The Beekeeper's Dilemma

The Great Detective ponders retirement

The Great Detective, or GD as he liked to ironically refer to himself, sat in his armchair in the darkened room, contemplating the ersatz fireplace flickering on the curved screen recessed into the wall. A glass of cognac rested by his side.

Was it time to quit? He asked himself yet again.

He eyed the stack of books on bee-keeping that had increasingly been absorbing his attention lately. Half the open tabs on his browser were related to bee-keeping. The whiteboard on the back wall of the living room hadn’t been used as a murder board in months. It was now covered in scrawled diagrams of pollination ecology.

Why not, after all? No active cases. None on the horizon, either referred by the police or private clients. As good a time as any.

The bee-keeping project had started out as a semi-ironic cosplaying impulse, but had turned serious now. He had genuinely been nerdsniped by the idea of a retirement devoted to a Holmesian bee-keeping larp. He’d even managed to convince a local apiary, just outside of the city, to let him volunteer on weekends.

His gaze drifted to the empty armchair next to his, which many an unsatisfactory companion had occupied over the decades, failing to adequately play Watson to his Holmes. He had given up trying to fill the role about six years ago, though he occasionally texted one or the other past companion to join him on particular adventures. Most of them demurred these days, citing kids, work, or general exhaustion. He had not had a companion on the last dozen cases, and hadn’t bothered even seeking one for the most recent half-dozen.

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July is side-quest month at the Contraptions Book club, where you get to pick your own book within the broad theme of 1200-1600 CE horizontal history. Suggestions on page. Chat thread here.

We’re also doing a mid-year Zoom hang in 2 weeks, on Thursday July 17th, at 8 AM Pacific. If you’ve been reading along with the book club, or seriously intend to join for the second half of the year, RSVP here (capped to 30).

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Not that there had been many cases lately. Luckily, he was now financially comfortable enough to deal with the increasingly long gaps between cases. Even retire if he moved far enough out of the city and didn’t get too ambitious with the bee-keeping.

What had once been a steady stream of consulting cases, referred by his cop friends, had slowed to a trickle. The private clients had dried up too.

He had few friends left on the force anymore, and memories of his own stint on the force decades ago — just long enough to log the hours needed to get his PI license — seemed almost dreamlike and other-worldly. They still messaged him on occasion, the old early-retired friends who’d given him his nickname, and invited him to their pub gatherings. But there was much less detecting to talk about, great or otherwise, on either end of the increasingly desultory and infrequent exchanges.

GD. The nickname had once felt embarrassing. His friends on the force had bestowed it upon him early in his career, after his first major case. The one that made the headlines and set him on course to strike out on his own a few years later. The media had picked up on the nickname too.

Now, thirty five years later, he had learned to carry it with a certain ironic grace that felt oddly comforting. And it certainly hadn’t hurt his career as a PI after he’d left the force. He’d been constantly besieged by podcast invitations throughout the early years, when he’d taken on a number of high-profile cases, and he’d managed to walk the fine line between the liabilities of over-exposure and the advantages of low-grade notoriety. They left him alone now. A familiar institution of the city that neither needed, nor attracted, the glare of the spotlight.

There had been a few rough patches early on, around highly public fumbles, when the nickname had threatened to mark him as a lolcow rather than a celebrity PI, but he had the track record to underwrite it now, and the sort of subterranean word-of-mouth reputation that was worth a thousand headlines. It was a joking-not-joking sort of nickname now, and still commanded enough respect that nobody used it disrespectfully.

But few used it at all these days, respectfully or otherwise. He stood for a world in retreat.

Most of his old friends on the force who had cared about clearing cases and justice for victims had left, in one of the many rounds of voluntary retirements, to take up private security work, or change professions altogether. The ones who remained had adapted to the new realities, focusing on the most politically fertile high profile cases. Or worse, they signed up for the new chief’s program. The media types and influencers who had supplied the tailwinds of his early career as a PI were now mostly doing other things.

The new police chief was cast in a decidedly praetorian mould, and unabashedly loved the role the federal and city administrations were eager for him to play — commanding a masked, militarized, camouflaged, faux-elite paramilitary force that stood for order rather than justice. Crowd control, security details, clearing of homeless encampments, containment of protests, monitoring immigrant neighborhoods and dissident social media chatter: Those were what he saw as his metier. And to be fair, he was good at all of it. If the political bosses wanted a proper Praetorian Guard, in their new chief they’d found someone capable of building one for them. He was not hostile to the investigative function of the force. He was simply indifferent to it, content to go through the motions and keep up appearances to the extent they were still needed.

Under the new chief, the technology operations of the force had vastly expanded, acquiring a fleet of drones, self-driving patrol cars, and complex infrastructural entanglements with the traffic and highway operations. The mass surveillance and AI analysis operations had spawned entire new departments.

And of course, there was the growing urban warfare training and tooling. The cream of the new recruits now affected the swagger of special forces operators. Narcotics and organized crime divisions had expanded steadily. Resources for investigating robbery, burglary, domestic violence, homicide — the bread and butter stuff that citizens still thought policing was about — had shrunk steadily. Just enough was left to handle the part of the caseload that attracted social media notoriety and caused PR problems for the department. Other cases were neglected till they turned cold.

Perhaps it IS time to quit. I’m a relic now. GD thought.

And it wouldn’t even really be a retreat. He wouldn’t be quitting. After all, bee-keeping mattered now, a bit role in a planetary crisis comparable to the bit role he now played in the criminal justice world of the city. Not an idle hobby as it had been in the time of his fictional idol over a century ago.

But deep down, he knew it wasn’t true. The problem wasn’t that he was a relic. At a fit sixty three, he had never felt more confident in his investigative talents, or more able to best the cops at their own game. The problem was that the cops weren’t even showing up at their own game. The problem was that nobody cared anymore.

The arc of the moral universe no longer bent towards anything like justice. They didn’t care that he was a better investigator than them anymore, or better at delivering justice.

Policing was openly about something else altogether now. About bending the arc towards whatever value the praetorian contraption at the heart of the city’s policing was about. He wasn’t a relic so much as an alien from a different moral universe.