I’ve always had a thing for detective fiction. As a 7 year old I wanted to grow up to be Sherlock Holmes (not *a detective* but specifically Sherlock Holmes). I ended up becoming a researcher at various places, but never really followed that urge to be a detective.

I’ve been struck recently by the way the that the fantasy of the investigative journalist has been played out in science fiction and noir.

The investigative journalist and the private detective do have quite a bit in common. The autonomy to follow one’s nose, to find out secrets that will embarrass someone, to have a hands-off benefactor who funds your jaunts with only a directive to find the truth are all part of the fantasy. The reality of the roles are very similar too – lots of boring work going through reams of data searching for that elusive bit of telling information, pressure from the funder to get results, incomplete data and insufficient time and coming up against the tawdry realities of human existence. And, of course, a worrying tendency to end up dead.

What really strikes me though is the way in which the detective in some of my favourite novels functions as a journalist, and vice versa.

The central character in Spook Country is a perfect example of a fantasy journalist. She works for a sexy magazine (literally, a European version of Wired) that is funded by a mysterious (sexy! rich!) millionaire wunderkind. The magazine has yet to publish its first issue, yet she has an unlimited expense account and seemingly no pressure to ever produce a story.

The journalist is also a successful-ish musician from a cult band, giving her both arty cred but distance from the unbalancing effects of actual success. She’s reporting on a hot, sexy, virtual reality art movement that (kinda spoilers but not really) leads into the sexy worlds of parkour, post cold war intel and money laundering.

(Ok, really spoilers now)

By the end of the novel, the journalist has managed to uncover a money laundering operation that is trying to bring stolen Iraq War funds back into the US via a Baptist Church. After all that, the story she has been writing is never to be published, and it transpires she has been filling the role of the detective all along.

This contrasts beautifully with the central character of Warren Ellis’ novel Crooked Little Vein. Michael McGill is a detective, assigned to find the secret Constitution of the United States. (It’s bound in alien skin, and has hypnotic powers). He acquires a grad student researcher along the way, but is committed to a secret mission on behalf of the US government.

But in the final confrontation (SPOILERS) after arguing with his kinky sex enthusiast/researcher about the impact this book would have in the US government’s hands ends with him calling the police and publishing the secret data to the world, via a (sexy!) citizen journalism / cell phone project, effectively flipping from private detective to investigative journalist.