George,
Re your comment below:
> I would argue that they [insurance
investigators]
> don't, unless specifically
> licensed as private investigators. One of
the
> things
> that differentiates the PI work from
other
> mystery/crime pieces is that license, in my
opinion.
>
> I've recently argued here that professionalism is
a
> key to the genre, as well (professionalism as
versus
> amateurism, I mean), and a license is part of
that.
I really have to disagree here. There are any number of ways
in real life that one can be a PI without having a license.
One can be an operative of a licensed agency, like the Op,
without having a license of one's own.
One can work in a state or country that doesn't require PIs
to obtain a license. Colorado, for example, has no such
requirement.
Some states require free-lance insurance investigators
(as opposed to those employed directly by an insurance
company) to have a specific insurance investigator's license.
Some allow insurance investigators to operate under a general
PI license. Still others require them to have both, if they
accept both insurance and non-insurance cases. Others only
require an insurance investigator's license if a certain
percentage of their business is insurance; if the percentage
devoted to insurance is under that percentage they are
allowed to get by with the general PI license. That's all
bureaucratic hoops that real-life people in the profession
might have to jump through. For our purposes it doesn't
really matter.
I've made the same point about the HB world being,
essentially, a professional's world, but professionalism, in
this context, means making your living at it. It doesn't mean
getting the imprimatur of some state or national bureaucracy
that's just there to generate revenue anyway.
An insurance investigator is just a private investigator who
specializes in investigating insurance cases, so, for our
purposes, insurance investigators are PIs.
Incidentally, that seems to be how the Private Eye Writers of
America feel about it, too.
JIM DOHERTY
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