DRIVING WITHOUT A LICENSE

by Jim Doherty

 

In his book A Reader's Guide to Private Eye Novels (Hall, 1993), award-winning reference librarian and well-known mystery critic Gary Warren Niehbur suggested a three-pronged definition of the hard-boiled private eye. The first of the three theorems he proposed was, “The detective must have a license to practice as a private eye.”

However, in the very next paragraph, he offers the first of several exceptions to this requirement: “Corollary #1 – The detective is in every other circumstance a private eye, but has not bothered to get a license.”

I mention this because I've been thinking a lot lately about famous private eye characters who are not, in a legal sense, private eyes, but who, as Mr. Niehbur puts, are “in every other circumstance” following the trail blazed by Hammett and paved by Chandler.

To make things clear, I am not talking about characters who are legitimately and legally practicing the profession of private detection despite their lack of certification.

Characters, for example, like Hammett's nameless Op, who was a paid, full-time employee of the Continental Detective Agency, or Frederic Nebel's Donahue, similarly employed by the Inter-State Detective Agency, do not fall into the “unlicensed” category. Such characters, though lacking a license of their own, are legitimately working under the license of their employers, and as such, are not unlicensed as Niehbur was (and, for the purposes of this column, I am) using it.

Similarly, there are states and countries that do not require one to be licensed before hanging out one's P.I. shingle. Colorado , for example, does not license private investigators. Neither does Great Britain .

Consequently, characters such as Rex Burns's Denver PI Devlin Kirk, Michael Stone's Denver PI Streeter, Dave Zeltserman's Boulder PI Bill Shannon, or Dick Francis's English PI Sid Halley, do not fit the parameters of this column because they operate in jurisdictions that, by not requiring anyone to acquire a license or permit to operate a detective agency, in effect, issue everyone a license or permit if they happen to be disposed to a detective agency. In other words, such characters are, for practical purposes, already licensed even though they never had to go to the trouble of jumping through bureaucratic hoops.

But what I'm talking about here are characters who practice private detection totally under the radar of bureaucracy. Characters who actively seek out assignments as detectives, who are regularly getting paid to undertake investigations for private clients, but who are doing so, not to mince words, illegally.

There were literally hundred, perhaps thousands, of private eye characters created during the pulp era, and it's likely that a few of them were practicing the trade illegitimately. But if they were, they have so far, flown under my radar as well as the radar of officialdom.

The two closest characters I know of from the pulp era are Frank Gruber's Oliver Quade, who appeared primarily in Black Mask , and John K. Bulter's Steve Midnight, whose stories appeared in Dime Detective . Though both are hard-boiled, neither one really fits the bill, though, because neither one is a professional detective, on or off the books. Quade is a door-to-door encyclopedia salesman, who in the course of his travels selling his wares, has a tendency to get involved in crimes that he is then obliged to solve. Similarly Stephen Middleton Knight, aka “Steve Midnight,” is a cab driver who doesn't look for trouble, but whom trouble invariably finds, forcing him, as it forced Quade, to solve the cases that come his way. They are, for all their toughness and colloquial manner, amateur detectives, not all that dissimilar, when you get right down to it, to such cozy characters as Dorothy L. Sayers's Lord Peter or Agatha Christie's Miss Marple, at least in terms of their professional credentials.

The earliest character I can think of who truly fills the bill is not a scion of prose fiction, but of Old-Time Radio drama. The titular hero of a series called Pat Novak for Hire (1946-49) hung around San Francisco 's waterfront. He had a seedy office there from which he rented boats and did “anything else that sounds like money.” In episode after episode of this incredibly tough series, the “anything else” Novak was invariably hired to do was solve murders, act as a client's bodyguard, recover stolen property, locate missing persons, and, in general, to perform all the other tasks we associate with private eyes. Never once, as far as I can recall, was he ever hired to rent out a boat.

The show started out as a local production of Station KGO, San Francisco 's ABC affiliate. A young actor named Jack Webb played Novak and got a lot of notice as a consequence. The show was popular enough that the network decided to put it on nationwide, but, curiously, decided to use another actor in the pivotal role. It soon became evident that Webb's breezily tough delivery was a huge part of what made the character work.

But, if the network realized its mistake, it was too late, for Webb was no longer available. Mutual Broadcasting immediately saw what had escaped their rivals at ABC, and hired Webb to headline a show called Johnny Modero – Pier 23 (1947). Modero hung around San Francisco 's waterfront, where he had a seedy office from which he rented boats and took any other odd jobs that came along. Inevitably, those odd jobs included solving murders, acting as the client's bodyguard, recovering stolen property, locating missing persons, and, in general, performing all the other tasks we associate with private eyes. Never once, as far as I can recall, was he ever hired to rent out a boat. In other words, Modero was basically a clone of Novak .

It would take awhile for ABC to get the message. When Modero shuffled off into OTR oblivion, Webb moved over to CBS, where he played an officially licensed P.I. (or at least an operative of an officially licensed P.I. agency) named Jeff Regan – Investigator (1948). In 1949, ABC finally took the hint, and hired Webb for the nationally broadcast Novak series. But Webb had his own ideas. A few months after reclaiming the Novak role, Webb left the show to take on the part of another detective in a series he'd created himself, a series that proved to have some staying power. The character was a cop named Joe Friday, and the show was called Dragnet (NBC, 1949-56).

As radio drama died out, and television became ascendant, the private eye show became a staple of the new medium, as it had been of the old. Frank Lovejoy, who had played on of TV's very first private eyes, Mike Barnett, in a revived version of Man Against Crime (NBC, 1956), actually made his P.I, debut in a 1954 episode of the anthology series Four Star Playhouse (CBS, 1952-56) entitled “The Long Count.” He portrayed a traveling troubleshooter who, like Novak and Modero, seemed willing to do any marginally honest job that came along. In “The Long Count” he was bodyguarding a boxer in the days leading up to a major bout. Mainly from a shady lady with whom the pug was enamored. In 1957, shortly after Lovejoy's brief turn as Mike Barnett ended, NBC revived the McGraw character for a series called Meet McGraw . The show lasted only a season, but that was enough for forty-one episodes, as McGraw (“That's enough of a name for a man like McGraw,” the announcer informed us over the opening credits), traveled from town to town, accepting assignments that involved rescuing distressed damsels, overturning corrupt municipal administrations, tracking down runaway kids, solving murders, and recovering stolen property. And all without a license.

Arguably, the most famous unlicensed P.I. was John D. MacDonald's first and only series character, Travis McGee, who was introduced in The Deep Blue Goodbye (Gold Medal, 1964). McGee called himself a “salvage consultant,” and his specialty was recovering lost or stolen property for half of whatever the property was worth. In most books, as he carried out his salvage operation, he inevitably met gorgeous but psychically wounded women, who somehow seemed able to recover their emotional equilibrium after a healthy, therapeutic session in the sack with McGee who, for all his toughness, was an incredibly tender and empathetic lover. McGee was a bachelor who lived in Florida on a spacious houseboat called The Busted Flush , had a best friend with whom he got to talk endlessly about his personal philosophy (which, evidently, when you boiled it down, seemed to be roughly equivalent to the philosophy of Al Capp's Mammy Yokum, “Goodness is better than badness, because it's nicer”), and drank a lot of his favorite beer (Dos Equis). Add in all the beautiful ladies he got to sleep with in the interests of psychological health, and he was living a life most of his readers could only daydream about. Which may have accounted for the phenomenal popularity of the series. MacDonald's undoubted talent as a writer and storyteller probably had a little something to do with it, too.

Donald Westlake adopted the pseudonym Tucker Coe for a series of five superb novels about guilt-ridden ex-cop Mitch Tobin, thrown off the NYPD after his partner was killed while Tobin was spending duty time enjoying the adulterous bed of a lady whose husband was in prison. Tobin's wife forgave the infidelity, but Tobin couldn't forgive himself. He spent his time in the backyard, slowly building a brick wall to keep out a world he no longer believed he had a place in. He supported himself and his family by taking on occasional investigations, but he does so with great reluctance. Slowly, though, the casework had the therapeutic effect of forcing him to come to terms with his guilt and deal with it. Tobin was introduced in Kinds of Love, Kinds of Death (Random, 1966). By his last appearance, Don't Lie to Me (Random, 1972), Tobin had obtained a P.I. license (thus making himself no longer eligible for consideration in this column), gotten a part-time job as a night security guard at an art museum, and was well on the way to psychological recovery. Largely on the strength of the Tobin series, Westlake was awarded the P.W.A. “Eye” award for Lifetime Achievement as a private eye writer.

If Travis McGee is arguably the most famous unlicensed private eye in fiction, Lawrence Block's Matt Scudder is the character giving McGee the strongest argument. Introduced in a paperback original called The Sins of the Father (Dell, 1976), Scudder is, on the surface, very similar to Tobin. Like Westlake 's character, he is a guilt-ridden NYPD officer, who left the force under a cloud. Unlike Tobin, he wasn't fired for dereliction of duty involving illicit sex. He resigned from the force (and abandoned his wife and kids) after accidentally killing a child during a shootout. It wasn't really his fault, but he blames himself nonetheless, and no longer feels fit to be a cop, a husband, or a father. He tries to dull the guilt by drinking copious amounts of liquor, and, unlike most fictional private eyes who drink copious amounts of liquor (but exactly like most real-life people who drink copious amounts of liquor), he becomes an alcoholic. Like most alcoholics, he doesn't admit it, at least not at first. By the fifth novel in the series, Eight Million Ways to Die (Arbor, 1982), in my humble opinion one of the finest private eye novels ever written, he finally comes to terms with his addiction, and the series seems to come to an end, as Tobin's series did once he learned to cope with his demons. Unlike Westlake , Block, with some reluctance at first, found a way to make Scudder's recovery as compelling as his addiction, and there are now sixteen novels and eight short stories in the series.

Scudder is one of the most honored private eyes in fiction. Three novels in the series, Time to Murder and Create (Dell, 1977), Eight Million Ways to Die , and A Long Line of Dead Men (Morrow, 1994) were Edgar nominees, as was one of the short stories, “Looking for David” ( EQMM , February 1998). Another novel, A Dance at the Slaughterhouse (Morrow, 1991), and another short story, “By the Dawn's Early Light” ( Playboy , August 1984) both won Edgars. The novels Eight Million Ways to Die and The Devil Knows You're Dead (Morrow, 1993), and the short stories “By the Dawn's Early Light” and “The Merciful Angel of Death” ( New Mystery , Dutton, 1993) also won Shamus awards from the PWA, while the novels A Stab in the Dark (Arbor, 1981), When the Sacred Ginmill Closes (Morrow, 1986), Out on the Cutting Edge (Morrow, 1989), A Ticket to the Boneyard (Morrow, 1990), A Dance at the Slaughterhouse , and A Long Line of Dead Men were all nominees. At the 2009 Shamus Awards, Scudder (and by extension his creator), was the recipient of the Hammer for being a character who has been a significant contribution to P.I. literature. Block himself, not only for his Scudder series but for his entire body of work, has won the MWA Grand Master, the PWA Eye, the CWA Diamond Dagger, and the SMFS Golden Derringer, a hat trick plus one of lifetime achievement awards.

Like Donohue, Streeter, McGraw, and many others, Harding, the hero of a trilogy of Chicago-set novels by John Wessel, goes exclusively by his surname. He actually had a P.I. license once upon a time, but lost it when he got convicted of manslaughter. Now he drives cabs, guides tourists, does handyman work, and all sorts of other odd jobs, including the occasional investigative or surveillance assignment that he gets thrown from time to time. He made his debut in This Far, No Further (Simon & Schuster, 1996), which received a Shamus nomination for Best First P.I. Novel, and reappears in Pretty Ballerina (Simon & Schuster, 1998) and Kiss It Goodbye (Simon & Schuster, 2001). The series is well-regarded and has drawn praise for its compelling protagonist and its colorful, knowledgeable depiction of the Windy City , but its “present tense” mode of narration may put off some readers.

One of my current favorite TV shows, Burn Notice ( USA , 2007- ), features an unlicensed PI named Mike Weston. One of America 's top intelligence operatives when the show begins, he is suddenly fired, for reasons he doesn't understand, right in the middle of a dangerous operation. Managing to extricate himself, he winds up quarantined in Miami , with no financial assets, no identifying documents, no credit history, and no work history. With the help of his best friend, former Navy S.E.A.L. Same Axe, an ex-girlfriend (and not so ex at that), semi-reformed I.R.A. terrorist Fiona Glenanne, and, occasionally, his mother, Madeline, Weston tries to solve the mystery of who got him blacklisted, and why, financing this investigation by taking cases from clients in deep trouble. The pilot episode of Burn Notice won the show's creator, Matt Nix, an Edgar for Best Mystery Teleplay from a Series of 1977.

We tend to think of the hard-boiled private eye as a loner, a rebel, a non-conformist who marches to the beat of his own drum. In some ways, this is not quite compatible with a character who goes hat-in-hand to some overpaid bureaucrat to ask for permission to do the work for which his talent, experience, and personality best suit him. In some ways, in fact, you can make a case that a “real” private eye would just give the bureaucrat an upturned middle finger, and go ahead and do the work anyway.