It’s fun to read about gumshoe detectives, it’s fun to watch them in movies starring Humphrey Bogart. It’s fun to see them spoofed in movies like Murder By Death¹.

And, if you want to read about a real life gumshoe, you can do that in this book which is a biography of Hal Lipset, “America’s real-life Sam Spade.”

This is a collection of cases that Hal worked on – or just had opinions on, based on his professional experience – often told first person, and stitched together by the biographer. I’m guessing someone interviewed him and Holt transcribed his words from tape, then added the context that makes it all make sense.

Here’s one of the stories from the chapter on lying clients.² A young woman moves to the big city and marries a guy. On the day the husband leaves for Hawaii, his sister takes his wife out shopping. After a lovely day, the wife borrows the sister’s car, promising to return it. The next morning, the sister looks out her window, sees her car, and assumes the wife returned it. Until the husband calls to say he arrived safely and that he tried calling his wife to tell her but there was no response. The sister drops by and discovers the wife, shot through the head, and dead on the couch. Time of death: while the husband’s plane was in the air. As luck would have it, on the day of the marriage, an insurance salesman that happened to know the sister happened to drop by the husband’s house and sell the husband insurance policies with a double-indemnity clause for himself and his wife. A policy that went into effect, as luck would have it, on the day that the husband flew off to Hawaii. The big, bad insurance company is a little suspicious and hires Lipset to look into the case. Lipset finds the wife’s family who tells him that the wife had been in a traumatic auto-accident as a child and was terrified of driving and never learned how. Oops. In fact, she didn’t even have a drivers license – she had one of those state IDs that look like licenses but aren’t. The evidence that Lipset discovers isn’t enough for an arrest – but his research about the insurance policy is enough for the insurance company to win their case in court.

Is it a major case, destined to change the world? No. Would anyone write a murder mystery about it? Probably not. But it’s interesting, clever how Lipset puts clues together to form a theory about what happened.

There’s an entire chapter about Lipset’s work re-acquiring children who had been taken out of the country by non-custodial parents. Other chapters cover electronic wire-tapping, which apparently Lipset was in on the early days of; his work with cults, including the Jim Jones cult; how he got his start (in the military); the role of coincidence in his work; his work in divorce cases – something murder mystery detectives generally look down on; and his work on Watergate and even his work on the Polly Klass case.

This is a very easy book to read and a lot of fun.

1. Classic. ↩︎
2. Although why this is in the chapter on lying clients, I don’t know, since the client in this case is an insurance company. ↩︎