The Introverted Detective

Gun laws are different for every state. I am only talking about Ohio in this post, but it's easy to find the open carry and concealed carry laws online. Keep that in mind, writers. Your character may be breaking the law if you don't know these laws. Heck, you may break the law if you don't know your gun laws. Open Carry Laws                             Open carry is a new law that some law enforcement aren't familiar with, thus your character that open carries may be approached by law enforcement and jumpy people alike. The best option for a reaction, in the situation of a law officer approaching, is to be calm, keep your hands away from your weapon, and comply. In the words of an FBI agent I once met, you can fight for your rights in court later. Also, you may want to get a lawyer if your approaching officer is one who doesn't understand the open carry law and you get arrested. Open carry is generally n...

Characters, like people, have personality types, thus they must be introverts, extroverts, or ambiverts (meaning can be both at different comfort levels). As writers, we have to know what our characters are to make them realistic, and doing so can make a more dynamic social scene in your writing. For example, having an extrovert (Person A) and an introvert (Person B) clash due to Person A having a need to fill the comfortable silence Person B enjoys will create a conflict that can drive conversation and character development. Conflict furthers your story and, in this scene, can spur colorful words from Person B, while Person A may not understand why the other character is so irritated. This is why introverted or extroverted matters; we interact based on being an introvert or extrovert all the time. It influences us far more than we think because it influences where we get our energy from and what exhausts us. Since I've now said the words introvert and extrovert without definit...

Tailing and surveillance are essential to private investigators. Your fictional private investigator will need to know how to do this well, or if you want them to fail, what not to do. Tailing, to be clear, is following someone in a car or on foot. Surveillance is watching someone from a distance. You'll have to know the difference for this to make sense. First, let's start with the pre-surveillance work. It only takes one stroll through the internet channels, public records, and social media to find one's habits and usual places to visit. There are whole websites dedicated to helping people do this. One hour or less and someone can know you hang out at the public library every Friday and you went to a Nancy Drew Convention in New Orleans last year (just a fictional example, but you get the idea). It's not that hard to do this. If you check your friends' Facebook events and pictures, you already have a lot of information. Your fictional PI, if they are on the le...

Private investigators are shown in films and (some) novels as shady people who solve crimes for the rich, and in some cases, get personally invested in the cases themselves. The reality is slightly less glamorous because PIs have to follow the law just like the rest of us. Most of the time, they are not loner detectives doing things by themselves and are part of a larger organization, like Pinkerton Detectives were. For the benefit of all those writers trying to write authentic private detectives, here are some basics on PIs, the real ones. To be a private investigator legally, you have to have a license and renew it every year. To get that license, you have to know the state requirements. For Ohio, you need a good reputation, 4,000 hours of investigative experience, and education. You can't just stumble into this career path. There is a test to pass. Every state is different, so check your facts. Keep this in mind when your PI comes to life on the pages of your novel. They worke...

As a writer who writes assassin characters, I have done research on the subject. It is scary how many people actually know how to find an assassin in several different countries (and I'm not even touching the dark web for my research!). First of all, let's discuss what a hitman/hitwoman is in comparison to an assassin. Hitmen/hitwomen is a subclass of the term assassin and kill for cartels, mafia, or just kill random people off the street (because of patterns of living and various other reason, random people are not hard to kill). An assassin kills for a living, to put it simply. In my research, I've also found that there are professional and amateur. The difference is training. For example, an ex-military special agent may have far more skill than a teen runaway trying to get some cash. Amateur also tends to get caught far more easily, and professionals tend to be older, while an amateur is more likely younger (not always the case). Keep this in mind when you write yo...