I should make it clear that I wasn’t at all bored by the books I was tearing through and loving, but bored by the fact that I wasn’t actually doing anything, just reading, though it was, in fact, Hammett and Goodis and Chandler and Thompson who sort of provoked me to take action, and it’s when I took action, because of those authors’ books, that I blew up my life.

It was a fantasy, a crazed notion, but I got it into my head that I wanted to play at being a private detective. I wanted to help somebody. I wanted to be brave. I wanted to have an adventure. And it’s pathetic, but what did I do? I put an ad on craigslist in the “services” section under “legal.” It read as follows:

Private Detective for Hire

Reply to: [email protected]
Date: 2007-04-13, 8:31AM EST

Specializing: Missing Persons, Domestic Issues.
I’m not licensed, but maybe I’m someone who can help
you. My fee is reasonable.
Call 347-555-1042

There were two other private-detective ads on craigslist and they offered all sorts of help—surveillance, undercover work, background checks, video and still photography, business investigations, missing persons, domestic issues, and two things that I didn’t quite grasp—”skip tracing” and “witness locates.”

I figured the only thing I could help with was trying to find someone or maybe following someone, which would most likely be a “domestic issue”—an unfaithful spouse or boyfriend or girlfriend. I didn’t have any qualms about that, following an unfaithful lover, though in all the private-detective fiction I’ve read the heroes never do “marriage work,” as if it’s beneath them, but I thought it would be fun to follow somebody and to do so for the purposes of a real mission. Sometimes, probably because I want everything to be like it is in a book or a movie, I have followed people on the streets of New York, pretending I was a detective or a spy.

I did try to cover myself legally by writing in my ad that I wasn’t licensed. I don’t know who does license private detectives, but I figured it was a difficult process and, anyway, I just wanted to put the ad up, mostly as a lark, a playing-out of a dream, like when I would shadow people on the streets. But I really didn’t think anybody would actually call me—I was offering far fewer services than the other private detectives and I was acknowledging in the ad that I wasn’t exactly a professional.