Sleuths

Preface

Over the past thirty-some years I’ve had the pleasure of creating a variety of fictional sleuths for both novels and short stories One of them has fared quite well, the others have been less successful, though a couple have had careers which exceeded my modest expectations. Each has led an interesting life (at least to me) and each has been different in fundamental ways.

Foremost among them, of course, is the fellow who has been around almost as long as I have — my first story was published in 1966, his first recorded case a year later — and who is better known than I am in spite of the fact that he doesn’t have a name. The San Francisco private investigator dubbed the “Nameless Detective” (by a former editor, not by me) has appeared in twenty-five novels and numerous short stories spanning four decades.

My other series detectives run the gamut of fictional types: professional and amateur, historical and contemporary, humorous and deadly serious, honorable and notorious, soft-boiled, medium-boiled, and hard-boiled. There is Fergus O’Hara, a roguish individualist who, with his wife Hattie, plies his trade during the time of the Civil War. There are John Quincannon and Sabina Carpenter, an affectionately mismatched pair who operate a private agency called Carpenter and Quincannon, Professional Detective Services, in 1890s San Francisco. There is Dan Connell, ex-pilot and reformed black marketeer whose bailiwick is Singapore and Malaysia. There is Christopher Steele, magician extraordinary, who specializes in solving seemingly impossible crimes — a joint creation with Michael Kurland. And there is Carmody, a freelance bodyguard and supplier of legal and extralegal services, who is based on the Mediterranean island of Majorca and whose adventures take him to such locales as Vienna, Venice, Amsterdam, North Africa, and Spain’s Costa del Sol.

Each of these characters, and his (and her) special brand of detection, is represented here — a sort of detectives’ round table. You may not like all of them or their methods, but I hope you’ll find their company stimulating. None of them gave me a dull moment, anyway...

Bill Pronzini

Petaluma, California