A Conversation with Kevin Burton Smith
about everything PI ...
This conversation is a bit different from the previous ones … Kevin Burton Smith doesn’t have a book coming out. He’s primarily an essayist and a critic offering opinions on a variety of subjects: crime fiction, rock and roll, film, television, comics, and bicycling among other things.
Kevin was born in Montreal and now lives with mystery author D.L. Browne out in a suburb in the High Desert of California, north of Los Angeles, with their two dogs Marlowe and Spenser. He claims he only misses Montreal on days with a Y in them.
Kevin is passionate about the detective genre. He contributes to publications like Mystery Scene, The Rap Sheet and the newsletter of the Private Eye Writers of America (PWA), Reflections in a Private Eye, and is currently doing reviews for Deadly Pleasures. He’s also the founder of the Thrilling Detective Web Site, a fantastic resource for everything you ever wanted to know about fictional detectives. The site is worth an extended visit. Some rabbit holes are full of marvelous discoveries. You can also subscribe to receive articles directly in your mailbox.
I wanted to ask Kevin why he built a site that aims to list and analyze every private detective ever imagined in literature, film, radio, television, comics, and whatever media people can possibly come up with. Think about that for a minute. I bet you can rattle off a dozen names without breaking a sweat. Then go look at the list Kevin compiled and let your jaw drop: alphabetical list.
M.E. Proctor: What the hell possessed you, Kevin?
Kevin Burton Smith: It was an accident, really. Or maybe a joke, possibly on me. It was the mid-nineties and I was working as a freelance graphic designer, doing brochures and annual reports. I was summoned in for a meeting with a client I’d had for a few years. He asked me if I’d be interested in doing “this thing they call a web page” on this thing they called “the information super-highway.” And yes, he used air quotes. Or at least that’s how I remember it.
“Sure,” I said, “No prob.”
Then I went home and ordered a modem over the phone from some mail order Mac catalogue. I’d never even been on the web.
It was a pretty steep learning curve. But I had all these little notes and bibliographies of a few of my favorite mystery authors on various scraps of paper (I’m a nerd) and decided to make a practice web site, transcribing those notes. Nothing special, very low key, uploaded privately, just so I could get an idea of how it all worked, before I had to do it professionally. It was real “fake it until you make it” stuff.
And then Peter Walker, a Brit from Rara-Avis, the hard-boiled online chat group, asked me if I happened to have a complete list of Joseph Hansen’s Dave Brandstetter books and stories, and I did. I slipped him the URL for one of those practice pages, and several members of Rara encouraged me to make the site public, so after a bit of tinkering, a very rudimentary Thrilling Detective Web Site lurched onto the web on—appropriately enough—April Fool’s Day, 1998.
Twenty-eight years later, we’re still lurching. It’s become my favourite waste of time.
MEP: The massive list “only” includes detectives that meet the PWA definition:
A Private Eye is defined as a private citizen (not a member of the military, federal agency, or civic or state police force) who is paid to investigate crimes. A Private Investigator can be a traditional private eye, a TV or newspaper reporter, an insurance investigator, an employe of an investigative service or agency (think Pinkertons), or similar character.
KBS: Yeah, I decided to focus on private eyes almost exclusively, because by then I was completely hooked on Chandler, Hammett, Macdonald, Parker and all the rest.
MEP: Even within these parameters, there must be more fictional detectives on your list than there are real ones.
KBS: Well, the original site had over 3,000 pages. The “new” site has 2,990, with another 1,000 or so still to be moved.
MEP: And more PIs are born all the time. I’m part of the problem. I created a new one last year. Why do you think authors gravitate to the genre, in a field that is so crowded?
KBS: It’s more difficult to explain a pastry chef, a plucky librarian or an even pluckier spinster investigating a crime than a professional. And then do it again the next book. And the next.
Like, “Oh my gawd! Stephenson’s been murdered!!! Somebody call a dog groomer!”
As for the cops, even purportedly law-and-order types often have a slight mistrust of the police. Plus, sadly, despite their best efforts, even the Mounties don’t always get their man. And in real life cops work as a team.
MEP: The unrealistic notion that an amateur could be involved in multiple crimes is the reason why I went with a traditional PI. I never really ‘took’ to Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple. Even as a kid, the idea that so many people get killed in a village the size of St Mary Mead made me dubious. The place must be terribly dangerous, people should move! You’ve written crime short stories, any detectives in them?
KBS: I have a handful of published stories, but oddly none of them, so far, feature a PI. And they’re all set in Montreal or thereabouts.
MEP: Canada has its share of fictional detectives. Sam Wiebe’s novels are set in Vancouver, and Joel Nedecky’s The Broken Detective takes place in Winnipeg. Your bio says you’re working on a novel …
KBS: Oh, the books I’d write if I could actually write them! A series of short stories and novels about an almost private eye, a former insurance investigator turned “guy who gets messed up in things.” Hangs around a Montreal dive bar on St. Laurent Blvd that he may or may not own, knows a lot of cops, strippers, petty thieves, bar flies, night crawlers, etc. The influences are many: Norbert Davis’s Max Latin, for sure, plus that Chandler guy, Block’s Scudder stories, Mordecai Richler’s Montreal novels, Ken Bruen’s spirited defiance, about a million rock songs …
MEP: And I saw something somewhere about a non-fiction project?
KBS: Ah yes, the book on married detectives. It’s a work in progress. Diane (D.L. Browne) and I are still theoretically working on it.
Beyond all that, I’d love to do a book called Another Country’s War, which takes place in Montreal, Canada’s largest city during the American Civil War. Montreal was a powder keg, with all sorts of shenanigans taking place, the city filled with both the Union and the Confederacy trying to curry favor with the British. Jefferson Davis had sent his family there, the Confederacy had their loot stashed in local banks, the theatre circuit Booth was part of made regular stops there, former slaves were there, and a former British Army quartermaster Joe Beef was running an anything-goes working man’s tavern, complete with a chained bear. English/French tensions were rising. As always. And immigrants were pouring in. There’s an 1812 veteran somewhere in the mix, too. He’s getting old, and he’s none too fond of Americans.
MEP: Great premise … you need to write the book before they make a movie out of that.
About the website, do you have people contacting you to ask that their favorite read/write PI be added to the list?
KBS: Oh, yes, all the time. Much preferable to the people who don’t understand what a private eye is or don’t like one of my opinions, and complain about my misogyny, racism, political leanings, or whatever.
MEP: Any insights on recent trends in the genre?
KBS: For mystery as a whole, I’m probably not well-read enough, but as for the Shamus Game, I guess I have some thoughts. Besides the Thrilling Detective Web Site, I’ve served as one of the Shamus Award judges (for the Private Eye Writers of America) a couple of times over the last few years, and I currently maintain their web site.
In novels, the main guns of the PI genre seem to be going steady, with occasional rookies breaking in, all holding true to the basic tropes of the last few decades. The real changes came back in the eighties when the ‘pale male’ deadlock was broken once and for all.
I’m not a big fan of these instant-series of PI novels clogging up Amazon and other places, “written” by alleged human beings who suddenly appear with 12, 13, 14 book series, all spat out in a year or two. They’re generic as hell, with entire passages cut-and-pasted from book to book, by “USA bestselling authors” (for what book, we’re never told). When you poke around a bit, you find there’s little to no biographical info on these authors, except maybe that they’re also the author of numerous other concurrent instant-series. Where are these books coming from?
Like Sundance asked Butch, “Who are those guys?”
Like, is author “Dan Ames” a real person? A pen name? A house pseudonym? An AI writing machine someone inadvertently left running? Whoever/whatever he/she/they/it is, Dan has been spitting out an astounding number of books (20? 30? 40?) annually for several years now, plus a couple of Jack Reacher-adjacent series (but that’s a whole other rant).
MEP: 20-30-40. A book every 2 weeks or there about … Not human. Unless it’s the writing equivalent of a sweat shop. Scribblers locked in little cubicles who are fed only when they deliver chapters.
KBS: Most of these “novels” are novellas, but still, I’m suspicious. In the days of the pulps, some writers cranked them out, but there was a wildness and unpredictability and roughness about those stories, where something/anything might happen. Many of these instant books seem to be carefully assembled from a box of pre-approved parts. They’re like regurgitated reprints of rejected TV scripts for Matt Houston or something.
Another question is who’s “writing” all these drooly, drippy five-star reviews of all these books?
MEP: Ah yes, 30,000 reviews on Amazon! Aren’t algorithms wonderful things? The machines have turned reviews into a joke. What’s your assessment of short fiction? It’s a format that’s dear to me.
KBS: Shorts are a more promising deal. There have always been themed anthologies and year-round Best Ofs, but self-publishing, print-on-demand, and online fiction have brought us hordes of aspiring writers trying to, as Raymond Chandler (eternally cranky) once put it “assault the citadel” in The Simple Art of Murder:
“There are no ‘classics’ of crime and detection. Not one. Within its frame of reference, which is the only way it should be judged, a classic is a piece of writing which exhausts the possibilities of its form and can hardly be surpassed. No story or novel of mystery has done that yet. Few have come close. Which is one of the principal reasons why otherwise reasonable people continue to assault the citadel.”
Whether these writers are reasonable or not, and whether or not their stories are classics, these “guys” are pumping ‘em out. And getting them published. In periodicals, print and electronic, and in a growing number of anthologies and collections.
MEP: As a writer of PI stories, I love to see anthology calls. Not only because the themes tickle my creative bone, but because it’s a great way to discover new authors.
KBS: Anthologies are published in numbers we haven’t seen since the days of the pulps or the early days of The Private Eye Writers of America, when Robert Randisi was regularly churning out collections of original PI stories by some of the best in the biz.
MEP: Michael Bracken is doing it now. I’m in quite a few of his. When you love the genre, these collections are like a big buffet loaded with goodies.
KBS: Michael is a PI writer himself. Last year he started a promising new annual series, The Best Private Eye Stories of the Year. It’s a mix of established and up-and-coming writers, with all kinds of stories: moody, introspective, noir-tinged, flashy. There are some trashy screamers in there that could have easily found a home in Black Mask or Dime Detective eighty or ninety years ago.
Both you and I are in it; my essay is like a palate cleanser. An annual best-of is very good news for the genre. I’m jazzed to play a small part in it.
MEP: It’s a cool anthology and it shows how flexible the PI genre is. You can really take it in an infinite number of directions. Chandler’s ‘citadel’ is not likely to be taken soon. I hope it stands for a long time.
Thank you, Kevin. It was a pleasure talking to you
A few links for you to check out:
If you want to see what the Thrilling Detective says about my guy, Declan Shaw, have a read. And my other PI, Harry McLean, also gets a mention (he’s only active in short stories, including one in the best-of anthology below).
The Best Private Eye Stories of the Year 2025 – Paperback and E-Book with a foreword by Kevin Burton Smith.
Eggcellent!
Cool interview!