THE MODERN DETECTIVE

A revealing look at the world of the private detective, which isn’t quite as Raymond Chandler imagined it.

“We are everywhere,” Maroney writes of detectives employed by private concerns rather than governments. Having begun his career, like so many PIs, in journalism (academia is another field ripe for recruitment), he reels off employers: large companies, movie studios, wealthy individuals, media outlets, even some government agencies, all of which need some critical piece of information. This can be of a rather sleazy nature—e.g., a juicy detail that will undo a spouse’s divorce proceedings or, in the case of the disgraced entertainment executive Harvey Weinstein, “compromising information on women Weinstein had allegedly victimized (such as Rose McGowan) and journalists whose articles Weinstein sought to quash (such as Jodi Kantor).” The classic PI modus operandi involves disguising one’s identity and deceiving—or, in polite parlance, socially engineering—one’s way into the confidence of the person who holds the desired information. Sometimes this is criminal, sometimes not, but in any event, Maroney pointedly observes, the behavior is ubiquitous and lucrative. It is especially lucrative for the hackers in the PI world, who steal into offices in the middle of the night and copy sensitive computer data without attracting attention or suspicion—a pro tip, Maroney offers, is to remove a hard drive from a computer before copying it off, since USB connections and computer logs tell tales. Having cracked a company’s system, the PI is then often hired to build an electronic fortress around it, double-dipping at its best. There’s more poor Joe Schmo than James Bond in the whole enterprise, writes the author, and the ethics are iffy (“sometimes our work benefits the social good; sometimes we are the instruments of moral outrage”). Whatever the case, being a corporate/private detective is a growth industry, and it’s not going anywhere anytime soon, which says something about the world in which we live.

Maroney deglamorizes the world of private investigators while limning their sometimes essential, sometimes damaging work.