PIs in fiction

Edgar Allan Poe is credited with the first fictional detective, C. Auguste Dupin, living in Paris. Arthur Conan Doyle patterned his own much more famous London "consulting detective" Sherlock Holmes on Dupin, also borrowing his sidekick-narrator and bumbling police. Equally famous is the solitary Los Angeles PI Philip Marlowe, his own narrator, created by Raymond Chandler. Sam Spade and The Continental Op, both creations of Dashiell Hammett, defined a shady pre-WWII San Francisco milieu. Another classic example is Agatha Christie's Belgian mustache-wearing detective Hercule Poirot, appearing in 33 novels and 54 short stories.

Since the 1940s, the fictional PI has become a leading stock character, a hero archetype. Marlowe, portrayed by Humphrey Bogart, defined the film noir-era shamus: cigarette smoking and whiskey-drinking, a cynical, wisecracking tough-guy dressed in a trenchcoat and fedora, packing a revolver and ready to use it.

PIs have also been popular in television fiction, including such hit series as "Charlie's Angels", "Magnum P.I.", "Simon and Simon", "Tropical Heat", "Angel", "Veronica Mars", "Moonlighting", "Remington Steele", "The Rockford Files", "Monk", "Burn Notice", "" and "Nice Guy Eddie". Meanwhile filmmakers like Joel and Ethan Coen ("The Big Lebowski"), David O. Russell ("I ♥ Huckabees"), and writers like Jennifer Colt ("The Butcher of Beverly Hills"), Laura Anne Gilman ("Staying Dead"), Rob Thomas ("Veronica Mars") and Jim Butcher ("The Dresden Files") have changed the traditional PI genre. Other examples are Suburban Madness, Gene Dooling PI and Parco PI. Garrison Kellior's A Prairie Home Companion makes humorous use of the classic tropes of PI fiction with Guy Noir, a private eye presumably located in St. Paul, Minnesota. Since 2000, the syndicated television show "Cheaters" has focused on infidelity cases investigated by the Cheaters Detective Agency. [cite conference
first = Joseph C.
last = Harry
title = Tales of Tattered Romance: Cheaters TV, Real Reality, & Melodramatic Parody, http://list.msu.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0602a&L=aejmc&D=1&T=0&O=A&P=10523
booktitle = Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication annual conference
year = 2005 ] The film Stolen Kisses, by filmmaker Francois Truffaut, feature the protagonist Antoine Doinel briefly taking on the job of a PI.

Detective Conan is a long-running manga and anime series about a young PI.

Mnemosyne (anime) is another anime dealing with a female private investigator.

Calvin from Bill Watterson's comic strip Calvin & Hobbes has a PI alter-ego named Tracer Bullet.

Sam & Max is a comic book series about an anthropomorphic dog and an anthropomorphic rabbit named Sam & Max respectively who are a pair of private investigators (or as they like to call themselves, "freelance police").

Alias was an explicit comic book starring private investigator Jessica Jones.

References