There’s no disputing that crime fiction is a beloved genre, but trying to measure its appeal can be a difficult project. Perhaps we’re drawn to crime novels because they possess the ability to titillate the reader, with all that safely removed talk of murder that allows us to shock ourselves at a distance with the most violent and depraved urges of mankind. Or perhaps we like them because a crime novel, traditionally, must set the world to rights by the end of the book—the bad guy is locked up, and the evil is contained, even if resolution exacts a price. As a character who gives us an up-close look at all that titillating danger and crime, the private investigator figure offers a time honored way through these murky waters, a sort of Dante-esque tour through the hell of criminality. The private eye is also the person—often the only person—with the skills to solve the crime, and more importantly, the emotional need to find the culprit, no matter the cost. (In more modern iterations, this character might also be a cop or journalist.)
You can find the blueprint for many of the modern investigators we see in crime fiction today in Raymond Chandler’s essay, “The Simple Art of Murder,” which contains a few lines as famous (and as spoofed) as any Jane Austen ever committed to paper (“Down these mean streets, a man must go…”).
Besides being a rather bitchy airing of grievances among the other top crime novelists of the day—one gets the sense that Chandler was That Dude at a party, the kind who would complain about the low grade of alcohol while downing a bottle of the host’s stash by himself—Chandler’s essay also acted as a primer to a certain type of private investigator novel. It laid out exactly the type of man best suited to solve the most noir of crimes: a man both noble and removed from society, possessed of his own sense of justice and able to hold himself above the corruption of society by sheer virtue of his exemplary nature, even as he gives in to his fatal flaws—and boy, would there be fatal flaws a plenty. In the end, this ubermensch will restore order to a world he’s not sure is worth saving (but feels he’s powerless to change, or maybe just feels that it’s too hard to bother trying).
In Chandler’s world, which set the tone for hundreds of characters after him, the tarnished knight figure stands alone: no one else is capable of saving the day. His agency is the agency of the book and therefore the world. Even in books where Marlowe does receive aid—notably, from Anne Riordan in Farewell, My Lovely—it’s a fleeting occurrence, not likely to carry through to other novels. The white knight works alone.
Chandler’s screed has another problem—the man who down these mean streets must go is all too frequently a “justice tourist;” he walks these streets but is not a part of them. Even as he wears the emotional scars of his work—a noble streak of alcoholism, a penchant for pensive jazz-music listening overlooking the city from his perch above crime—he’s but a brief visitor in the space where crime occurred. “[The best man in his world” too frequently translates to a justice seeker without the emotional stakes or community ties necessary to understand the world in which he’s working. This need for authentic ties to a community is an integral part of the #ownvoices movement, particularly in crime novels, located at the intersection of a real-life need for lawkeepers and enforcers to be part of the community they’re serving, not above it, and a need for crime novels to reflect the complexity of the justice system at large.
(For a real life counterpart, Jill Leovy’s excellent fact crime book, Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America beautifully illustrates the stakes at play when cops actually live and thrive in the neighborhoods they police.)
Early in November, the great Laura Lippman tweeted a thread about the private investigator. Traditional tropes aside, the central flaw of the crime novel—and the private investigator novel in particular—is that too often the restoration at the end of the novel seems to indicate that that particular evil is contained for all time. Sure, that young woman of color was found murdered but we found the one person responsible—lock him away and surely everyone else is safe…right?
It makes for a satisfying book but a troubling reality, because it places the blame for the deaths of the victims—which all too often correlate closely to vulnerable real-life populations—squarely on the shoulders of one individual who can be contained and blamed. It’s not institutional racism or misogyny if it’s just one psychopath (or one bad apple), is it?
But is that the type of crime solver our stories—our culture—requires today? And more to the point, does this traditional model of the PI uphold a version of white privilege and white supremacy?
One could, of course, imagine that The Simple Art of Murder should be considered in the context of a living text (like the Constitution, which should be updated and adjusted as the concerns of the times do) or else one could just say, “screw it,” and write the kind of crime novel one wants without hewing to Chandler’s exhortations. (It’s not as if the book is the end-all be-all in how to write a crime novel, after all.) But the tide of change is slow, and the weight of precedent heavy—and there’s a helluva lot of precedent and tradition in the crime/mystery/thriller sphere that tilts towards a conservative vision of crime, justice, and storytelling.
As Laura Lippman tweeted, “We need to rethink everything about private eyes. How we define them, what they do, whether their job is to restore the old order or create a new one.” I see a variety of realms in which this change needs to take place: a greater expanse of stories told, and by whom; a sea change in the world of publishing that allows for greater latitude in regards to the types of stories that make it into readers’ hands; and even a new freedom in how these stories are resolved (or left unresolved). Surely our skills as puzzle-makers/solvers can enable us to find new ways to satisfy readers without adhering to the blueprints of a genre established centuries ago.
While there’s obviously still plenty of room for the genre to grow, here is a roundup of only some of the fictional private investigators who manage to adhere to the best parts of the genre, while breaking the mold and crafting new traditions for generations to come.
Steph Cha’s new book, Your House Will Pay, is one of the standout books of 2019 (seriously, go read it right this very second!) but her contemporary noir Juniper Song novels (which starts with the peerless Follow Her Home, a book so good it made me cry on two levels: 1. As a reader for the sheer greatness of it and 2. As a writer for the sheer unmatchable greatness of it) introduce a young, female, Korean-American PI who brings a version of LA to vibrant life that Chandler never bothered to explore. As hardboiled as they come, Song knows that getting to the bottom of a case probably won’t make the world a better place—but she can’t not help.
If you prefer your noir served dark with a side of electric neon lights and balmy ocean breezes, Alex Segura doesn’t miss any of the beats of the best of noir (alcoholic hero, plot twists, double crosses) while still containing a tremendous amount of heart. And Fernandez, a Cuban-American and a reluctant investigator, doesn’t work alone: help comes in the form of his partner, Kathy Bentley, and the full community that Segura builds for Fernandez. Because what man truly is an island?
Kellye Garrett’s Detective By Day private investigator series has won the Agatha, Anthony, Lefty, and IPPY Awards. And for good reason: the books are narrated by Dayna Anderson, a former actress turned investigator who’s pretty much the most charming private investigator to ever reside in Los Angeles. While Dayna’s not the most hardboiled of private investigators, she never soft-sells the crimes she’s solving, and brings a sense of joy to the page and the reader.
Naomi Hirahara’s amateur sleuth Mas Arai is a staple in private investigator fiction, but I wanted to toss some love the way of her newest investigator, Leilani Santiago, a native Hawaiian woman who, in the novel Iced in Paradise, returns to her home on the islands and quickly becomes embroiled in a murder investigation. Hirahara keeps the stakes both very high (if Santiago doesn’t solve the crime, her father’s pinned as the murderer) while never neglecting the import of community for Santiago (and therefore, the world of the book/reader) or the tensions particular to authentic Hawaiian living.
Nicolas Obregon’s Inspector Iwata bounces from Japan in Blue Light Yokohama to Los Angeles in Sins As Scarlet but no matter the setting, remains dedicated to solving crimes that give closure to families even as he, in prime noir fashion, has suffered devastating personal tragedy. Iwata might feel alone—bilingual and bicultural, he’s a slipstream of a man—but he isn’t alone, nor does he remove himself from the comfort and support of community.
Kristen Lepionka’s Roxane Weary might “work too little and drink too much” (as per the Macmillan page for the series) in classic private investigator fashion, but she’s also a thoroughly modern investigator with a complicated personal/ bisexual romantic life. Despite her descriptive kicker of a last name, Weary can’t help picking up personal attachments in her own life.
No one wrestles harder or more eloquently with the effects of white supremacy on America than Attica Locke in her Highway 59 series, starring main character and Texas Ranger Darren Matthews. In Bluebird, Bluebird, Matthews confronts racism—both the legacy of America’s racist roots, as well as active strains of it—in his quest to solve two murders, and in Heaven, My Home, Matthews must find a missing child: the son of a local white supremacy group. In both, Locke uses her gripping narrative power to confront difficult questions about the intersection of policing, justice, and race.
Like Sherlock Holmes by way of Long Beach, Joe Ide’s IQ is an unofficial investigator who takes on the cases that police won’t or can’t touch. Ide’s iconic character remembers everything, puts everything together faster than anyone else, and is, at times, the sole light of justice in a community that police and lawmakers have written off. Ide makes it clear that IQ, while extraordinary, is not above or outside his community, but part of it—and that, as much as his eidetic memory, is his true superpower in solving crime.
Tori Eldridge’s ass-kicking ninja heroine Lily Wong was first introduced in 2019’s The Ninja Daughter, on a quest to avenge her murdered sister. Eldridge shatters the mold with Wong, who uses her particular set of skills to protect vulnerable communities of women. Make no mistake, Eldridge’s heroine is damaged in that familiarly noirish way but unlike other sword-wielding badass women (say, The Bride in Kill Bill), Wong’s quest of vengeance is also in service of making the world a better place than she found it—not returning to the status quo of a world that saw her sister raped and murdered.
While not a traditional private investigator (and, sadly, not the start of a series), the narrator from Kalisha Buckhanon’s Speaking of Summer features a protagonist as determined to uncover a mystery as any PI paid to be on the case. Autumn’s sister Summer has gone missing, seemingly into thin winter air—and no one else seems to be looking for her. A story about a missing black woman also weaves in the hard facts that for many missing black women (and their loved ones) in America, this story is not fiction but all too real.
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Crime fiction has plenty of room to grow and become more expansive: more inclusive, more diverse, more experimental. In the meantime, go buy these books.
