According to a new book search tool on Google, we are currently living in a literary private detective renaissance. The new Google Books Ngram Viewer revealed that private detectives are mentioned in books now more than any moment in human history.
In the graph embedded above, you can see the increase (click to enlarge). Use of the words “private detective” have tripled in books since the early 20th Century–increasing from 6,920 results between 1900 and 1918 to 27,200 results between 2002 and 2008.
Here’s more about the tool: “When you enter phrases into the Google Books Ngram Viewer, it displays a graph showing how those phrases have occurred in a corpus of books (e.g., ‘British English,’ ‘English Fiction,’ ‘French’) over the selected years.”