Ingrid Thoft

July 29, 2018 By Joyce Simons

Glimpsing the Road Not Taken

It’s official: after ten months of study at the University of Washington, I’m now a private investigator. At the recommendation of crime novelist Ingrid Thoft, I enrolled in the UW’s Private Investigation program to learn the skills my protagonist will need to solve crimes. At the end of it, I received a Certificate in Private Investigation as well as a P.I. license. It’s just a piece of paper but for less than $20, I can buy a hoity toity P.I. badge because, as one of my instructors pointed out, it’s a lot more convincing when you knock on a witness’s door to wave a badge instead of a piece of paper:

Now the curious thing is that it was never my intention to become a practicing private eye. But after three courses, a deep dive in Washington State law, as well as firsthand accounts of what it’s like to be a criminal investigator and a civil one, I got swept up in the excitement.

In my last course, the instructor asked us to design our P.I. business cards. It was my favorite assignment (far more satisfying, imho, than recreating a car crash investigation, for instance) because I had to think up a name for my P.I. agency (which I have yet to open) and put my pseudo-design skills to use. And while I was going to all the trouble of choosing a catchy name, I wanted to make sure the domain name was available, just in case. Here’s what I came up with:

So now I’m in a bit of pickle. I’ve chosen my specialty (fraud investigation), and I’ve even started networking with people who have expertise in the field. One of my classmates, who is also a mystery novelist, chose surveillance as her specialty and suggested we go into business together. This could be fun! We are so unalike and yet compatible that our skills would complement each other quite nicely. She has as endless supply of patience (which will serve her well in surveillance); I have almost none. I have technical skills (which will serve me well in detecting fraud); hers are scarce. She wants to take the agency exam (which is required before we can open our own agency); I have no interest in sitting through another exam. She doesn’t seem terribly interested in setting up our agency website; I already plunked down $10 to buy whodunitpi.com from GoDaddy and set up a website (www.whodunitpi.com).

There’s no rush to decide whether to moonlight as a P.I. while I work on my next novel. But I feel like a path has opened up before me. Now I just need to decide whether to set foot on it. It’s an intriguing proposition. If I don’t at least try to investigate a case or two before committing to any bigger undertaking (like opening an agency), will I regret it?

Strangely, sometimes you get a glimpse of the road not taken. And it feels like time stalled and threw open a window for you to peek into. I know this because it has happened to me before.

Back when I was in my twenties, I dreamed of living in Paris. At the time, my written French was respectable but my spoken French was not. Nonetheless, I answered a Help Wanted ad for a translator in The New York Times. I was called in for an interview and made it all the way to the last step: meeting with the president for a sit-down in French. He told me I had passed the translation test with flying colors but my conversational skills were lacking. He was in a pickle himself because the only other candidate (whose name was Laura, I discovered, when we rode the bus to the interview together) who had made it that far had outstanding conversational skills but her test scores were lower. What to do?

The answer seemed obvious: choose me! But he chose Laura. And my heart broke a little when I learned that I would not be moving to Paris.

A couple of years later, I answered another Help Wanted ad in The New York Times, was flown to Seattle, was offered an amazing job, and started my new life here in the Pacific Northwest. But part of me always wondered: what if I had gotten that job in Paris? What would my life have been like? I pictured myself going to a whirlwind of parties with fascinating francophones, living in one of the most beautiful cities in the world, breakfasting on croissants, maybe even meeting someone who lived in a chateau. It was all very Funny Face meets Amélie meets Midnight in Paris.

And then, shortly after starting my new job, I was offered the chance to go to a conference in Minneapolis. I had always wants to go to Minneapolis since I grew up watching The Mary Tyler Moore Show and wondered whether the city was anything like it was portrayed in that filmed-in-Studio City sitcom. Maybe I’d even toss a beret in the air.

Shortly after arriving at the conference, I heard someone call my name. I turned around, and there was Laura, the woman who had beat me out of the job in Paris. She had come to Minneapolis for the same conference.

What an opportunity! I was dying to hear about her magical life in the City of Light. I knew I’d be green with envy but I was so curious to learn what my own life could have been like. So we met up between sessions, and she laid it all out for me: she hated her job; Paris was so expensive that she had to live at the end of some metro line; she was not living the dream. In fact, did I know of any openings at the company where I worked?

What a gift. Now, that’s not to say that I would have hated the job and would have chosen to live in some dodgy quartier of Paris. But life had dealt me a hand that was hard to beat: I worked for one of the most successful companies in the world; I was making friends right and left; I had a beautiful home that suited me to a T. And when I vacation in Paris, I stay in one of the chic arrondissements within walking distance of everything I want to do.

So to come back full circle, I’m not in a rush to investigate a crime or embark on a road that might not be to my liking in the end. I have faith that when the time is right, a window will open and I’ll be shown the darker side of life as a P.I. (many of my former classmates are now friends I keep in touch with). Or maybe I’ll find an immensely satisfying way to marry my interests in a way that wouldn’t be possible without a background in tech, a passion for writing mystery novels, and my newly acquired skills as an investigator.

And when that happens, it’ll be something worth throwing my beret in the air about.

Thanks this week go to Ingrid Thoft, who drew my name out of a bucket and made me the lucky winner of a book raffle, and ultimately helped make me a private investigator too.

October 30, 2017 By Joyce Simons

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 21^st 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!)

August 23, 2017 By Joyce Simons

Teaching an Old Dog New Tricks

These days, all my social activities with friends who are parents of school-age kids have been put on hold while they gear up for the new school year. If I had kids, I’d be swinging from the rafters at the thought of having my weekdays (or part of them, anyway) back to myself. And then I thought that I do have kids; they just happen to be of the canine variety. And it got me thinking: is it really impossible to teach old dogs new tricks?

I have one new dog, who’s six years old and highly trainable. No problem with new tricks there. And I have one older dog, who’s twelve and has never been trainable, not even by the best trainer I know. Getting her to sit on command reminds me of the scene in Skyfall when the villain, played by Javier Bardem, bemoans the senselessness of Bond’s refusal to do what he wants and ends by lamenting, “It’s exhausting.” In fact, I often try to mimic his accent when I say the same thing to my “senior” dog.

Javier Bardem in SKYFALL

And then I realized that transitioning to a new career means I have to send myself back to school and be open to new tricks. Luckily for me, I love learning new things. In just the past month, I’ve signed myself up for three new learning experiences:

Survival strategies, which combines practical self-defense techniques with tactical handheld weaponry. I do not like guns, though I enjoy target practice. And I loathe knives except to slice, dice, chop, julienne, and otherwise cut food. I’m more of an air horn girl. One blast of that thing should send an intruder careening toward the exit signs. But it’s not a suitable accessory for a small purse. Better to know how to wriggle out of an attacker’s grip and run to safety brandishing pepper spray if need be. It’s something that my protagonist, Maxime Martin, had better know how to do too, sans pepper spray.
The University of Washington’s Certificate in Private Investigation. At the recommendation of crime novelist Ingrid Thoft, to whom I’ll forever be grateful for turning me onto this program, I applied for admission and I’ll be sitting in the classroom this fall. I can’t wait to learn how to “uncover the facts and expose the truth,” according to the program description, because Maxime will need this know-how for the sequel to my first novel, A SCANDAL IN NICE.
The Book Passage Mystery Writers Conference, which was recommended to me by Hallie Ephron, author of my favorite how-to book, Writing and Selling Your Mystery Novel. This conference starts in a couple of weeks, about the same time that my friends’ kids will be facing their first day of school.

I’ve never been to a writers’ conference, so I don’t know exactly what to expect. And being reasonably new to mystery writing, I had never heard of the Book Passage Mystery Writers Conference. So I googled it and found a blog post by mystery writer Katherine Bolger Hyde. What a find— and what an inspiration! She describes how she struggled for ten years to launch her career as a mystery writer. And then, in the space of about ten months, she applied for a scholarship to this conference, won the scholarship, attended the conference, met literary agent Kimberley Cameron, became her client, and ended up with a two-book deal.

It didn’t take this “old dog” (though I prefer “young pup,” but let’s be real) more than ten minutes to follow the scent to the Book Passage website, sniff out information about the scholarship, send in my submission, think good thoughts, and prepare to wait for a reply.

And last week I got the news: I am the recipient of this year’s William Gordon scholarship! WOOT!!!

So while my friends’ kids gather their school supplies and agonize over what they’ll wear on their first day of school, I’ll be doing the same things. Only I’ll be jetting down to San Francisco to begin my schooling at this four-day conference.

Thanks to William C. Gordon for funding the scholarship, Kathryn Petrocelli at Book Passage for her delightful emails, and Hallie Ephron for her suggestion that I check out this conference. But most of all, thank you to someone I’ve never met or had contact with—Katherine Bolger Hyde—for taking the time to blog about her experience and inspire someone a thousand miles away to follow in her footsteps.

San Francisco, here I come!