Writing a
mystery novel from a P.I.’s perspective . . .
There’s
no denying that my background as a private investigator has shaped my writing
career and the types of books I like to write. Over the years, I’ve discovered
that the skills required to be a private investigator are the same skills
necessary to be a writer.
1. A good observer. What is
it that you notice about people? About their habits? Their body language? I
am a collector of people. When I notice something interesting, I tuck it away
in my brain for future reference be it a person I’ve noticed with a freckle on
his lip, the way that a bank manager would not lower himself to count the coins
in a deposit of several hundred dollars, or the way that an elderly lady
routinely helps herself to packets of ketchup, salt, sugar and paper napkins
whenever she dines out. When you notice a trait or gesture, is it occupation
related, culture or family related, personality related?
2. Excellent people skills.
Particularly your phone skills. An ability to get complete strangers to open up
to you and tell you their troubles. A great percentage of investigative work is
done over the phone. Being rude doesn’t get you anywhere, nor does looking
particularly strange. I often found when working as a PI that it was helpful to
dress at a level to fit the occasion and the person I was trying to get
information from. You have to make people want to help you get whatever
information you need. You need to be a good listener, too. To be able to hear
what people are saying, or not saying.
3. Ability to research. Must be resourceful at finding answers. Libraries, courthouses, newspapers, the Internet. And you need to be
creative in terms of figuring out where certain information would live.
There are all kinds of ways to find out information about people that are
perfectly legal. Think how much someone in your writer’s group knows about
your personal life--your occupation, where you’re from originally, things
about your family, hobbies, interests. Each of these details
provides an avenue of information opportunity to a private
investigator.
4. Like to write.
Investigators have to keep a written record of their activities for their
clients. Sometimes, all you have is that written report to convince your client
you’ve earned your fee. Very often, an investigator will find the lead or the
solution to a case buried somewhere in all those notes. In fact, as writers
working on mystery plots, I would encourage you to take careful notes when
you’re researching the elements for your book and find a way to organize it. I
use a binder with those tabs and I label them according to the element in the
plot. The publishing process is very long and copy-editors are incredibly
thorough. They will question everything, particularly unfamiliar details. It’s
a monumental task to respond to all those questions within a few days. So get
organized from the beginning.
5.
Competent at risk assessment. An ability to think on your feet and consider
what the long-term repercussions of any action you take now may be.
To me,
plotting a mystery novel is like preparing an elaborate puzzle of unrelated
objects that nest one inside each other. You think you’re going somewhere,
maybe following a theme and you open an object only to find something surprising
and not quite what you expected inside. Sometimes the surprises will be
shocking, sometimes amusing, sometimes puzzling, but they will always keep the
reader guessing what will happen next.
Creating Your PI
Your
first order of business if you’re creating a credible PI character is to
research the state or province (in Canada) where you're setting your story to
find out the regulations licensing private investigators.
My work
experience has given me an advantage in terms of thinking like a sleuth.
There’s a certain logic which helps propel me toward the resolution of the story
whether my protagonists are professional or amateur sleuths. The job is easier
with a professional sleuth, because like most careers, there is a structure of
procedure in-built into a private investigator accepting a case. Much as a
police detective follows a procedure when he’s assigned a new case. When I’m
writing my mysteries, I always contact the police in the area where the story is
set, tell them my scenario and ask what would likely happen. What leads would
they investigate first, etc.
As a
private investigator, a client walks into the office and wants to hire you to do
a job. The client is going to fill out all kinds of paperwork—information about
the client and the matter being investigated. The PI will gather as much
identifying (identifiers) information as possible about the client and any
subjects of the investigation. Current and previous addresses, birth date,
social insurance number, occupation, spouse information, relatives, friends,
whatever. The client will pay a retainer before the PI will do
anything.
A PI’s
only loyalty is to himself and to finding out the truth. Clients commonly make
the mistake of assuming that since they are paying the PI, that the PI owes them
some sort of loyalty. Clients very often neglect to inform the PI of a few
pertinent details. The wise PI’s first order of business is in backgrounding
both the client and the subject and to find out if the client has a hidden
agenda. Is the client who or what he/she says he is? It’s very common for
people to hold back information that puts them in a bad light, or merely neglect
to add something because they didn’t think it was important.
Types of Cases
What
types of jobs are PIs hired to do? Locates (finding someone for whatever
reason, skip tracing (locating someone because they haven’t paid a debt, probate
work (heir tracing), insurance fraud (some
PIs specialize in surveillance on individuals injured in accidents, assets
investigations (usually for divorce actions), missing persons, missing children
(custodial rather than stranger abductions), cheating spouses, and a huge group
of other peculiar reasons people hire private investigators that usually involve
some kind of undercover operations.
A
company might hire an outside operative to come in and investigate the
possibility of internal theft, espionage, whatever. A private individual
might hire an operative to find out who is the source of a number of false
rumors circulating about him in his networking club or his curling club.
Someone might be suspicious of the extracurricular activities of a business
partner.
Information
Now
what kind of information can a PI find out about someone? PIs do manage to get access
to the local credit bureau, I won’t tell you how, but they do. You can simply
say they do a credit check. Usually they have sneaky ways of checking with
the hydro company for the most current address of an individual and how long they’ve been
in residence. Sometimes, a PI may do work for a particular bank and be able to
get otherwise unavailable information through a contact in the bank. Or you
could have a friend or relative of the PI do a favor.
PIs
also find out a great deal about people from birth, marriage, divorce and
probate records. A
Land
titles. You can find out if a particular person owns property in an area or who
owns a particular property.
Professional licenses. Check them out. Many occupations require a license of
some sort--doctors, realtors, engineers, taxi drivers. Call up the
licensing bureau and ask for confirmation that a particular person has a
license.
Business licenses. Go to your city to find out if someone has a business
license. Very often with city records you might even find copies of canceled
checks which would tell you where someone banks.
Addresses and phone numbers—a lot of this you can now find on the Internet. I
believe there are even backwards directories. In the old days I’d go to the
library to look up a phone number or an address and it would give me the name of
the person it belonged to. Sometimes, I’d get the phone books for small towns
and go through the listings looking for neighbors whom I could call to get the
information I was seeking. If the person I was looking for wasn’t listed, I
would get the names of the neighbors and contact them.
Dunn
and Bradstreet—You can look up businesses and it will tell you the name of the
officers, addresses, etc.
Phone
bills. Phone companies are very sensitive to the theft of their information and
come down pretty hard on employees who do so. However, you have three options
here:
1. Your PI can purchase the
information via an information broker. Wonderful term that! Sometimes,
apparently they can even get tax forms. You pay a lot of money and don’t ask
any questions, but you get the stuff. I would have your PI get the number of an
information broker from a fellow trusted PI.
2.
Dumpster diving—have your PI steal the subject’s trash. People throw out all
kinds of stuff.
3. Find a legitimate means
to get the PI into the subject’s home or office where they can find a bill. Or
they can phone the phone company from the home number and ask for a replacement
bill to be sent, then intercept it. Get the idea? There are ways to get around
things.
4. Tail the subject. Sooner
or later they’ll have to give their address or phone number to a clerk at a
video store or in a Zellers when they return a purchase.
Whatever piece of information your PI is after, I suggest you do your research
and try to find it out yourself, then you can add that bit of realism to your
plot. If in doubt, phone or go and ask. How do I …..?
Pretexting:
Your
PI’s greatest skill will be his/her ability to pretext. It’s called pretexting
in the trade. Making up a story to explain why you want some information. It
may be calling up a bank and pretending to be the subject to get your current
balance. People fall for this all the time. Having a cold gave me the perfect
opportunity for me to call someone and pretend to be someone else because the
other party has an obvious reason that
explains why your voice sounds funny. In custodial abductions, someone in the
family always knew where the parent was hiding with the child, the thing was to
trick the info out of another family member. It might mean taking a fitness
class and striking up a conversation with a sister or grandmother, who’ll
happily tell you she has a niece/grandchild in San Diego. See, how easy it can
be? The key to success with pretexting is overwhelming the person with details,
funny, silly, serious, whatever, the more you talk, the more legitimate you
sound. But
successful pretexting requires doing background work and making sure you have
your facts straight so you don’t blow it.
If
you’re doing pretexting on the phone, your PI better have a phone system to
block her outgoing calls and she should have at least one unlisted line--a
return number she can leave when she has to leave a number for someone to call
back. I called a florist once who I knew was supposed to deliver some flowers
to an address I was hoping to find out and I made up this wild tale about being
the man’s secretary and confirming where the flowers were to be sent, and voila,
I got the address, but I had to leave a number for the clerk to call me back.
Searching A Home
Something to think about if your PI is searching someone’s home or office for
clues to their disappearance. Check the garbage cans, phone book (yellow pages
for marked pages or notes scribbled on it) notepads, calendars (did they have
upcoming appointments that might have been canceled), newspapers (for the travel
section), memos stuck to the refrigerator, address book open, check the phone
for messages, press the redial button to see last number called. Do they have
pets they would have had to have asked someone to take care of? A neighbor
with a key to the house they might have notified they’d be away for a few days.
Is
newspaper delivery halted? You can find very interesting things in a search
like this. You can check their e-mail (everyone keeps some kind of
notebook near their computer with passwords and pin numbers written down.
What about checking the fax machine cartridge for images
of last faxes sent out. Get the idea?
Conducting Surveillance
Again,
creativity is needed. People tend to be very suspicious of people sitting in
their cars who look like they are staking out a residence. I used to bring a
book and sit on a bench, bring a lawn chair and a sketch pad. Walk. Once I
canvassed a neighborhood pretending I was thinking about buying a house that was
for sale and I talked to the neighbors asking if there were children in the
neighborhood, and about the local schools, etc. Going to the bathroom IS a
problem.
Tailing a Subject
This is
much harder than it looks on TV. You have to be close, but not too close.
People are less likely to notice they are being followed in city traffic. In
suburbs, you have to fall way back. I was taught it was better to have two
people in the car that way, one could jump out and look down a street to see if
the vehicle had turned. If you’re tailing someone on foot, you’ll want to
disguise yourself in some manner, especially if you’re tailing them several days
in a row. You have to think of clothes, hair. People tend to notice the most
obvious things about people.
Interviewing people
I’m not
sure that a strong-arm approach works very well with most people. You see it
often in fiction and on TV, where the PI often bullies someone into providing
info. Better if the PI finds a way to make it worth the person’s while to
cooperate, be it grease their palm with a twenty or holds some information over
their heads.
Useful terminology for your Private Investigator
Subject--In police work, the person being investigated is called the suspect.
PIs use the term subject.
Pretexting--Making up a story to explain why you want some information.
Backgrounding--The process of checking out a client and/or subject’s background.
Verifying that they are who they claim to be. Could include a credit check,
property records, talking to neighbors.
Identifiers--identifying information about a subject. Date of birth, SIN,
current and previous addresses, occupation, name of spousal, etc.
LKA--Last
known address.
Dumpster diving--going through a subject's garbage for information.
