Joyce Simons

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Archives for October 2017

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A Brief History of Private Investigation

Earlier this month, I started attending classes for the Certificate in Private Investigation at the University of Washington. It was recommended to me by crime novelist and program graduate Ingrid Thoft, and I’m told by the organizers that it’s the only program of its kind in the U.S. My goal is to learn the investigative techniques that my protagonist, amateur detective Maxime Martin, will need to catch a killer. But I’m learning so much more and we’re just three classes into the program.

For instance, did you know that in the criminal justice system…

  • The truth has no bearing on a trial. The burden of proof is on the prosecution to prove the elements of its case beyond a reasonable doubt. The job of the defense is to cast doubt on one or more of those elements, and thus compel a jury to render a verdict of Not Guilty. The defendant’s job in all this is to let his or her attorney do their job. The “what really happened” story is of no consequence and could very well remain a mystery during a trial and long after it ends.
  • The police investigate crimes on behalf of the prosecution. Private investigators, if they’re involved at all, typically work for the defense.
  • The police stop investigating when they think they’ve found what they were looking for. If they believe a victim died from a gunshot wound and they find a smoking gun, they call it a day. But what if the victim actually died of poisoning and the gunshot just covered up that fact? Private investigators tend to pick up where the police leave off, almost like a murder of crows picking over the detritus of a crime scene. Find the poison, and the prosecution’s entire case can be thrown into question.

The tagline for the UW program is: Uncover the Facts and Expose the Truth. Which feels so poignant now that I know what I just listed above. It’s not the job of the prosecutor, the defense attorney, the judge, or the jury to uncover the truth; that job belongs to the private investigator. Writing novels that lay out a crime, untangle a mystery, and expose the truth just got a whole lot more satisfying.

A happy consequence of learning about the function of private investigation is that I started wondering how it got its start. (Being a lover of history, digging into the origins of something is an activity I relish.) I always assumed that it all began with Sherlock Holmes.

How wrong I was!

Eugène François Vidocq

The first known private investigation agency was opened in 1833 by a Frenchman, Eugène François Vidocq, who accepted money in exchange for solving crimes.

Eugène François Vidocq

He made the first plaster casts of shoe prints. He ran a printing company that created indelible ink. And, like the kindly Bishop Myriel in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, he didn’t turn in people who committed crimes motivated by real need.

Allen Pinkerton

Seventeen years later in the U.S., Allen Pinkerton started his own detective agency and rose to fame when he foiled a plot to assassinate President-Elect Abraham Lincoln.

Allen Pinkerton

At one point, the Pinkerton Detective Agency had more agents than the U.S. Army and was consequently outlawed in some states because it could be hired as a “private army.” Which is exactly what happened when it was hired as strikebreakers and bounty hunters (of Jesse James, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, among others). Its motto was We Never Sleep, which inspired the term, “private eye.”

But what about private investigators in fiction? Surely, they can be traced back to Sherlock, can’t they?

Wrong again! The beginnings of detective fiction can be traced all the way back to the Bible. Here’s a brief rundown of what you can read about in detail in a Wikipedia article on detective fiction:

Ancient literature

Read the Old Testament story of Susanna and the Elders, and it’ll sound a bit like a case of he-said-she-said. But when Daniel inserts himself and cross-examines the two witnesses, the truth is uncovered, the false accusers are condemned to death, and justice reigns. Similar stories of detection can be found in Oedipus Rex by Sophocles in which Oedipus uses cross-examination to uncover the murder of King Laius (never mind that his efforts implicate himself in the murder), The Three Apples narrated by Scheherazade in the Arabian Nights (which could be subtitled Two Fall Guys and a Guilty Slave), and Gong’an fiction of Ancient China (in which the detective is the local magistrate).

Early modern literature and beyond

Not surprisingly, another Frenchman pops up in history as a pioneer in private investigation.

Voltaire

In 1747, Voltaire’s novella Zadig ou la Destinée (Zadig, or the Book of Fate) appeared and seems to have influenced countless mystery novelists who followed, from Edgar Allen Poe (who is credited with having established the detective fiction genre with The Murders in the Rue Morgue in 1841), to Arthur Conan Doyle (creator of Sherlock Holmes and his trusted chronicler, Dr. Watson), to Queen of Crime Agatha Christie, who presided over the Golden Age of Detective Fiction during the 1920s and 1930s.

In the years that followed, hardboiled novels replaced classic whodunits in popularity (think Dashiell Hammett, Erle Stanley Gardner, Raymond Chandler, etc.), until the 21st century when Michael Collins ushered in the PI series of the Modern Age.

For me personally, given all the authors, genres, and subgenres through the ages, there’s something irresistible about reading a great cozy mystery, and it has nothing to do with drinking tea (which I don’t drink) or owning cats (which I’m allergic to). What lies at the heart of a “cozy” is a mystery that needs solving without the overdone window dressing of graphic sex or violence, and takes the reader along for the adventure.

If I’m lucky, my KNITTING DETECTIVE series will one day appear on the list of “Detective debuts and swansongs” at the bottom of the Wikipedia article on detective fiction. And then I can say it all started with A SCANDAL IN NICE and the ending is TBD because Maxime will be making stops in Lyon (in book two) and Versailles (in book three) before taking up his beautifully crafted knitting needles in-between unraveling a few skeins of luxurious yarns and unraveling his next big mystery.

Thanks this week go to fellow student at the UW and published mystery author Marianne Harden, who is filling my commute with invaluable advice about finding representation, and who has become my partner in crime in exercising our powers of observation as writers to decipher the private lives of our instructors. (But let’s keep that last factoid just between us!)

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Are You Different in Different Languages?

If you speak more than one language, you may have noticed that the way you present yourself to others varies depending on which language you’re speaking.

For instance, I’m a confident speaker of my mother tongue (English). I consider myself articulate and, being a native New Yorker, there’s a certain boppity-bop-bop to the way I speak. When I recently asked a group of friends for a list of adjectives that best describe my personality, “direct” bubbled to the top, which is consistent with my speech style. I tend not to beat around the bush.

But when I asked my French friends to do the same, their list was surprisingly different. According to them, when I speak French I come across as “cheerful.” Hmm, how did “direct,” which I sometimes have to temper lest I inadvertently say something that rubs someone the wrong way, morph into “cheerful?” I like to think I’m fluent in French. But I make frequent mistakes, struggle occasionally to find the right word, and almost always laugh at my foibles. So there’s a certain amount of humility that plays into my forays in la francophonie. Hence, my cheerfulness.

Eiffel Tower

Expressing your style in written French presents a whole new set of challenges. According to one of my former French professors, the French language has 30% fewer words than the English language. So what we anglophones might sum up in an adjective might be said in French with a verb phrase, for instance. And even when you can find an appropriate word-for-word translation, it often doesn’t sound like something a native French speaker would say or write. Oh la la.

A couple of years ago, a Parisian friend living in Nice came up with the idea to publish an anthology of short stories (nouvelles, in French, not courtes contes, which translates literally as “short stories” but is more accurately translated as the nonsensical “limited fairytales”). Each story would be a first-hand account of how a world-famous monument came to be. She gathered a group of writers from the countries where the monuments are located, and went to work assigning one monument to each of us. She found a French-speaking Egyptian to write about the Great Pyramids, a Parisian to write about the Eiffel Tower, etc.

But when it came time to write about the Statue of Liberty, she told me that another writer— who was only half-American— wanted to write it. So I told her how I had an unobstructed view of the statue from my home in Brooklyn Heights, NY. That’s all she needed to hear: I got the assignment (the other writer was assigned Big Ben), and she gave me the option to write it in either English or French. I chose English and produced a short story whose tone blended an appropriately woe-is-me attitude with some home-brewed NYC snark. As soon as she read what I had written, she asked me to write the French version. Zut alors!

Here are just a few of the challenges I faced:

  • Research shows that French translations are about 15-20% longer than their original English text. So if you’re trying to match or fall below your English word count, good luck with that.
  • There are three clearly defined levels of French: familiar, standard, and soutenu, or formal. In English, we have one. So when translating from English to French, you have to choose the appropriate level for the text and be consistent within it.
  • French is rife with faux amis, or false friends. What might seem like an accurate translation could end up having a completely opposite meaning. For instance, if you feel “blessed” in English, let’s hope you’re not blessé in French because it means you’re injured.
  • While there are myriad ways to say something in English, there may be just one way to say the same thing in French. And that one way might have more than one meaning. For example, French may be considered the “language of love” but the word for “love” (aimer) is the same as the word for “like.” Je t’aime means “I love you.” But if you want to say, “I like you,” you’d say je t’aime bien, where bien means “well.” So loving someone well means you like them. Go figure.

My favorite adventure in translation came at the end of my Statue of Liberty story, in which the last line made it clear that Lady Liberty may have been born in France, but she has become a dyed-in-the-wool, potty-mouthed New Yorker. Which presented two new challenges. First, French people seem to think that New Yorkers are elegant folk. The only thing plus chic than being Parisian is being New Yorkais. But in my experience, scratch the surface of anyone born and raised in the tri-state area, and you’ll find a hint of vulgarity beneath even the most elegant veneer. Second, after I toned down the vulgarity of my last sentence at my friend’s request, I had to find a decent translation for “No one messes with Lady Liberty.” (You can easily guess which verb I originally chose.) The problem was that there’s no obvious translation for “mess with.” So I asked some of my French friends for their ideas, and the result was an exercise in hilarity.

Here are some of the options we came up with, translated word-for-word from French:

  1. Whore, don’t touch Lady Liberty.
  2. Don’t joke around with Lady Liberty.
  3. If you look for Lady Liberty, you’ll find me.

In the end, we agreed to go with option 2, though I pushed hard for the infinitely more vulgar option 1 because it packs a punch that the other two don’t.

So there you have it. I may be direct in spoken English and cheerful in spoken French, but I lean toward vulgarity in written French. Merci mille fois to my friend Iveline de Normandie for teaching me these things about myself and for bringing our anthology of monument stories to life. If you want to read it, it’s available on Amazon in English (as The Wisdom of Monuments) and in French (as La Sagesse des Monuments). And if you do read it, please post a review on Amazon or send me comments because I love the feedback— especially if you want to propose an alternative translation for that last line. Just don’t be surprised if the style of your translation says more about you than you imagined!