The Private Eyes
The film revolves around the exploits of a detective agency in Hong Kong called Mannix Private Detective Agency. It is headed by private detective Wong Yeuk-sze (Michael Hui) with his emotionally drained assistant Puffy (Ricky Hui). Meanwhile, Lee Kwok-kit (Samuel Hui), a kung fu expert, who works at a Vitasoy plant factory and spends most of the time doing kung fu tricks to impress a girl, ultimately loses his job. Seeking to find another line of work, Lee attempts to joins Wong's detective agency. Despite Lee's impression with his kung fu talent which involves his snatching trick, Wong was not impressed. Then, as it appears that Lee would not get the job, Wong discovers that his wallet was missing and was presumed stolen by one bystander who bumped into them, which led to a scene where Wong fights the thief in the kitchen using sausage nunchaku as a weapon. Wong's onslaught backfires, and just as the thief walks away, Lee intercepts him and recovers the wallet, thus impressed Wong to hire him for the job. In truth, the wallet was in Wong's possession the whole time; they attacked an innocent bystander and stole his wallet.
The Private Eyes
The client explains that he already hired four detectives to work on the case. Two have given up, one is working and the last one has failed. He shows them a man locked in a room, a detective named Ryu who's familiar to Kogoro and also wears an ID watch. The client tells Ryu his deductions were wrong and then activates the explosives in the watch. Ryu dies before Conan's and Kogoro's eyes.
Conan frantically tries to deactivate the IDs when he sees a countdown on the computer screen but he needs a passcode to shut the IDs down or reset the countdown. What's worse - Reiko damaged part of the computer when she tried to shoot Heiji, Ito and Conan. Conan tries to reset the system and connects it with the client's private laptop.
The private eye story, that acclaimed (and sometimes unfairly vilified) sub-genre of crime fiction, is important for the contributions of its best writers and for its influences on other aspects of popular culture (films, radio and television drama). The P.I.'s antecedents may be traced all the way back to Sherlock Holmes, himself a "private inquiry agent." These stories explore this sub-genre, and enlighten the reader to the vast influence of the private investigator novel. Media & bookseller inquiries regarding review copies, events, and interviews can be directed to the publicity department at publicity@uwpress.wisc.edu or (608) 263-0734. (If you want to examine a book for possible course use, please see our Course Books page. If you want to examine a book for possible rights licensing, please see Rights & Permissions.)
Peculiarities of manner and person, which in the ordinary individual should be free from comment, may acquire a public importance, if found in a candidate for political office. Some further discrimination is necessary, therefore, than to class facts or deeds as public or private according to a standard to be applied to the fact or deed per se. To publish of a modest and retiring individual that he suffers from an impediment in his speech or that he cannot spell correctly, is an unwarranted, if not an unexampled, infringement of his rights, while to state and comment on the same characteristics found in a would-be congressman could not be regarded as beyond the pale of propriety.
A simple case of blackmail turns out to be anything but for private detective Philip Marlowe (Humprhey Bogart) as bodies start turning up and his employer's daughter (Lauren Bacall) gives his head a good turn. Just say the names Bogart and Bacall and you can work up a bit of static electricity.
What is different today is the size and scope of the commercial satellite sector and the ease of information dissemination. Advances in satellite technology and the growing availability of commercial space launch platforms have made it easier and cheaper for private firms to operate their own satellites. At the same time, more powerful computers and improved Internet connectivity mean that more and more people and organizations outside government can access and analyze imagery gathered by the growing constellation of private satellites.
A few months back, the editor of the online magazine Festivale asked if I'd like to write an article about female private investigators in fiction, going back to such early women detectives as Miss Felicity Lemon, the efficient secretary for Mr. Parker Pyne in Agatha Christie's set of short stories Parker Pyne Investigates (1934). This kind of article is "my thing." Besides being a female PI, I've written female private detectives in novels and three nonfiction books on private investigations, as well as judged novels and short stories for the Private Eye Writers of America.
Many view Mrs. Paschal as the first female private detective in literature. In 1864, Paschal appeared in The Revelations of a Lady Detective, written by W. S. Hayward, a British male writer. Although Mrs. Paschal occasionally worked with the police force, she also conducted private investigations for payment.
The hard-boiled genre and its detective - AKA shamus, private dick, snoop, gumshoe - took its first steps in the 1920s and hit its stride in the 1930s up through the 1950s. These hard-drinking, wisecracking private eyes walked the mean streets in an urban jungle filled with violence and bloodshed.
Alongside iconic hardboiled private eyes like Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe were their female counterparts in pulp fiction (named for the cheap "pulp" paper on which these stories were printed). A subset of these female private eyes appeared in the "screwball comedy" genre, which included elements of farce, romance and humor. Below is a sampling of these detective dames, their authors and example works:
Secrets of a Real-Life Female Private Eye: Topics include the history of the first US female private eye, investigative tips, real-life case stories, links to other PI/cold-case/private-eye-genre blogs and sites, an overview of several popular female private eyes on TV and more.
When the Schiavo case began garnering national attention, Democrats' first reaction was to press their social libertarian line. "Congressional leaders have no business substituting their judgment for that of multiple state courts that have extensively considered the issues in this intensely personal family matter," House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi complained. Liberals became increasingly confident as polls showed the public overwhelmingly concerned about federal intrusion into a private family matter. Once again, Democrats risked reinforcing the perception they lacked core values.
Space and the Amateur Detective in Contemporary Hollywood Crime Film Luis M. García-Mainar (bio) The crime film has traditionally been defined through spatial concepts that point to social issues metaphorically, from the urban underworld of gangsters and private eyes to the hostile foreign territories traveled by spies. The macrogenre of the crime film itself can be tentatively explained as a narrative structure that expresses views about the conflicting relationship between personal initiative and the social organization of communal life by tracing the lives of the agents of crime: criminals, victims, and law enforcers. The gangster film, the suspense thriller, and the detective/cop film deploy these agents as protagonists of stories where we witness the passage from a social space, troubled by fantasies of power and disempowerment, to a space of adventure that serves as the escape from social oppression. In this process the self is asserted through violence.1 Since space is so intimately related to the form, content, and cultural significance of the genres of crime, analysis of it should open ways to understand the aesthetic, thematic, and ideological changes undergone by crime films.
Of course, there are some links between today's mysteries and yesteryear's. Most current detective stories, like those of Chandler or Dashiell Hammett or Ross MacDonald, are set in a big-city milieu full of crime, vice, and corruption. Today's private detectives, like their predecessors, may be tempted to leave the straight and narrow, but they seldom do. As in the past, today's detectives are unflinchingly committed to helping their clients - no matter what the cost.
Richard Nehrbass's Dark of Night (HarperCollins, 210 pp., $20) illustrates both the continuities and changes in American gumshoe tales. The hero of this whodunit set in the City of Angels is Vic Eton, a former police officer turned private eye. His job is to find the missing daughter of a prominent film producer - a task that becomes considerably more complicated after his client is blown up by a car bomb.
"Dark of Night" is an engrossing tale full of authentic Hollywood atmosphere. One of the running jokes in the book, for example, is that everybody - from the secretary to the cop - has a movie script they're trying to peddle. But, as with many detective writers, Nehrbass falls a little flat on narrative; there are too many loose ends and unexplained happenings, especially involving the private school attended by the missing girl.
A better novel is Joe Gores's 32 Cadillacs (Mysterious Press, 338 pp., $18.95). In the tradition of Hammett's Continental Op, this novel centers around a firm of private eyes, Daniel Kearny Associates in San Francisco. DKA's specialty is auto-repossessions, and, in this deftly written caper, the repo men are matched against a wily ring of Gypsy con-artists who have absconded with 32 Cadillacs from local car dealers.
IN contrast, David Berlinski's A Clean Sweep (St. Martin's Press, 230 pp., $17.95) - another private-eye tale set in San Francisco - demonstrates some pitfalls of the genre. This book is populated by cliches: Aaron Asherfield is a sarcastic private eye who lives by himself and is afraid of getting involved with women. He gets beaten up a lot and has an antagonistic relationship with the police. Sound familiar? 041b061a72