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4.0 AVERAGE
4.0 AVERAGE
informative
medium-paced
This non-fiction book is excellent fodder for those who like to think about fiction and how it shapes and is shaped by society. This work embodies an academic form of "just the facts, ma'am," laying out actual events and private detective practices based on the historical record. These events and practices especially centered around strike-breaking. Historic private detectives were not heroes, to say the least. Then it compares them with the fictions told by the agencies themselves within their work (advertisements and reports) in order to garner respectability and more work, plus the fictions of the entertainment industry, from pulp fiction to radio shows to movie screens, and how they borrowed from real events.
The scope does not include police or police shows. It touches on women in (and running) private detective agencies, but there is an opportunity for further study there. It similarly touches on racial and ethnic divides that fueled some detective work, giving even less detail on Black and brown people involved in the detective work itself. It focuses on the detective legend as it shaped and was shaped by white U.S. culture, with a few hops overseas.
This book is especially good at exploring the contradiction in (especially white male) U.S. culture between being "rugged anti-authoritarian individualists" and being in favor of "law and order." That is certainly a line that the legendary detective walks.
The scope does not include police or police shows. It touches on women in (and running) private detective agencies, but there is an opportunity for further study there. It similarly touches on racial and ethnic divides that fueled some detective work, giving even less detail on Black and brown people involved in the detective work itself. It focuses on the detective legend as it shaped and was shaped by white U.S. culture, with a few hops overseas.
This book is especially good at exploring the contradiction in (especially white male) U.S. culture between being "rugged anti-authoritarian individualists" and being in favor of "law and order." That is certainly a line that the legendary detective walks.
Content Warnings
Minor: Bullying, Confinement, Death, Domestic abuse, Gun violence, Infidelity, Racism, Sexism, Torture, Violence, Kidnapping, Murder, Fire/Fire injury, Injury/Injury detail
All of these tags are discussed or mentioned in a detached and academic way, the violent ones mostly in the context of strikebreaking. The author is against strikebreaking, though it's not clear at the start.