Of course, Joe Gores is a professional writer. In fact,
whether one admires his work or not (and I admire it quite a
lot, as I sense most of you do), one has to be impressed by
the sheer work ethic he brings to the craft of fiction.
But here I'm talking about his past experiences as a
professional private detective that so informs his
fiction.
When his first DKA story, "The Mayfield Case"
(retitled "Find the Girl" in his STAKEOUT ON PAGE STREET
collection), was first reprinted in a BEST DETECTIVE STORIES
OF THE YEAR anthology, the editor of that series, Anthony
Boucher, noted that Gores was one of the few actual private
investigators to enter the mystery writing field since
Hammett (the parallels between Gores and Hammett have already
been mentioned).
It must have been a proud moment for Boucher when this story
first appeared in the 12/67 issue of EQMM. Though he'd sold
an average of two stories per year since 1957, while working
as a PI, he had never, AFAIK, written a PI story. A member of
the Bay Area chapter of MWA, Gores was asked by Boucher to
give a talk on what it was like to work as a real-life PI,
and specifically as a repo man, to a regular monthly meeting.
Boucher was so impressed with the talk that he suggested
Gores write a series based on his real-life experiences. The
DKA stories and novels were the result of that
suggestion.
Regretfully, Boucher died soon after the first DKA story was
published, so he never got to see how the series
developed.
But I'm going far afield here. The point is, Boucher was
quite right about few PI's actually turning their real-life
experiences into fiction between Hammett and Gores. Cleve F.
Adams, the creator of Rex McBride and other hard-boiled PI's
of the '30's and '40's, claimed on his dust-jacket bio that
he'd once been a private detective (along with an insurance
exec, a copper miner, and an art director for the movies),
but that always had the smell of puffery. I never really
believed it.
The only two private eye writers I can find between Hammett
and Gores, who were also for-sure private eyes in real life,
were a pair of agency ops in Kansas City, MO, named John
Roscoe and Mike Russo who, as
"Mike Roscoe," collborated on a rather enjoyable series of
Spillane-like novels featuring a KC shamus Johnny April, all
of which appeared in the '50's. No one actually followed in
the wake of Mike Roscoe, however. Indeed, as noted, the
Roscoe team was following in Spillane's wake.
But, just as Joseph Wambaugh's success, for all that there
had been cop-writers before him, seemed to start a tsumani of
cop-writers (including yours truly), Joe Gores's seems to
have been the source for a similar wave, if perhaps not quite
a tsunami, of professional PI's writing about their
work.
Following in Gores's footsteps, we've seen his fellow San
Franciscans, Jerry Kenneally, Elizabeth Pincus, Lise. S.
Baker all break into print, as well as Parnell Hall, Carolina
Garcia-Aguilera, Michael Stone, Art Hardin, and Don Winslow
from the rest of the country. And all of them, to at least a
degree, and in contrast to the "Mike Roscoe" team, following
Gores's lead in presenting some of the reality, instead of
the Chandleresque fantasy, of private eye-ing.
Gores has declared his stories and novels about DKA to be
"the first private eye procedural series." He qualifies this
by stating that Hammett's Op series was written before the
term "procedural" had been coined, which I regard as not
entirely logical. One might as well say that DRAGNET wasn't a
police procedural because it debuted on radio seven years
before Boucher coined the term "police procedural," or, for
that matter, that Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue"
wasn't a mystery because the term hadn't yet been coined to
described fiction dealing with the solution of crimes.
Still, there's no denying that Gores was doing something that
hadn't really been done before. Even Hammett, for all his
experience, was presenting a fantasy about what it was like
to to be a PI, a fantasy with a heavy dusting of informed
realism to be sure, but a fantasy nonetheless. Hammett
presented PI's routinely solving murders. Gores presented
PI's doing skip traces, looking for debtors who'd defaulted
on their obligations, repossessing cars, etc.
Aside from Gores, the only real PI procedural I can think of,
and it was a stand-alone not a series, was Stanley Ellin's
heavily-researched Edgar-winner THE EIGHTH CIRCLE.
So, to perhaps a greater degree than any other PI writer
since Hammett, Gores was a trend-setter.
JIM DOHERTY
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