I've always felt if you followed a real private detective around, it would be boring.
I've always wanted to play a hard-boiled gumshoe, as they say.
I was raised on John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee series. Something about this genre - hard-boiled-private-eye-with-heart-of-gold - never failed to take me away from whatever difficulties haunted my daily world to a wonderful land where I was no more than an enthralled spectator.
I worked for a private investigative agency briefly. I rarely had the opportunity to snoop.
I used to work as a private detective years and years ago.
He just waited until I stopped talking and said, 'Jesus, kid, you're almost a detective. All you need now is a gun, a gut, and three ex-wives. So what's your theory?
For some reason or another, 'Richard Diamond, Private Eye,' still sticks out in my mind. I don't think I particularly liked that show, but for some reason, he sticks in my mind.
Hardboiled crime fiction came of age in 'Black Mask' magazine during the Twenties and Thirties. Writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler learnt their craft and developed a distinct literary style and attitude toward the modern world.
I am a private detective. I am paid to be inquisitive and presumptuous.
He reached out, opened the glove compartment, and took out a gun. It was a Smith & Wesson .38 five-shot special. It looked a lot like my gun. "I stopped by your apartment this morning and picked this up for you," Ranger said. "I found it in the cookie jar." "Tough guys always keep their gun in the cookie jar." "Name one." "Rockford." Ranger grinned. "I stand corrected.
When I started out as a novelist, I thought I was going to be a private-eye writer. That was my intent, and that's what I studied, I mean, scholarly.
I loved 'Buddy Faro.' I loved the whole idea.
I've read a thousand private-eye novels.
My college senior thesis was going to be on the American private investigator.
I came to believe that being a private detective was the work I was meant to do.
To understand the current state of mind of both Sara Paretsky and her private detective alter ego, one must first roll back the clock to 1982, when Victoria Iphegenia Warshawski took her first investigative bow in 'Indemnity Only.'
What brought me to the table was Raymond Chandler and, to a lesser degree, Ross Macdonald and Dashiell Hammett. I was basically inspired to want to write like the classic private-eye writers.
I thought it was time for a tough, smart, likable female private investigator, and that's how VI came to life.
