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alt title(s): Private Investigator 
Sam Spade doesn't mind a reasonable amount of trouble.
Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor. He talks as the man of his age talks, that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness.
A seeker character frequently used in Detective Drama. A professional detective not directly affiliated with a police department in any official sense (although many will have contacts in the department, and it's not uncommon for members of this profession to have been either police officers or previously worked in law-enforcement, as many of the skill sets overlap), a Private Detective takes on cases that private citizens bring to them - however, whilst they aren't supposed to investigate crimes (which are official matters for the police, who often look dimly upon private detectives sticking their noses in - both in fiction and in real life), they usually find themselves knee-deep in murders, robberies and kidnappings by the end of the story. They may be doing this because the police are useless and/or unconcerned about solving the case, meaning our detective is the only person who is actually willing or capable of solving it.
Although it's more common for a Private Detective these days to be treated as just one step away from the Amateur Sleuth (or often, particularly if seen from the point of view of the police, as rather sleazy bottom-feeders usually involved in some kind of criminal activity and frequently ex-cops kicked off the force for some kind of corruption), the classic Archetype of the Private Detective - and the one that has generally stuck in the mind of people when they think of the profession - is the hard-bitten, hard-living, chain-smoking and heavy-drinking gumshoe so beloved of Film Noir, clad in a fedora and trenchcoat, possessing a sharp, biting wit and prone to giving a Private Eye Monologue at every opportunity. They're also usually the only people who can - or are allowed to - describe themselves as ' Dicks' without either irony or insult. The page quote - from an essay by Chandler - essentially describes how these characters are often written; hard-bitten and cynical, but with their own sense of morality and rigid codes of honour and ethics that lift them above the sleaze they often face down.
Vampire Detective Series often feature one as a protagonist, though of the immortal varient.
Examples:
Anime and Manga
Comic Books
- Heironymous "Hip" Flask is a private eye and anthropomorphic hippo in the Elephantmen comics.
Film
- Parodied in the Steve Martin movie Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid
- Casey Affleck's character in Gone Baby Gone is an example of a modern PI.
- Kiss Kiss Bang Bang has fun with all the Film Noir tropes, this one included: Val Kilmer's character 'Gay' Perry Van Shrike is a hard-bitten, tough-talking, gun-slinging Private Detective who's also, well... gay. And considers his job very boring. And, at least until Harry and Harmony come into his life, isn't exactly dogged in his pursuit of justice.
- In Lethal Weapon 4, Leo Gets becomes a licensed PI. This garners much comedy for Riggs and Murtaugh.
Riggs: "Excuse me, private investigator? Could you investigate my privates?"
Literature
- The works of Dashiell Hammett (The Maltese Falcon, Red Harvest, etc.) and Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep, Farewell, My Lovely, etc.) in particular are often credited with creating and popularizing the hard-living Film Noir impression of the Private Detective, especially through characters such as Philip Marlowe (created by Chandler), Sam Spade and the Continental Op (created by Hammett). Many of these characters have transferred into movies; to name just one example, Humphrey Bogart played both Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade in adaptations of the novels (The Big Sleep and The Maltese Falcon, respectively).
- Jim Butcher's The Dresden Files is somewhere between an Affectionate Parody of the genre and a straight example.
- Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot has elements of this. He retired from the Belgian police force, emigrated to England during World War I, and became a Private Detective in London.
- The Marcus Didius Falco series by Lindsey Davis. Essentially Sam Spade in a toga. Living centuries before Noir was invented however, makes him amusingly Genre Blind and allows the author to gleefully subvert most Private Detective tropes.
- Sherlock Holmes is often described as the 'first consulting detective', this making this Older Than Radio.
- John Taylor of Simon R Green's Nightside books is a classic - if slightly skewed - example of a private eye.
- Joe Sixsmith, a character of crime fiction author Reginald Hill, subverts most of the basic Private Detective characteristics: a short, balding, middle-aged, black private eye from Luton, whose hobbies include singing in a choir and motor mechanics. His main talents are being a nice, sympathetic sort of guy, knowing when he doesn't know things, and tremendous serendipity.
- Sara Paretsky's VI Warshawski is written to be a distaff version of the (usually) male hardboiled PI.
- Robert B Parker's Spenser is a modern, politically correct version of the type. If anything, he errs as far on the "sensitive" side of the "sensitive tough" archetype as Mike Hammer errs on the "tough" side.
- The titular character of the Joe Copp series, written by Don Pendleton (also the author of The Executioner series), is a private detective who used to be a cop.
- Lazlo Woodbine, from the Far Fetched Fiction of Robert Rankin, is a parody of the archetypal PI. He insists on using the first person, getting knocked unconscious at his first appearance and can only appear in four scenes (his office, a bar, an alleyway and a rooftop). Considering the outlandish nature of his books, often involving things such as time-traveling Elvis doing battle with Eldritch Abominations out to unmake existence, this makes things awkward.
- Mma Precious Ramotswe (in the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series by Alexander Mc Call Smith) subverts almost all of this trope, being a kind and overweight Botswanan lady who solves everyday problems, like absconding husbands, by a sharp psychological perception, persistence and being able to win the confidence of others.
- Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer perhaps goes too far in the direction of being mean. He's a Magnificent Bastard of a private eye. (He's also such a Canon Sue and an Author Avatar that the writer played him in a TV series.)
- Nohar Rajasthan from S. Andrew Swann's Moreau series of books is a down-on-his-luck PI... who just happens to be an 8'-tall humanoid tiger Super Soldier. Better Than It Sounds.
Live Action TV
- Angel started out as a private detective, before he made the transition from "supernatural crime" to "supernatural".
- Humorously parodied in the Canadian TV series Butch Patterson: Private Dick. Butch is given to internal monologues, wears a fedora everywhere he goes, refers to himself as a "Dick", and drinks very heavily...so heavily, in fact, that he's known to continually wet his pants and prematurely ejaculate. To make matters worse, he's also got a thing for prostitutes, a tendency to wake up in strange places after passing out drunk, and it's unlikely he'll ever live down that incident at the petting zoo. In spite of this, he's actually a very competent detective, and generally manages to solve the case, although he quickly blows whatever money he makes on pornography and whores.
- Moonlight's Mick St. John started out as a private detective, before he made the transition from "supernatural crime" to "supernatural".
- An episode of NCIS has the team working with a private investigator. Gibbs expresses his contempt for the fellow by repeatedly referring to him as a "private dick," emphasis on the second word.
- Jim Rockford of The Rockford Files is a slight subversion — hardly hardboiled, and an ex-con (albeit innocent of the charges). He also edges the Affectionate Parody line.
- Magnum PI is about one of those: from his contacts in the police to the monologuing, the trope fits him to a T... for Trope.
- Keith Mars (former cop) and Vinnie Van Lowe (stereotypical sleazeball) of Veronica Mars.
Newspaper Comics
- In Calvin And Hobbes, one of Calvin's alter-egos is Tracer Bullet, a parody / pastiche of the 'hard-bitten' private eye character.
Radio
Video Games
Western Animation
- Raw Toonage parodied it with "Cro-Magnum PI
 ", a Caveman Detective.
- In the Sam & Max universe, the main characters are rather atypical private detectives (though they prefer the term "freelance police"), while their neighbor Flint Paper is a more stereotypical, two-fisted, Dirty Harry type.
- Duckman: Private Dick/Family Man
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