Note: Various versions of pieces of this appeared recently across my social media profiles and a few group texts, but I wanted to gather it all together in one place and smooth it out a bit, so I hope if you’ve already read some, or all, of this you don’t feel cheated.

All I’ve ever really wanted to write is a classic PI novel. From the time I discovered my first Spenser novel, I’ve been hooked on the form. I even named my first child Spenser because that series was so important to me as a person and as a writer. I’ve written two unpublished PI novels and attempted several more, but I always end up running into the same wall because I try to write about the city of Detroit. But I don’t know Detroit. I’ve never lived there, never worked there. I’m not really a city person at all.

What I do know are suburbs, especially the suburbs of Detroit. I’ve lived and worked in the rich northern Oakland County suburbs, the blue collar Downriver suburbs, and currently live in the southeastern suburbs. These are the people and the stories I know. Aside from Kinsey Millhone, Lew Archer, and a few others, the suburbs remain a vast, untapped promised land for the PI novel.

But instead of finding a way to make my mark in that untapped promised land, everything I’ve written since those first few novels has been an attempt to avoid writing another PI novel. I never felt like I was good enough to write a Detroit PI novel and I was never confident enough in my skill as a writer to make a PI novel work in the suburbs. Which I now realize is silly, but seriously this has been the internal conflict driving me insane for the last 25 years or so since I finished my first book in 2001 to enter the PWA St. Martins Press PI first novel contest.

But something has changed inside me recently and I feel like it’s finally time to face down this demon. A couple of things have driven this realization. First, Sarah Weinman wrote this great PI novel starter pack for the New York Times that reignited my fire for reading PI novels again. In some follow up posts of Sarah’s promoting the piece, she talked about how she feels like a PI novel revival is just around the corner and that made me eager to finally try and make a PI novel work for me.

I picked up the new Robert Crais novel The Big Empty, which is just amazing, and I went back to Detroit series like August Snow by Stephen Mack Jones that I had missed, and the Amos Walker series from Loren Estleman that I have missed the last several installments of.

The second thing driving this was feeling like I’m bumping up against a ceiling for what I can accomplish with the typewriter book in its current format. About 30k words in, this book has become for all intents a purposes a PI novel in all but name. And this is what happens with every book I write. At some point it starts to resemble a PI novel, but I never fully commit to actually writing a PI novel because I’m a coward. But that ends now.

As I was thinking about PI novels, I was thinking a lot about a new project I want to work on based on one of my best received short stories. “Howard’s Heart” appeared in the Mystery Writers of America anthology When A Stranger Comes to Town and after it was published I got several notes of encouragement from some of my idols in the PI field.

The story is about a guy named Casey Carlisle who works as a rideshare driver to supplement his PI work. The name is inspired by Carlotta Carlisle, Linda Barnes’ Boston PI who drove a cab. I’ve been fascinated with the idea of a PI being part of the gig economy and think it’s kind of a natural evolution of the field. So after a weekend of obsessive mulling, I wrote a couple hundred new words and added it to a revised version of the short story’s opening and really like what I have.

What I’ve found works best for me is a hybrid approach. Casey has an apartment and office in Detroit, but he’s new to the city after living in the suburbs for most of his life. So you have this cool fish out of water aspect of it, but the bulk of his work is still in the suburbs because that’s the territory he knows.

I think my next move will be to formalize a page or so of notes I’ve had bouncing around in my head about the new case that will entwine with the case from the short story kind of like Lawrence Block did with When the Sacred Ginmill Closes and the short story “By Dawn’s Early Light.”

I’m having a lot of fun writing this and feel like I’m finally doing what I should have been doing all along as a writer. Here’s a taste of the opening:

A WICKED CONSCIENCE

My name is Casey Carlisle. I’m 42 years and licensed as a private investigator in the state of Michigan. I live and work in Midtown Detroit. A year ago, I sold my house in the suburbs and moved to the city after my parents moved south, my wife moved to Florida with the man she’d been cheating on me with, and my 16-year-old son was murdered all within the space of a week.

I have a small office with my name on the glass door and everything in a co-working space a few blocks from my apartment building, but lately when I wasn’t out detecting I was driving my 2023 Dodge Charger. Southeast Michigan has almost 30,000 miles of road and I’d covered most of it at top speed.

At first I drove to keep myself from eating my gun, then I drove to feel alive. Eventually I started picking up ride share passengers for money and conversation. I’d been an investigative reporter for a decade before I was laid off and fell backward into a career as a PI. Apparently I missed talking to people.

I picked up Howard Hart in front of the arrivals area at Detroit Metro Airport a few minutes after 1 a.m. It wasn’t particularly hot, but he was sweating profusely and looked like a raw ham squeezed into a sausage casing.

I’ll be doing a mini version of Jami Attenberg’s #1000Words project to make some quick progress on this before I chicken out again. I really do feel like this time is different though. I’m ready. I hope you’r feeling inspired on whatever you’re working on these days. It’s rough out there in the real world, so make sure you’re finding ways to feed your creativity and keep your mind and your body healthy.