Gumshoe: Reflections in a Private Eye.

• Author: Crawford, Alan

Gumshoe: Reflections in a Private Eye. Josiah Thompson. Little, Brown, $17 95. A private investigator's clients aren't always sultry blondes with gorgeous gams. Many of them, as Thompson's intriguing account of his decade in the sleuthing business indicates, are paunchy, rather dull men. What they may lack in legs, they make up for in other areas. Most of them can pay their bills, and, while that pay may not be great, it is enough, in Thompson's case, anyway, to enable him to avoid reporting, day after day, W the dull drudgery of an office job. This is precisely the sort of compensation that Thompson and other middle-class men are most likely to appreciate: freeedom from routine, an element of risk, sometimes a hint of real danger, and a sense, most of all, that one's work has some connection to the gritty business of real life. A Yale graduate who taught philosophy at Haverford College, Thompson gave up his tenure in the mid-seventies to become a gumshoe on the streets of San Francisco-Stan ing salary, $5 an hour.

Sunday, November 14, 1976. The sun has yet to come up, and Thompson, who is waiting to shadow a strike organizer, reflects on surveillance. "I was actually beginning to enjoy the game... '" he writes. "It had to do do with the watching and not being seen. .But there was also something more fundamental, something 'gritty' about it... .You had to worry about elemental things-having food in the car or else going hungry, knowing where the pay phones were, which streets were oneway."

There are moments of discouragement and periods in which he wonders why he isn't back in the classroom. Flying to Boston to dig up evidence for a jailed drug dealer's defense, Thompson begins to answer his own question. The plane "was filled with rows of businessmen, some reading papers, others tabulating their expense accounts, still others sleeping," he writes. "Had I been like that? Had I been a drowsy, well-fed passenger lolling back in his seat, fulIy at ease in the comfortable and the familiar?" Acutely aware of the "dull routine that was the reality of most people's...