Detective Agency: Discrete Inquiries, Mysteries Solved

Strong Sense of Place | Travel Through Books

Melissa & Dave

Books, Arts

5.0 • 559 Ratings

🗓️ 13 September 2024

⏱️ 71 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Fictional detectives are some of the most beloved characters in print and on-screen. It’s easy to relate to someone with an overblown sense of justice and a need to set the world right (or as right as it can be). There are nosy neighbors like Nancy Drew and Miss Marple with no real credentials whatsoever and police detectives — Hello, Harry Bosch! Ta, Inspector Lynley! — with entire departments behind them. Relentless journalists, dogged medical examiners, resourceful bounty hunters (We see you, Stefanie Plum!), and, perhaps, the most endearing detectives of them all: private eyes. This show is all about the gumshoes who work outside the pesky laws of search warrants and chain of evidence. Who maybe toil in an office with a frosted glass door and a dame with moxie tapping away at a typewriter — or perhaps the dame with moxie is the detective. This installment celebrates independent investigators who distract and delight in their search for the truth. In this episode, we meet the world’s first PI and first American lady detective, delve into Poe scholarship and the problem with his ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue,’ and discuss one of the kindest mystery authors. Then we recommend five books we love that put us in the thick of dangerous inquiries, including the escapades of a thoroughly modern detective agency, an urban mystery with a bookish PI, a British caper with an unforgettable hero, a how-to for wannabe detectives, and a noir-tinged fantasy novel about a reluctant sleuth. Here are the books about Detective Agencies we recommend on the show: The Verifiers by Jane Pek IQ by Joe Ide Odds Against by Dick Francis The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Private Investigating by Steven Kerry Brown The Manual of Detection by Jedediah Berry For more on the books we recommend, plus the other cool stuff we talk about, visit show notes. Sign up for our free Substack to connect with us and other lovely readers who are curious about the world. Transcript of Detective Agency: Discrete Inquiries, Mysteries Solved Do you enjoy our show? Do you want be friends with other (lovely) people who love books and travel? Please support our work on Patreon! Strong Sense of Place is an audience-funded endeavor, and we need your support to continue making this show. Get all the info you need right here. Thank you! Parts of the Strong Sense of Place podcast are produced in udio. Some effects are provided by soundly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	McDonald's wraps all flavor, no mess. No drips on your drip or grease on your shirt. No crumbs on your keyboard or sauce on your dashboard. Just all the flavor of sweet chili chicken, barbecue and bacon chicken and new teeka chicken. Rapt up neat.
0:15.0	Served after 11 a.m. Teaka chicken wrap available until the 13th July 26. Feeze applied to delivery orders subject to availability. Hello, welcome to strong sense of place.
0:23.4	In each episode, we focus on one destination and discuss what makes it different than any other
0:28.4	place on Earth. Then we recommend five books we love that took us there on the page.
0:33.0	I'm Melissa Joel Wan. I'm David Humphreys. We're going around the world, one great read at a time.
0:38.8	Thanks for joining us. Welcome to Strong Sense of Place. Today we get curious about detective agencies.
1:18.7	If you're listening to this on launch day, Bloody Scotland starts up today.
1:24.7	That's an international crime writing festival in a charming town called Sterling in Scotland.
1:30.5	They have a really fun lineup of authors this year. Richard Armitage,
1:35.9	he's an actor who was in Berlin Station. He'll be talking about his new book. Anne Cleves created the series Shetland. She'll be there. Peter May, who wrote the Black House,
1:41.4	which we talked about in our Scotland episode, also there.
1:45.6	How am I not going to this festival this weekend? Yeah, exactly that. The thing, though,
1:51.0	that makes me really want to attend Bloody Scotland is this. They have a tradition, and the tradition
1:57.7	is that on the first night of the festival, they gather by a local church, several hundred people, and they hand out torches, and they march through the streets to the venue.
2:08.9	Okay, I'm saying it right here on the show. Let's all go to that together next year.
2:15.3	Nothing brings people together quicker than skulking through a quaint Scottish
2:19.0	village, Torches High, crime on their minds. Right? Yeah. Sign me up immediately. Yeah.
2:25.0	Today on Two Trio Sun Alai, we're going to talk about the remarkable life of a man who founded
2:29.4	the first private detective agency. He packed about three lives worth of adventure into his one.
2:37.5	And then we'll talk about five books we love.
2:40.4	I'm recommending a book that is a really delightful mashup of noir detective and whimsical fantasy.
2:49.1	Oh, that's awesome.
	...

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