They Wrote What?
Dabblers in the Form

Private detective and hard-boiled novels, as with most genre fiction, are frequently dismissed as mere trite formulaic scribbling by the literary poohbahs-that-be. And when something in the genre does meet with their approval, they promptly disavow it, condescendingly claiming it "transcends the genre."

Yet there must be something to the P.I. form that attracts writers from other fields, everything from the purest nose-in-the-air literary types to our brother and sister grunts in other pulp fiction genres. Some of the results were truly sad, but several other writers, who have since gone on to other genres or even careers, have left their mark, or at least some droppings, on the genre.

The ones to really beware of, though, are those that the blurbs loudly proclaim "transcend the genre." In real life too often that's simply publisherspeak for "can't write in the genre worth shit."

• Koke Abe
  The acclaimed Japanese playwright and novelist came up with one real headscratcher of a P.I. tale, 1967's The Ruined Map.
  
  
• Paul Auster
  This long-time fan of the genre took its conventions and cliches and converted them, distorted them, and turned them inside out in his high-falutin', sometimes exasperating, but acclaimed and literary-as-hell New York Trilogy. He also wrote, under a pseudonym, a rather more traditional P.I. novel, Squeeze Play, featuring New York eye Max Klein.
  
  
• Thomas Berger
  The man behind Little Big Man, Reinhart in Love, Neighbours and others was also responsible (although he may deny it) for the P.I. parody/travesty Who is Teddy Villanova?, featuring New York eye Russell Wren.
  
  
• Richard Brautigan
  The counter-culture -fave wrote a trippy private eye spoof called Dreaming of Babylon, featuring San Francisco P.I. C. Card.
  
  
• Michael Crichton
  Best known for creating the blockbuster book and film franchise Jurassic Park and the equally blockbusting TV show ER, has also dabbled in the P.I. sub-genre, and done pretty well at it, in a short story featuring LA private eye Ray Chambers.
  
  
• Howard Fast
  Under the pseudonym of E.V. Cunningham, he wrote Sylvia, about a P.I. named Macklin.
  
  
• James Jones
  The acclaimed writer of From Here To Eternity wrote 1973's A Touch of Danger, which relates the tale of Frank "Lobo" Davies, an aging American private eye set loose in Europe.
  
  
• Stephen King
  The horror meister supreme and genre-jumping giant wrote a short novella, entitled Umney's Last Stand, an affectionate and well-done homage to, and nod at Ross Macdonald and Raymond Chandler, featuring reality-challenged private eye Cylde Umney.
  
  
• Louis L'Amour
  Not so much a dabbler as an explorer, pulpster L'Amour wrote whatever would pay, including at least four stories about boxer turned LA gumshoe Kip Morgan. The westerns ended up paying better.
  
  
• Jonathan Lethem
  Like King, a genre-hopping gadfly, but Motherless Brooklyn, his dead-on take on a Brooklyn P.I. suffering from Tourette's syndrome, tracking down the killer of his adoptive father figure, is a literary tour-de-force that nabbed the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction.
  
  
• Arthur Miller
  The Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright responsible for Death of a Salesman and The Crucible wrote the original screenplay for the P.I. flick Everybody Wins, starring Nick Nolte and Debra Winger.
  
  
• Thomas Pynchon
  Pynchon's Inherent Vice (2009) is an impenetrable shaggy dog story featuring Doc Sportello, a early seventies era gumshoe wandering around the counter-culture fog of early seventies Southern California trying to help an old girlfriend out of a jam and find some semblance of plot. Of course, most of the critics are afraid to admit this thing's a turkey (some of the convoluted critical logic is almost as difficult to follow as the book itself), but take it from me, a great detective novel this is not. Nor does it particulalry work as parody.
  
  
• Graham Swift
  The author of such modern literary classics as Waterland, Out of This World and the Booker Prize-winning Last Orders, also wrote The Light of Day, a stream-of-consciousness private eye novel featuring obsessed, brooding London private eye George Webb, that has more than a few echoes of Hammett's work.
  
  
• P.G. Wodehouse
  Best known, of course, for creating Jeeves, the ultimate "gentleman's gentleman," Wodehouse never wrote a genuine hard-boiled detective story in his life, but it turns out that over the years several desperate characters in the Wodehouse canon employed the services of such private eyes as Elliot Oakes and Paul Snyder, Henry Pifield Rice, Percy Pilbeam, Adrian Mulliner, Mr. McGee and J. Sheringham Adair.

Preliminary list compiled by Kevin Burton Smith. Suggestions and comments welcome.