A Professor Becomes a Private Eye

Detective Josiah Thompson. Thompson was a tenured professor of philosophy at Haverford College when he applied for a job at a San Francisco detective agency. He has since left academia and works full-time as a private eye. He's written an account of his work titled Gumshoe: Reflections in a Private Eye. Thompson's cases run the gamut from recovering money from an attic in a drug case to saving an innocent man from the gas chamber.

In the '70s, novelist Lawrence Block created New York private investigator Matthew Scudder who chases extreme bad guys. Liam Neeson now plays the character the new grisly film directed by Scott Frank.

The fictional Australian hard-boiled detective is the star of several sharp, funny novels by Peter Temple. Two of those books have recently been adapted into TV movies starring Guy Pearce. Critic-at-large John Powers says Pearce perfectly conveys a complex blend of old and new masculinity.