Sunday, September 10, 2017

Josiah Thompson, Gumshoe ** 1/2

Josiah Thompson was a forty-something philosophy professor when he had a midlife crisis of sorts and decided to become a detective. Gumshoe is his account of learning the trade.

I read this (now out-of-print) book back when it was published in the late 1980s. I held onto it for its descriptions of real-life detective work: surveillance, custody disputes, serving subpoenas, and so on. The stories from his early day especially made it easy to imagine doing these activities myself.

I didn't remember how awkward Thompson's writing is. One particularly annoying tic is a confusing treatment of time. An example from near the end:
Before Dick arrived, [Asha] sat on the floor making chapatis for the Indian meal Neva and Ruth had prepared. Nancy and I tried to help but ended up getting in the way. Asha circled the table, chattering nonstop as she doled out chapatis, while the rest of us worked on the curry and sauces, washed down by the champagne Dick brought. Then she handed a jar of chutney to Dick.
Dick's arrival is in the future for the first two sentences, in the past for the last two. In his attempts to start stories in medias res he frequently stutters back in time two or three levels. He's in a restaurant talking to a woman... who his partner introduced to him in the office three days before... to discuss something that happened a month before that. It's confusing.

The aspect I liked the first time I read the book –– the mundane details of detective work –– was less compelling now due to the passage of time. If I were to become a detective today, or write a story about a regular guy doing detective-y things, I wouldn't need to think about whether I should stop watching a suspect's apartment long enough to find a public pay phone.

No comments:

Post a Comment