San Francisco private eye Josiah Thompson doesn`t wear a ”silly”
trenchcoat, he said. He wraps himself instead in angst.
Nor does this philosophy-professor-turned-private-investigator pack a Smith & Wesson. He fires from the hip with high-caliber Camus, hollow-point Kierkegaard and semiautomatic Sartre.
Stand back, ma`am, wouldn`t want you to get any existentialism on your pretty little dress:
”In a fundamental way, surveillance is the detective`s paradigm activity,” Thompson writes in his book, ”Gumshoe: Reflections in a Private Eye” (Little, Brown, $17.95).
”The investigator`s should be the private eye,” he goes on, ”the eye that sees but is not seen. . . . Traditionally, the eye that sees and is not seen is God`s eye. Is that what the surveillance man seeks? Does he wish to become God? The closing section of Sartre`s `Being and Nothingness` flashed to mind. All human projects are doomed, wrote Sartre, because they share a contradictory desire, to become the ens causa sui-that is, God.”
Not a pretty sight, a private eye with his philosophizing smeared all over the place.
Thompson is a handsome little guy in his 50s with a young man`s mop of hair and a childhood nickname, ”Tink.” He is a product of privilege, prep schools and the Ivy league. Andover, Yale and Oxford.
As a professor of philosophy with tenure at Haverford College in Pennsylvania in the early to mid-1970s, he drove a Volvo and had a family. He wrote a biography of Soren Kierkegaard in 1973, and the New York Review of Books said it deserved to be read by all students of the philosopher.
But he also rode a motorcycle and had interesting hobbies that set him apart from his apparently boring-by-comparison peers at the college, a small, prestigious ”mini-utopia,” he said.
In the late `60s, Thompson was one of the several hundred thousand amateur investigators of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. He wrote a book about it, ”Six Seconds in Dallas.” He was a consultant to Life magazine on his theories that the Warren Commission`s single-assassin theory was all wrong.
His freelance probing prompted the clucking of tongues among his campus colleagues as an unscholarly pursuit, he said.
As a small football player in college and a U.S. Navy frogman after graduation, Thompson had developed a thirst for adventure, nearly equal to his relish for tossing out the words of Great Thinkers. He quoted Robert Penn Warren about ”the awful ambiguity of immediate experience” to dates from Smith or Mt. Holyoke in college because ”I thought it might make me seem
`poetic and interesting.` ”
He didn`t say whether it worked.
At any rate, in 1976, adventuresome Tink headed for suburban San Francisco on a sabbatical. From the ”mini-utopia” he escaped to Marin County, Calif., and a place described as a ”Walden Pond for the comfortably laid-back.” There he had intended to work on a biography of yet another philosopher, Nietzsche, but it just wasn`t clicking.
His marriage wasn`t hitting on all cylinders, either. He hadn`t intended to become a philandering jerk, or ”womanizer,” as he put it. ”But womanizing became habitual, a series of new experiments, perhaps new mirrors for the self.”
Then, his Self had a ”spasm of middlescence,” the Marin County version of a middle-age consciousness crisis. He was having self-doubts. He fretted that in the academic world, ”the way one goes about proving things is too soft.”
The academic world, he decided, ”is a world encased in language. The rawness of the world is muffled. I`ve never fit real well in that world.”
So, one day he got on his motorcycle, rode into the mean street of San Francisco, wherever it is, and signed on as a $5-an-hour aide to a private eye.
”I felt some thirst for experience, for the otherness of experience and the gritty raw bone of the actual. Something different, something
surprising.”
First off, he tailed a guy who got on a bus and lost him. Then, he staked out the home of a cheating wife and got busted as a suspected Peeping Tom.
Gritty, raw-boned, actual stuff. Not at all like Andover or Yale.
As he grew into his gritty raw-boned role, Thompson began quoting author Dashiell Hammett and his model private eye, Sam Spade, more and more, and the Great Thinkers a little less; although over a beer in the Wrigley Building Bar last week while he was in town to promote his book he slipped in Camus once or twice. He used the philosopher`s words to describe the life of a private eye as ”a life lived without justification or excuse.”
In one case described in the book, Thompson is sent to find a $30,000 stash left behind by a dope dealer facing trial. For a minute or two, the philosophy teacher on sabbatical thinks seriously about swiping the loot.
”On top of half pay (during the sabbatical) at Haverford and the money I`ve made as a detective, $30,000 would make this year a real zinger,” he quotes himself as saying when his Dark Side emerged, writhing in his conscience.
But, son of a gun, once he found the stash, the Good Professor side won out.
”I can`t steal it. It`s real. It`s in the trunk of our car. Before we had it, I was tempted. But not anymore. It`s too real. I`m sorry.”
Thompson is now a real detective, full-time gritty. He makes about $85 an hour investigating cases for defense lawyers, ”getting people out of cages,” he said.
His marriage survived his spasm of middlescence. ”It wasn`t that we`d looked down the long barrel of divorce and finally decided to put the gun away. We`d never taken the gun out. After a while, we`d just decided to quit playing with toy pistols and let it be,” he said.
Although he doesn`t write about them in his book, Thompson worked on the defense of Black Panther Huey Newton when he was on trial for assault and murder charges, as well as the defense of William and Emily Harris in the Patty Hearst kidnaping. Last year, he was named best local detective by the Bay Guardian, a San Francisco alternative newspaper.
After 10 years as a private eye, Tink took a break to write the book, in October, 1985. He wanted to find out ”what I`d become . . . I was a detective, the job, the role, the identity.”
He decided, he said in the Wrigley Bar, ”We`re the garbagemen of the social service. We`re mercenaries. I don`t think we do any good; we`re hired guns. The kind of suspicions and cynicism you gotta have is really
debilitating . . . .”
He discovered, as he writes in the closing line of his book, that
”Hammett had gotten it all right,” which should be comforting to Hammett.
Lorimar Productions has purchased the television rights to ”Gumshoe.”
Pilot and series. With Jerry Mathers as his sidekick Camus?
