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Press, 23 May 1977, Page 23

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PRIVATE EYE, PUBLIC SCANDAL

Those of us who have been devoted, ever since we first read them, to the novels of Raymond Chandler and in particular to the character of Philip Marlowe, and have consequently nurtured a romantic vision of the private eye as a sort of battered knight of the twentieth century, have lost a little of the magic from our lives as a result of the Private Investigators and Security Guards Regulations 1975. It is bad enough that such a free-range activity, should be subject to regulation at all, but it is the particular pettifogging nature of the Regulations which makes them seem so incompatible with the

free, tough spirit of the men they regulate. The dead hand of bureaucracy is laid nowhere more heavily than in Clause 18: Special receipt forms — “ (1) No private investigator shall give a receipt for trust account money except on a form supplied to the private investigator by the Registrar or some form authorised by the Registrar.” Now isn’t that pathetic? You spend a day bursting through doors with guns blazing, being sapped on the base of the skull with a blackjack, rescuing beautiful blondes with grey eyes which hint, at a nature more passionate than you had ever

dreamed possible, and then when it’s all over and you get back to the office, lean back in your chair and uncork the bottle of bourbon, you suddenly see on your blotter a letter from the Registrar complaining that you issued a receipt for trust account money on an unauthorised form. And the point is that you can’t ignore his complaint because he has the power to strike you off or rub you out, or whatever Registrars do to private eyes. If Philip Marlowe had been subject to these Regulations he would have turned in his gun and become a chartered accountant.