Snoops Site Thrives at 25

You’ve gotta give the guy credit for longevity! April 2023 marks 25 years—a full quarter-century—that Kevin Burton Smith has been writing, editing, expanding, and forever tinkering with his indispensable online resource, The Thrilling Detective Web Site. Taking its name from a crime-fiction pulp magazine popular on newsstands between 1931 and 1953, Smith’s Thrilling Detective is an encyclopedia of information, primarily about fictional private eyes (those appearing in books and journals, as well as on radio, television, and in other electronic media), but occasionally he slips in a character who acts just like a gumshoe without officially being one.

The results, despite Smith’s persistent modesty about them, are outstanding. Now, I may be a particularly receptive audience for this sort of intelligence, but I can’t tell you how many times each week I refer to The Thrilling Detective, whether it’s to investigate the background of a vintage shamus, search for details on a forgotten scribbler, examine the editor’s periodic (and often delightfully snarky) news bits, sample the evolving “This Day in P.I. History” listings, or check out the site’s intermittent presentations of short fiction. And I’m quite chuffed to see that Smith has resumed updating his “Dick of the Day” page, on which he directs readers to fresh and updated entries to his rogue’s gallery of pertinacious peepers.

Specifically for this 25th anniversary, Smith has posted “The Autobiography of Matthew Scudder,” an excerpted work of fiction from Lawrence Block. He also provides author-screenwriter Lee Goldberg’s blunt assessment of the Magnum, P.I. TV reboot. And he introduces the whole package with cover art by Oregon artist Leslie Peterson Sapp, who he says, “does these simply amazing paintings inspired by noir. The one I’ve chosen was the most ‘private-eyish’ one I could find, but Leslie’s noir visions go far beyond that. You can read all about her and her work in ‘Leslie Peterson Sapp: I Paint What I Feel—And I Feel Noir.’ And be sure to check out some of her other work in ‘My Scrapbook.’”

As much delight as I find in Smith’s ongoing project, he’s caused me some definite headaches over the last couple of years, as he’s gone through the fitful process of transferring The Thrilling Detective’s pages to a new, apparently more reliable cyberspace address, causing multitudes of links from The Rap Sheet to become inoperable. (Those connections are still being fixed.) But I can forgive him that irksome move, so long as he persists in enhancing the Web’s foremost compendium of knowledge regarding invented sleuths.

Here’s to many more years behind your keyboard, Kevin!

By the way, if you’d like to help The Thrilling Detective Web Site grow, pitch a few bucks toward the cause. Click here to learn how.