The profession of private investigator is not one that we found listed on the pamphlets they hand out after high-school, urging us to make a decision about our future.
It is most likely that, as I did, you have found this incredible line of work in the literature of your childhood.
We got to read about heroic characters, tangled up in complex cases, interrogating suspects, and anxiously following the trail that will lead to the identification of the culprit. We got to steal a little time in the head of a detective and loved every minute of it.
The return to reality always felt a bit unfair and we lay there for a few minutes wondering, what if....
What if this could be real? Or at the very least be rooted in some kind of reality? One where individuals could play a role in helping those who were wronged find solace in the voicing of the truth.
As we started to grow up, we left the fiction novels on the night-stand, and read newspapers more frequently. If you are anything like me, your eye always tilted towards the "Crime" section.
Among other things, it allowed us to prove to our skeptical friends that beneath the Hudson River lies more than washing machines and jewelry. More importantly, every so often, we would see the words "private investigator" in that very section. When they were not associated with words like "crooks" and "thieves", they were mentioned in crime-solving stories and exonerations of the innocent. Hope.
Could this be? Could the profession be real? Could I participate in helping someone by diving into gut-wrenching research, laws and surveillance? All the while focusing on one thing and one thing only; the truth?
Right at that moment is when most of us would begin the frantic research about private investigators and how to become one. In my case, that research led me to the websites of a few investigators, all of which had a "Blog" section. In there they shared articles with insights on the job, reality vs fiction pieces, as well as advice.
These helped me bring to life a profession that I thought only belonged to Raymond Chandler novels. The image of the ever so secretive private-eye who hides in borderline paranoïa and keeps to himself happily shattered. I knew I had to get to work.
Thus was born Hudson Investigations. After a few years of work, we wanted to create a space, like many have done before, dedicated to sharing stories of all kinds.
We will be introducing articles in "Series" or in stand-alone pieces, ranging from "Kooky P.I Stories" to "Surveillance" as well as "Collaboration" and "Advice". Obviously the official names of the "Series" have yet to be finalized.
We hope that you enjoy reading us, and that this will not only give you some insight as to what we do as P.Is, but how we see the World as People.
HPI