“I’m a romantic, Bernie. I hear voices crying in the night and I go to see what’s the matter. You don’t make a dime that way.” Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye (1953).
Mutual aid is a term we’ve been hearing a lot lately, as needs grow and services diminish. Calls for donations over CashApp to help a stranger get a room, medical treatment, or a new escape from a bad situation. Friends band together to raise money for a food bank, an animal shelter or bail bonds. Mutual aid is as old as humanity itself; tribes sharing what they’ve hunted and gathered. And the detective genre is just one more artistic rendering of that.
Unlike the cops, who (in theory) have a professional obligation to solve a crime, the private eye does so by choice. With the private eye, the choice often involves money, or a luxurious pair of legs, or a curiosity that cannot help but be tickled, but more often than not, that invoice never gets paid or those gams belong to a killer. By the time the P.I. find this out, though, they’re in too deep to worry about money and too concerned with protecting the innocent or clearing their client’s name. That client might be afraid of the cops, they might feel ignored because of their race, social status, gender or other profiled bias, so it’s the private eye who risks their life in order to restore justice to their community. Their investigations – on and off the books – serve as a form of mutual aid.
Detective fiction often mirrors the unfortunate truth that some crimes are investigated more than others, leaving the private eye to pick up where law enforcement leaves off. The cops aren’t interested in helping a junkie find his missing stripper girlfriend – but Billie Levine is in Kimberly G. Giarratano’s Death of a Dancing Queen (Datura 2023). Phillip Marlowe helps out mobsters, drunks and other lowlifes throughout his time behind the desk, often taking a hard left hook or a night in the clink – courtesy of those same cops – to do so. And even when they do charge a fee, like the “steep rates” Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro usually charge in Dennis Lehane’s Gone Baby Gone, that fee is often dropped in favor of doing the right thing.
Just as Dean Spade writes in Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next), the detective’s work is not charity – i.e. “rich people or the government deciding who gets the help, what the limits are to that help, and what strings are attached.” – but even as the detective grumbles, drinks or quips their way through the case – they are doing so because they believe in justice. They hear voices crying out and they respond to the trouble at hand, regardless of their client’s perceived social or moral failings.
And justice is the ultimate form of mutual aid.
Author Bio:
Libby Cudmore is the author of Negative Girl (Datura 2024) and The Big Rewind (William Morrow 2016) as well as the Wade & Jacks P.I. series in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and Tough. Her short fiction has appeared in The Dark, Smokelong Quarterly, Monkeybicycle, Shotgun Honey, Stone’s Throw and HAD, as well as the anthologies Mixed Up, Welcome Home, Hanzai Japan, A Beast Without a Name and Lawyers, Guns & Money: Crime Fiction Inspired By the Music of Warren Zevon (co-edited with Art Taylor). She is the 2018 recipient of the Oregon Writer’s Colony prize, the 2023 Shamus award for best P.I short story, and the 2023 Black Orchid Novella award.
She is the current co-host of the OST Party and Misbehavin’ podcasts and the former co-host of The Shattered Shield podcast, and teaches short fiction through The Writer’s Circle.
