By K.D. Hays
Remember the
hardboiled detective? The private investigator hired to save a client wrongly
accused of some heinous crime was a staple of page and screen for many years.
But in our casual-Fridays world, the detective who stood out for wearing a
cheap suit is long gone. Characters solving crimes these days usually work in
law enforcement or serve as consultants to the police.
So when I started
writing cozy mysteries, why did I decide to make my sleuth Karen Maxwell a
private investigator? The obvious answer would be that I didn’t know what I was
doing. But I prefer to think that I did it to challenge myself.
Here’s why it’s a
bad idea to use a private detective in a modern mystery.
1) First
of all, there is no such thing as a private detective. Detectives work for the
police. “Private eyes” work for investigation firms, and most of their business
consists of doing background checks. Clients often hire investigators to find
out who’s stealing from them, but they don’t hire them to solve murders. So if
the lead character is a private investigator, she’s not going to be solving
murders, and most people pick up a mystery expecting to find at least one or
two dead bodies lurking in the pages. But in this situation, it actually works
in my favor. I tend to write with a lot of humor and it just didn’t feel right
to have characters snarking at each other over breakfast cereal while people
are dropping dead all over town.
2) The
second problem with using a private investigator as my fictional crime solver
is that a competent investigator already has a pretty good idea “whodunit” by
the time he or she goes out to a site to investigate. There may be a couple of
suspects, but nowhere near the number of red herrings that are required to
sustain a good mystery plot. What’s my solution to this problem? I deviate from
reality here and have my investigator spend more time “undercover” than a
client would realistically pay for.
3) A
third problem with using a private investigator as my fictional detective is
that most investigation work these days is done on the computer. If I write a
story where the heroine comes to the office and sits in front of her computer
for eight hours, it’s not going to be much fun to read even if I have her
associate turn the coffeemaker into a Feng Shui aquarium. My solution to this
problem is two-fold. First, I skip over most of the computer stuff. Second, I
would have Karen get even with her associate by doing something like covering
his motivational posters with banana stickers and sardine labels. It may not
advance the plot, but at least it’s a change of pace.
Of course, there
are some advantages to using a private investigator. For starters, it gives her
real reason to get involved in the first place. I don’t have to make my
character a busybody or know-it-all—she gets involved and starts asking
questions because that’s her job. And because it’s a new job and she’s not very
confident about either her abilities or her status in the firm, her insecurity
creates a sense of tension.
So while I would
not recommend other writers use private investigators as the main character in
a mystery novel, it works for my offbeat suburban soccer mom mysteries. Do you
prefer to see an amateur or “professional” solving mysteries?
_______________________________________________________________
Kate Dolan began
her writing career as a legal editor and then newspaper columnist before she
decided she was finally ready to tackle fiction. As the author of more
than a dozen novels and novellas, she writes historical fiction and romance
under her own name and contemporary mysteries and children's books under the
name K.D. Hays. Her book Roped In now available in
print and ebook! When not writing, she enjoys volunteering as a living
history interpreter, coaching jump rope and riding roller coasters with her
daughter. She loves to connect with readers on Facebook and through her website, www.katedolan.com https://twitter.com/KDHays https://www.facebook.com/Kate-Dolan-255723894451936/ https://www.facebook.com/Totos-Tale-158336124177702 http://katedolan.com/blog
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