The Socioeconomics of the Private Detective

It’s kind of remarkable, once you notice it. Almost every private detective throughout history is either nearly destitute, independently wealthy, or appears to exist in a universe where money has no meaning whatsoever. On the rich end, let’s start with Sherlock Holmes. Since he has no visible form of support, and chooses many of his cases from interest and curiosity instead of necessity (Holmes does not, after all, accept any boring cases he might solve in, say, five minutes, pocketing a nice payday without even getting out of bed), we must assume he’s moderately wealthy—possibly because he has solved a few high-profile cases for wealthy patrons, possibly because Sherlock Holmes is no doubt capable of embezzling billions without being caught. Either way, the man is rich enough that he can afford a serious cocaine habit while rarely leaving his apartment.

There are plenty of rich detectives—sometimes referred to as Gentleman Detectives. Lord Peter Wimsey, an English Peer so laden with old money he can barely move under his own power, solves crimes solely out of passion, because he won’t have to leave the estate any time soon and get a job. Nick Charles of The Thin Man fame was wealthy, by virtue of marrying heiress Nora. In the modern day, we have examples like Stone Barrington, born into money, dispossessed, then reattaining his wealth as he squeezes detecting and investigation into a busy schedule of cocktails, learning new ways to knot neckties, and memorizing wines according to bouquet. Even Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, a nosy, gossipy old woman in a small English town, is obviously a woman of means, although she apparently never worked a day in her life. While not precisely rich, Marple can afford her modest lifestyle without any effort, never worries over bills, and investigates her crimes out of burning curiosity, a belief in the awful nature of mankind, and because solving the puzzle entertains her.

On the other end of the spectrum is the classic, possibly more well-known private detective trope: the downtrodden, unlucky gumshoe who’s always fleeing creditors, always insisting on being paid in cash, and who often pursues his cases more out of desperation or economic necessity than any sense of justice. Most of Hammett’s and Chandler’s classic detectives would fall into this category, as would Easy Rawlins, Robert Parker’s Spenser, and Kinsey Millhone from Sue Grafton’s alphabet series. This doesn’t mean the detective character is necessarily destitute, or that they have no sense of honor or duty to their community. It just means that, unlike their tonier counterparts, they pursue their detecting out of economic need. Even a detective like Nero Wolfe, who enjoys a rich lifestyle, is presented as a man who takes on cases solely for a (very large) payout at the end, enabling him to maintain that lifestyle, since he’s not a British Peer sitting on a mountain of money so old it has grown mossy.

It also doesn’t mean the detective in question cares about money at all. Jack Reacher is essentially an indigent private detective who takes on whatever cases call to him. He doesn’t take cases as jobs, doesn’t expect or accept fees for his services for the most part, and of course lives more or less as a disciplined homeless person, traveling from town to town owning nothing. Nevertheless he fits snugly into the bottom half of the Private Detective Income Scale as a man who has no steady employment, no assets, and no possessions (in fact a man who has an almost pathological fear of such things).

In between these two extremes are the Outliers, the investigators and detectives who exist completely outside the framework of economics. As outliers, these characters are often not even, strictly speaking, private investigators, but rather people who find themselves tracking clues and solving mysteries for their own reasons. Jason Bourne, for example, is a man who investigates his own life and the implications of his past because he has no choice—but this also renders him a detective of sorts, chasing clues and interrogating witnesses, even while he apparently exists in a world where the basic necessities of life are free—or at least a world where amnesia-stricken superspies routinely hide thousands of dollars for future use. However it’s justified, one thing is clear: Jason Bourne never once sits down to count his money and make a budget, because it just doesn’t matter.
The Otherness of Private Eyes
The pattern’s pretty clear: private detectives are either wealthy or of independent means, poor and motivated by their constant economic desperation, or living in a fictional universe where their personal finances don’t really matter much. There are very few examples of detectives who live comfortably. Even characters like Kinsey Millhone, who live fairly comfortable lives, do so via unusual choices—Millhone lives in a tiny apartment and leads a life of extreme modesty when it comes to finances. Detectives in this category are just as motivated by money; it’s just that they’ve downsized their lives to match their meager incomes.
There’s a good reason for this sort of economic pattern in detective stories: private detective characters need to be the Other in order to function properly.
Most people work pretty hard to avoid being drawn into other people’s drama. We all have plenty of our own, and we’re generally more than happy to walk past things that aren’t our business. Most people also lack the time to investigate random crimes and seek justice for the downtrodden—we’ve got mortgages to pay and kids to raise and video games to play. In other words, investigating crimes and mysteries is decidedly not a mainstream activity, for both practical concerns—our time is committed elsewhere—and because society and civilization are built on a few basic supports, one of which is simple: everyone minds their own business. In order to be an effective investigator, you have to undermine this basic premise of civilization, because investigating isn’t just poking your nose into other people’s business, it’s a form of vigilantism.
As a result, private detectives are Others. They exist just slightly outside the boundaries of society in order to be able to break these fundamental rules. This in turn allows them to break other rules, as well, including the simple breaking of laws and even the breaking of limbs as they attempt to chase down the truth. In modern society, there are a few ways of being the Other: you can be a little crazy, which works to a limited extent for a private investigator (see Sherlock Holmes again) but can ultimately be limiting because the private detective also has to be able to function within society to a great enough extent to have access to it; an insane, muttering person might be a brilliant detective on basic ability but is incapable of digging deeply into the lives around them simply because they cannot gain access to homes and businesses and are incapable of establishing trust with potential witnesses. The most effective way in the modern world to depict someone as an outsider without resorting to mental instability or extreme eccentricity is to depict them as economically Other, removed from the normal flow of income and outlay—either as desperately insolvent and thus pushed to being the Other out of necessity, or as wildly affluent and thus beyond caring about the negative consequences of their investigations. Money is a classic and easily accepted motivation for all sorts of terrible or unusual behavior, after all.
The Windfall Cometh
While economic desperation works pretty well as a motivator for private detectives as well as a character trait (as the explanations for being broke and in need of cash can range from personality defects to laziness, philosophical considerations, or simple bad luck), it can cause other problems for the writer, of course, like explaining in every book or story how the character continues to survive—or at least not suffer from scurvy or some other debilitating disease stemming from malnutrition—when they are constantly broke. Even if the character isn’t necessarily destitute but simply working hard to make a living, the mysteries they investigate often call for resources that aren’t quite believable when the character is depicted as swimming in the shallow end of the income pool. Even if the specifics of a case aren’t particularly resource-heavy, if your private eye is supposed to be poor and working hard to make a living, having them embroiled in a single case for weeks or months at a time can stretch believability. You can’t be dirt broke and yet paying your bills for months while you dig into a single mystery, after all.
Enter The Windfall, a frequent occurrence in serials involving the downtrodden investigator. The Windfall is simple: it’s a lump of money the character chances into that serves to solve their immediate financial problems and frees them to continue their investigations without worrying about mundane details like how to afford food—without changing their basic situation or personality.
Sometimes The Windfall happens in the character’s backstory, explaining how they’ve come to be a Gentleman (or Gentlewoman) Detective, but most often it happens after a few books have established the character, their lifestyle and universe, and the fact of their poverty begins to drag down stories because the author has to constantly justify it, subvert it, or ignore it in order to get the character into the situations they need to be in. Kinsey Millhone gets one in Grafton’s Alphabet series, a lump of money she puts in the bank and ignores because she is “miserly and cheap” and has no desire to travel or live the high life—a lump of money she specifically states allows her not to worry when her client list gets a little short. Jack Reacher, after years of being a near-penniless drifter, gets a windfall, too, though he has an even more extreme reaction to the money, maintaining his drifter lifestyle. But it allows him to have enough money to support himself despite not really working a job of any kind or even regularly leveraging his services as investigator and butt-kicker into regular paychecks (although he helps himself to ill-gotten gains from time to time).
The Windfall excuses the writer from having to prop up the Otherness of their character, who by book number four or five or ten has been well-established in the role. An inheritance allows them to avoid the distraction of how they pay for their room and board and concentrate on stepping outside the boundaries of normal life in order to pursue justice with the single-minded energy most of us lack.
And that pursuit of justice is a form of insanity, which is why we love these characters so much. Most of us can’t be bothered to investigate even the simple mysteries of everyday life—where that sock went, what that noise outside is, how in the world there is still such a thing as Miley Cyrus. Investigating the bigger things is simply beyond us, and that’s why we need the Other—the independently wealthy or absolutely destitute Other who has literally nothing else to drive them but the pursuit of justice.