe.
They’re much more interesting.
If you’re here reading a CrimeReads story, you’re probably spy-curious, the type who might tell me you’d make a great private investigator. And maybe you would. But first, get to know the real stories of who they are and what they do. The good news is: they’re happy to tell you, if you’re willing to read, listen, follow, or subscribe. Below, you’ll find a brief (and woefully incomplete) sampling of memoirs, blogs, podcasts, interviews, YouTube channels, and even novels by private investigators, all of which, to varying degrees, shine some light on the PI life.
___________________________________
Books
___________________________________
Nonfiction
A great place to start is Tyler Maroney’s The Modern Detective: How Corporate Intelligence Is Reshaping the World. Maroney, a former journalist, turned to private investigations in 2005 and later launched his own agency, QRI. His new book profiles elite investigators on high-stakes cases all over the world. You’ll meet a former spy who counsels businesses on terrorism risk in East Africa, detectives hunting for an accused fraudster’s missing assets in the French Alps, and other operatives in the loftier strata of sleuthing, hired by corporations, white-shoe law firms, and even sovereign nations. To get a taste, read an excerpt here.
The next stop spins you backward in time: The Good Detective dives into the case files of the legendary mid-century San Francisco sleuth, Hal Lipset, a brainy tech aficionado who shattered the myth of the shady private eye and saw the potential in using tiny electronic devices for surveillance—most famously, placing a bug inside a martini olive. Patricia Holt, who worked for Lipset as an investigator for a time, wrote this 1994 biography. In 1976, a Yale-educated philosophy professor named Josiah “Tink” Thompson became another of Lipset’s “cadre of overeducated operatives” and never returned to academia. His 1988 book, Gumshoe: Reflections in a Private Eye, is part case-files memoir, part philosophical treatise, with musings on Sam Spade: “Dashiell Hammett was the only mystery writer who got it right about private eyes,” Thompson told an LA Times reporter. These two books shine a light on a golden era of San Francisco shamus-philosophers who crusaded for justice and helped transform private investigation into a legitimate profession.
And I suppose no PI library would be complete without the autobiography of the biggest and boldest tall-tale Texas sleuth in the history of swaggery sleuthing, Jay J. Armes, Investigator: The World’s Most Successful Private Eye.
For a more current glimpse of PI fieldwork, check out a couple of memoirs by working investigators. Mike Spencer, who has the ideal PI name, runs a Bay-Area investigative agency and is also a former crime reporter with supreme storytelling chops. His memoir in essays, Private Eye Confidential: Stories from a Real PI, is an entertaining peek behind the curtain, told with Spencer’s wry wit and prodigious street wisdom. You’ll get investigative how-tos, musings on the moral ambiguities of investigative work, and a great understanding of why ex-journos make great detectives. You can read an excerpt here.
Utah PI Scott Fulmer’s memoir, Confessions of a Private Eye: My Thirty Years Investigating Cheaters, Frauds, Missing Persons and Crooks, offers a similar aesthetic—witty and gritty tales from the trenches, infused with the sense of purpose that drives him: “The need to help people find resolution,” he writes. “To solve problems. To make things right … The game is afoot, and I am ready.” See this excerpt.
There are so many texts that teach aspects of the trade, they’re fodder for a separate article. But for folks curious about investigative techniques, check out Surveillance: A Concept of the Art by retired NYPD undercover operative-turned-PI Eddie Cruz and The Art of Fact Investigation: Information Overload, by Philip Segal, an attorney and PI. Aspiring crime novelists should not miss How to Write a Dick: A Guide for Writing Fictional Sleuths from a Couple of Real-Life Sleuths by Colorado detective couple Colleen Collins and Shaun Kaufman. Collins has also written a memoir, Secrets of a Real-Life Female Private Eye; another PI primer, How Do Private Eyes Do That?; and a number of crime novels. Which brings us to…
Fiction
“I love reading mysteries, but I hate it when the author gets things about being a PI wrong,” wrote Elizabeth Breck, a California PI and author of a new detective novel, Anonymous. That’s a common feeling among PIs who love crime lit, which is why so many have tried their hand at fiction. It’s a crowded field. The best-known sleuth-turned-novelist is, of course, Dashiell Hammett, who worked for the Pinkerton Detective Agency before creating the iconic Sam Spade. But did you know that thriller author Don Winslow worked as a PI? He’s best known for his Cartel Trilogy, but he also threaded his own investigative experiences into California Fire and Life, a novel about an arson investigator, and into detective characters like surfer-PI Boone Daniels and grad-student sleuth, Neal Carey.
Hard-boiled fiction author Joe Gores mined his own PI work for authentic details to season his stories and novels. Start with his 1974 novel Interface, featuring San Francisco PI Neil Fargo, and go from there. See also Jerry Kennealy, another San Francisco sleuth, and his long-running series starring Bay-Area PI, Nick Polo. Another SFO-based series, written in the 1990s by ex-PI Elizabeth Pincus, introduced “lesbian sleuth Nell Fury,” as quoted in reviews of the time. A more recent San-Fran-based PI series, starring the zany Spellman family of investigators, was inspired by screenwriter Lisa Lutz’s work at a family PI firm in the Bay Area.
Elsewhere in North America: Sean Chercover, a Toronto native who worked as a PI in New Orleans and Chicago, has a popular hard-boiled series set in Chicago which stars newspaperman-turned-PI, Ray Dudgeon. Another series, interestingly enough, features a sleuth who investigates miracles for the Vatican’s Office of the Devil’s Advocate. And Pacific Northwest author Rene Denfeld interweaves her personal history—of a childhood in poverty, her experiences as a foster mom, and her work as a journalist, public defense investigator, and mitigation specialist—into three literary thrillers propelled by haunted and driven female investigators: Naomi, who finds missing people in The Child Finder and The Butterfly Girl, and “the Lady,” a death-penalty investigator in The Enchanted.
___________________________________
Podcasts
___________________________________
Podcasts are a great way to dive into Sleuthworld with the low, low investment of zero dollars and an hour of your time. Most PI podcasts are interview-based and low-budget, but you’ll learn a lot by listening to investigators chatting each other up. Check out three podcasts with deep archives: “PI Perspectives” by Matthew Spaier (which focuses on business development for PIs), “PI’s Declassified” by Francie Koehler, and “The Investigation Game,” by Oklahoma PI, Leah Wietholter. New shows spawned by lockdown boredom include the Intermountain PI podcast by Scott Fulmer and “Great Women in Fraud,” in which Oregon-based certified fraud examiner Kelly Paxton interviews her fellow female fraudbusters.
True crime podcasts by PIs capture the investigator’s perspective, which is sometimes deeply personal. In “Boston Confidential: Beantown’s True Crime Podcast,” PI Barry Maguire lays on his signature South Boston cadence—and his flinty philosophy of crime and punishment—without apology. Although he occasionally interviews guests, most of these episodes are just Maguire growling tales of gritty New England murder and mayhem into your ear. Another Bostonian, Harvard grad and criminal defense investigator Sarah Alcorn, co-hosts “Ivy League Murders”—tales of crimes set in academia.
Mike Spencer’s true crime podcast revisits an old unsolved case that has plagued him since 1998, when an ex-con he was trailing in a custody case was shot to death. “The Gary Murphy Assassination, A San Francisco Cold Case” traces his follow up; the production is as straightforward and unvarnished as the title. In the popular “Hell and Gone” podcast, writer/PI Catherine Townsend investigates unsolved murders in the Arkansas Ozarks and Malibu, CA. And Sheila Wysocki, who became a PI to investigate the unsolved murder of her college roommate, now investigates other cold cases in “Without Warning.”
A couple of PI YouTube channels worth a look are Cincinnati PI Adam Visnic’s informative how-to series on surveillance techniques, titled “The Reason You Got Burned,” and a charmingly unpolished channel called “Investigators in Cars Drinking Coffee,” by veteran Florida investigative duo, Mark and Wendy Murnan. Move past the dad jokes and silly props to get a crash course in real-life PI tools and tricks—and what it’s like to chase this calling as a classy but tough husband-wife team.
___________________________________
Blogs
___________________________________
One of the best entry points into the life and times of working private eyes is to read their unedited and unvarnished blogs. The intended audience is fellow investigators and prospective clients, but these sites are troves of juicy eavesdropping material for the spy-curious. Several writer PIs already mentioned have good ones, including Mike Spencer (“Private Eye Confidential”), Philip Segal (“The Ethical Investigator”), and Colleen Collins (which wins best title, with “Guns, Gams, & Gumshoes”). MileHi PI, a blog by Ross Investigators PC, Inc. in Denver, has great information and a deep archive. Attorney and criminal defense investigator John Nardizzi (who quietly sidelines as a novelist) has serious writerly chops and maintains an excellent blog called “The Last Detective.” And bellingcat.com, while not exactly a blog, is still an incredible resource for amateur sleuths who aspire to solve crimes worldwide without ever leaving the basement. Their resources page is an advanced degree in OSINT—open-source intelligence techniques—and so is this blog by Marcy Phelps, an expert in due diligence and asset searches.
Rachele’ Davis, a PI in Missouri who specializes in adoption searches, writes a splendid blog that ranges from candid explainers about the work to the deeply personal reasons she’s made it her calling to reunite birth families. This blog will enlighten you and make you cry. And the entire investigative community will agree on this last one: The best PI blogger of all is Brian Willingham, a widely respected open-source investigator in New York. Willingham doesn’t pull punches, and his Diligentia Group blog is a no-holds-barred treatise on the work, the business, the “colorful” personalities in PI Land, and the mythology swirling around it all. As a torch-bearer for raising the bars of intellect and ethics in the industry, he carries on the PI-philosopher tradition discussed earlier, except on the opposite coast and with a heavier dose of baseball. Dive in with his ten most popular posts of the decade, which he has collected here. This blog will enlighten you, make you laugh, and may even inspire you to change careers.
One last pro tip: You can stalk these and other investigators legally by monitoring PI Twitter—and the daily notes-from-the-field, hilarious rants, OSINT tips, and gear recs the global investigative community shares there. I’ve made a good starter list here.
And of course, you can read scores of articles, hear podcast interviews, and watch video webinars highlighting many of these same folks—and lots more—in the virtual pages of Pursuit. No retainer fee is required.
