About the Power of Columbo and Doing It Yourself
I first met Deborah Shapiro all the way back in 2002, when we were fact-checkers at New York magazine. After that, we were fact-checkers at Elle, a job I got in part because of Deb (thanks, Deb!). I always knew she was a writer outside of work; I still remember a story she wrote in which a character refers to Hasids as "acids." Good writing sticks with you like that. So I wasn't surprised when Deb became a published novelist, first with The Sun in Your Eyes and then The Summer Demands, both of which I recommend enthusiastically.
A few years ago, I saw Deb when I was in Chicago and we commiserated about how tough the publishing industry is. And then she went on to do something that continues to impress and humble me: she started her own damn imprint. With B-Side Editions she has published three books, and her newest is also my favorite. Watching the Detective is part memoir, part cultural analysis, part intellectual inquiry into the strangely enduring power of Columbo, and part inadvertent distillation of what it means to be Gen X.
As I've never watched an entire episode of Columbo, I'm not the book's most obvious demographic. (Although I have come to realize that one side effect of getting older is recognizing that Peter Falk was in fact kind of hot.) But I still found myself swept up in Deb's close reads of various Columbo episodes because they're as much about what isn't on the screen as what is: the detective's off-referenced but never-seen wife; Falk's fascinating career; a specific shade of blue found on old cars; the city of Los Angeles, where Columbo takes place; film theory; Roland Barthes; the passage of time; fathers.
On the latter point, Deb writes about her own father and his tendency to collect things. Reading of his arsenal of clothing from the past took me to my parents' cedar closet, filled with '70s-era Pendleton shirts and the smell of mothballs. If I had to describe this book's mood, it would be roughly equivalent to how I feel when I think of that cedar closet: a bit nostalgic, yes, but mostly keen to investigate the pull of the past and the connections — both obvious and inexplicable — that lead us to perceive the world, and our place in it, in certain ways.
This book is very good at doing just that, and in my eyes it does so in a way particular to Gen X. We were a generation raised in a fracturing, contradictory society on a steady stream of network TV, mostly left alone to figure things out. Watching the Detective operates much in this spirit: at its heart, it's about a writer undertaking a research project not because anyone told her to, but because she saw certain things and wanted, in a low-key way, answers.
I feel so happy that this book exists, that it can't be neatly categorized and is guided by a writer's own idiosyncratic interests and not what the market is asking for (the market being a forever unreliable narrator of its own wants). And I love that both it and Deb's larger publishing project embody another Gen X ethos, that of DIY. If you can't find what you want, make it yourself. Others, for reasons they may not be able to articulate, will more often than not discover that they want it, too.
