Guy Noir in Virginia Beach

Many of us are familiar with Garrison Keillor's internal investigator “Guy Noir,” popularized by the hit radio program Prairie Home Companion over the last few decades. If you're not, you may have read some of the old hard-boiled potboiler detective stories in classic magazines, or watched some serialized detective show on television.

Of course, real life is never quite like the movies, but there are some key ways that these types of media show what it's really like to be a private investigator and hit the streets working hard on behalf of your clients.

Something New Every Day

The Guy Noir character is an excellent example. Every episode becomes an intriguing story, with unexpected twists and turns. Somebody walks in with a problem, and Guy treats it with his own brand of dark humor and diligence.

Investigative work really is like that, in a way. This is a job where you have to be prepared for anything. It's not the type of work where you can just say to somebody “here are the keys, and here's the cash register.” It requires a lot of problem solving and critical thinking and creativity, and that's something that you can't say about a lot of other industries anymore.

Wearing Out Your Shoe Leather

This is another old saying that holds true in modern detective work, except that instead of wearing out our shoe leather, we’re mostly wearing out our brake pads.

As a trusted private investigator firm in the Tidewater and Virginia Beach area, we’re used to putting the hammer down across the Hampton Roads Bridge Tunnel or going back and forth from Portsmouth to Newport News, or navigating the crowded streets around the shipyards looking for the evidence that our clients need.

You might say part of the business is leaving no stone unturned, and that the process takes a lot of daily travel, not just sitting back in a dark office looking at the sports page.

A Can-Do Attitude

You don't make it in the private investigator business by being a doom and gloom kind of person.

Just look at Guy Noir and his plucky responses to a challenge. You want to frame things from the perspective that you're going to succeed because in some ways it often becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

To put it another way, clients are coming to you because they have real problems. They want reassurance and empathy, and to the extent, you can give that to them, you're carrying them through a tough time. It's not the time and place to be a naysayer and be pessimistic about results. That's not to say that you should promise people the world – just that the best investigators commit to doing what it takes at the beginning, and help their clients to feel better about the situations that they're in.

Talk to East Coast Investigations, Inc. about what you’re facing – and we’ll face it with you.