The private eye genre has come a long way, baby, with new subgenres — from teenage PIs to vampire gumshoes to geriatric sleuths — attracting new readers every year. Unfortunately, most writers are not aware of the state-of-the-art developments that shape today’s professional private investigator, which sometimes leave writers floundering with impossible and antiquated devices, characters and methods in stories. Which is why we wrote How to Write a Dick: A Guide for Writing Fictional Sleuths from a Couple of Real-Life Sleuths, whose material we culled from our combined 14 years as private investigators, and also from our teaching online classes and conducting workshops at writers’ conferences about writing private investigators. How to Write a Dick isn’t about how to write a novel, but what you need to know to write an authentic, compelling 21st-century sleuth character or story.

“Forget Google and Bing. When you need to research PI work, go to the experts, Colleen Collins and Shaun Kaufman: they live it, they teach it, they write it. How to Write a Dick is the best work of its kind I’ve ever come across because it covers the whole spectrum in an entertaining style that will appeal to layman and lawmen alike. This will be the industry standard for years to come.” —Reed Farrel Coleman, three-time Shamus Award winner for Best PI Novel of the Year and author of Hurt Machine

“If you want authenticity in creating a fictional private investigator for your stories, then this is a must-have reference book. Its authors, Colleen and Shaun, are living breathing PIs with years of actual experience in the PI game.” —R.T. Lawton, 25 years on the street as a federal special agent and author of 4 series in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine

I’m a professional private investigator as well as a multi-published author.  How to Write a Dick: A Guide for Writing Fictional Sleuths from a Couple of Real-Life Sleuths is co-authored with my husband, also a PI (who is also a trial lawyer–since publishing this book, he’s returned to the practice of law).  The book is a compilation of articles, presentations and classes we’ve given at regional and national writing conferences, including content from classes we gave between 2006-2010 to writers through online courses.  Besides bringing our experience and knowledge as private investigators to this book, we also bring my experience as a multi-published author (22 novels) and my husband’s experience as an attorney (he practiced law and trained PIs for nearly three decades). In other words, we address the techniques and tools of private investigations as well as what a fiction writer needs to know and the legalities of private investigations.

Besides being a nonfiction book for writers, its information is useful for researchers, private investigators and those simply curious about the world of private eyes.