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.
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).
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.
This new wave of militarization, praetorization really, made the old wave in the wake of the war on drugs look like building schools and libraries.
GD couldn’t recall the last time he’d been introduced to a freshly minted detective with the sort of cerebral, investigative affect he’d grown up idolizing in fiction, and encountered reasonably frequently in his years on the force. Now, they all looked like crosses between caricatures of “warriors” (not soldiers of course) and political muscle. Few seemed to have read classic detective fiction or watched classic detective shows. Nobody joined the police force or became a PI inspired by Sherlock Holmes anymore. It had always been something of a quixotic motive, but it had at least been represented in his world. Not any more.
The tastes of the increasingly hypermasculine world of policing, as best as he could tell, leaned towards militarized fiction. To the extent they watched TV anymore, they mostly watched shows about SWAT teams and immigration raids. To the extent they read, they read heavy handed ideological novels about post-apocalyptic civil wars, not mysteries. But what they mainly consumed these days was influencer videos about weapons and tactics for urban warfare. And they didn’t play chess or poker. They played first-person shooter games.
They joined the force to impose order, not uncover it. To be a part of an apparatus designed to legibilize and control, not diagnose and cure.
Not that he blamed them entirely. To be fair, it mostly seemed like a mimetic thing. At least a few of the young recruits he’d met at the last mixer seemed capable of being nerdsniped by an investigative itch, given the right case. They’d been interested in some of his famous cases, enjoying and expressing vicarious Ahas at the right moments in the stories he’d gotten good at telling well.
But they’d been the exceptions, and the odds of them cultivating their investigative aptitudes in the current environment were astronomical. The younger ones increasingly ignored him. They milled around the veterans of the sensational praetorian missions instead. That SWAT raid. The assassination attempt. The race riot.
And this despite the fact that being a good investigator, a good detective, had perhaps never been easier. Things had been hard through the 20s, when the modern AI-powered investigative machinery hadn’t quite come together. Thanks to the hyper-proceduralization of investigative work — the protocolization wave they’d called it — through the 30s, what was called for in a good detective now was not so much investigative intuitions as a simpler sort of procedural doggedness. A dedication to keeping the infinitely capable, but also infinitely distractible, machinery of policing steadily pointed in the right direction. The direction of justice.
Even PIs had it easier today, thanks to the increased access to the machinery available with the right credentials.
You didn’t have to be a genius anymore to solve cases. You just had to care enough to relentlessly drive the machine to discover the truth, whether from the inside or the outside. You needed a genius for caring now, not a genius for unraveling mysteries. Saintliness, not deductive prowess.
What determined your case-closure rate now was the steadiness of your moral compass, and the stamina to keep spurring the machine on. And few had, or cared to cultivate, either now. The game had gotten pointless faster than it had gotten easier.
Perhaps it is time to quit, he told himself yet again. They can do without people like me now; the AIs can do it all to the extent they care to get it done at all.
But deep down, he knew it wasn’t true. Not because the AIs couldn’t do his job — he knew they could do it better — but because they increasingly weren’t allowed to. The new chief and his political bosses had different ideas of where to direct the multi-headed hydras of computational attention at their disposal.
In a different political environment, this might have been the golden age of criminal justice, thought GD. The thought called for a pensive sip of the cognac.
Investigation systems and protocols were now so advanced and capable, every ordinarily conscientious cop could operate like a Sherlock or Poirot if they wanted to. You wouldn’t even need Lestrade or Japp level talents. Now that, GD thought, he wouldn’t have minded at all. To contemplate retirement because crime had essentially become a technologically solved problem would have been one thing. A great thing.
But to contemplate retirement because society no longer cared to solve crimes; because moral compasses pointed to other priorities — that was quite another.
It made him wonder, he had to admit, what his whole career had been about. Why he’d bothered. Yes of course, the victims had been grateful for closure, resolution, restitution, and justice. But it had never been about the personal element for him, the empathic care, as it had been for many of his closest allies in the force. It had always been about inhabiting that liminal space where the principles of justice met the sheer joy of working out complex puzzles buried beneath piles of messy, noisy facts. Where moral ambiguities met exceptions to rules, and forced both moral and intellectual growth on you.
The catchphrase from the old Bosch franchise from the 2010s and 20s suddenly popped into GD’s head. Either everybody matters, or nobody does.
A surge of sentiment surged up from GD’s stomach and caught in his throat. He paused to sip his cognac. Don’t be sophomoric, he told himself firmly. You’re sixty three.
But Bosch. Now that had been a show that had stylishly promised hope in that era, threading the needle between a warrior ethos inspired by politicized policing battlegrounds, and the cerebral, investigative ethos of policing as a higher calling driven by a genuine desire for truth and justice. Between the individual and the crowd. Between the computational intelligence and human caring. Between solving puzzles and babysitting temperamental moral machinery. Between class loyalties and universalist values. Between expedient deal-making and procedural justice.
The cases that had been referred to him during the show’s reign had been some of the most satisfying in his career. Cases that were cozy, gritty, and procedural all at once. Cases that had called for puzzle solving, machinery-whispering, and political instincts operating in a delicate balance. Several young detectives he’d mentored in that era had been directly inspired by the show, including at least a few military veterans with an investigative bent who aspired to balance their cerebral and warrior sides.
They had nearly all retired early. The hopes represented by Bosch, he had to admit, had faded. The various needles could not be threaded. The cult of warriors had won. The praetorization was progressing inexorably.
Quitting now would be admitting defeat, I suppose. GD thought.
Even the non-human policing machinery was beginning to exhibit the new praetorian dispositions. Take the city’s big AI systems contract for instance. He’d been called in to consult on the award in ‘33. The SHERLOCK system he’d recommended, which would have vastly improved multi-modal crime-scene analysis, sensemaking large corpuses of documents, and made evidence analysis a lot more thorough, hadn’t made it past the first round. The system they’d eventually purchased was the civilian version of COUNTER, the system used by the counterterrorism and immigration enforcement agencies, clumsily and hurriedly adapted to deal with policing requirements and rebranded as RADAR. He’d consulted for the startup behind the SHERLOCK system for a few years after that, helping them with bids in other cities, but they’d gone bankrupt after losing too many bids. RADAR now had a virtual monopoly in the policing intelligence systems market.
That was really it, wasn’t it. The system had settled on an answer to Bosch’s dilemma: nobody mattered.
Citizens were to be treated as terrorists. Massed, lurking threats to law and order, not ordinary, fallible humans individuals stumbling and bumbling through the fog of life, occasionally running into situations beyond their abilities to navigate. Situations that called for people like him to step in and help unravel with patience and surgical precision.
Even the elites and charismatic politicians didn’t matter as individuals anymore. They were merely massed embodiments of interests to be protected in the abstract. The system now solved for a certain praetorian orderliness in the affairs of a city. If you were lucky, it was an order that worked to your advantage. If you were unlucky, it policed you with relentless prejudice. Either way, you couldn’t actually challenge the order. At best, you could feel guilty about benefitting from it.
Justice. It was no longer about the morally ambiguous encounter between normative ethics and the epistemic and ontological ooze of reality. It was about ensuring that the State saw what it wanted to see.
GD shook his head impatiently. Political philosophizing is for the helpless. He’d never had much patience for it. Those inclined to it didn’t last long in the business. The machine did what the machine did. You had to do what you had to do.
At the end of the day, it boiled down to a simple question: could you find a way to follow your own moral compass, or would you be have to hew to the message of the increasingly praetorian medium of the city? And in the latter case, would you stay, or walk away?
It wasn’t about retirement at all. Or about whether he could contribute more to the world through bee-keeping than through detection. Or about spending his final decades resting on his laurels, and pursuing some ideal of personal enrichment.
It was about whether or not he was willing to admit defeat and walk away.
No, not defeat, GD told himself firmly. Defeat implied being bested in contest. This was different. He wasn’t being defeated. Nobody cared about the contest anymore. Not-caring had been deeply encoded into the system itself. Into its protocols and the weights of its intelligences, artificial and human. Into its very ways of seeing.
You could fight confusions clouding a difficult case, or the machinations of a clever criminal, even a Moriarty. You could even fight a machine determined to stop you from solving a case — at least it was attending to the same realities you were. But you couldn’t fight apathy and inattention. You couldn’t fight not-caring. Not-seeing.
In the new praetorian world, there wasn’t enough care to frame events as crimes that needed solving. There were just meaningless happenings that sometimes aggregated into law-and-order problems at scale that needed orderly governing. The individual crime was simply a neglected tragedy by default now, unless it contributed to a statistic snowballing towards a million.
You could fight hostility. You couldn’t fight a lack of care. It was impossible.
That word…
Despite himself, a sheepish smile crept across GD’s face. He’d always found the ratiocinative conceit of Holmesian fiction juvenile. Eliminating the impossible.
The world of policing, investigating, and detecting was simply too open and messy to operate the way cozy libraries did. There was what the AI-maven amateur detectives behind the defunct SHERLOCK system called the frame problem.
There were too many dogs that did not bark in the night. Too many plausible but not dismissible solutions that could never be eliminated beyond a reasonable doubt, with or without AIs. All you could do was place bets based on likelihoods, with limited resources, before entropy and inattention claimed a case and rendered it unsolvable. You gambled with an eye on case-closure rates. You didn’t work with corny impossibility elimination protocols.
And even the cases that, to use the Holmesian term, presented singular features, were rarely resolved by means of an improbable solution that remained after eliminating the poor bets. They were resolved through unexpected breaks. Breaks that often took months to years to emerge. Breaks that didn’t just seem improbable, but impossible within the nominal logic of the case itself. Kobayashi Maru breaks.
In some ways, Dirk Gently’s motto made more sense for the times: I don’t like to eliminate the impossible. Detection was a matter of engineering the right ontic structure within which to view reality, not the epistemology of ratiocinative investigation. GD had read an obscure academic essay about the evolution of detective fiction long ago, making that point. By Kathleen somebody. He had it in his files somewhere.
The breaks that had resolved some of GD’s most interesting cases had had a touch of the impossible to them. Not the time-traveling robots and Norse gods that Douglas Adams’ imagination had spawned for Gently to contend with, but changes to the rules of the game. Strange new rules that had rendered impossible solutions possible.
There was that time when the new mayor had driven through a zoning regulation that had uncovered a body at a new construction site. There were those early cases where AI systems had proved capable of literally finding needles in haystacks. There was that time a swarm of amateurs on a forum had identified a location through a clue in a blurry photo only one in a million humans could have spotted — but several million people did look at the photo, with two independently spotting the clue.
Maybe some apparent impossibilities were really wild improbabilities in disguise; artifacts of unimaginative rules governing apparently closed universes, and subject to abstraction leaks. Maybe others were vulnerable to the law of large numbers, which computers were increasingly capable of unleashing on a question.
And then there were the sudden breaks that seemed like moral impossibilities.
Like the strange, unprompted confession of the King street psychopath in ‘29, who everybody knew had done it, but against whom no meaningful case could be made. The profilers had been stunned. It was as though he’d suddenly become possessed by an alien morality. He had easily resisted the best interrogators, but not his own inexplicable self-incriminating impulse.
That was the sort of impossibility he needed. A moral impossibility restoring a world where his own moral compass became useful again. A bending of the arc of the moral universe away from praetorian morality, and back towards justice. Away from a future of bee-keeping, and back towards Great Detecting.
A world in which he could make a comeback while he still had his powers.
But until then, GD told himself, beekeeping it is.
The resolution made, he stood up, and walked over to the sideboard, to pour himself another cognac, and pick up the text he was working through, Pollination Dynamics in Climate-Stressed Ecologies.
Just then, there was a knock at the condo door.
He frowned, and tapped his muted phone, which lay by the decanter.
He had missed several messages from a number he did not recognize, the last one read: I’ll just come over in person and hope to find you at home. I got your address from Sergeant ____.
GD set down the cognac glass and text, stepped over to the door, and opened it. An unfamiliar visitor stood outside, visibly distressed.
“Come in,” said the Great Detective. “You look like you could use a drink.”
I'm hoping for more of this story...
This captures things for me, the trends to the larger and more mundane implications. I can’t say whether the intention was speculative of the future, it does feel appropriate at that, but it resonated even more of today and even the past decade.