Who is Randall Hitt?

For lack of an accessible term, let’s call the long established fictional portrayal and attitude of private investigators – PI noir. Thanks to books, movies and TV shows, PIs are regarded as persons who are cleverer than their situation. In a nutshell, that is who Hitt wants to be – that’s pretty much who he needs to be. In his younger more self-conscious days, Hitt romanticized private investigation because it gave him an “above the fray” role in his mind. Maybe he needed that frame of mind to armor his small town beginnings. After all, how can a bumpkin be relevant to the worldly wise moneyed? He doesn’t fit the bill as a PI Noir protagonist. That’s mainly because in real life, this fictional genre can only hope to be a state of mind – at best. After all, day to day life isn’t very noir-like.

Over time, Hitt’s attitude, a mental mechanism to comfortably cope with pretty girls and awkward social settings, became who Hitt is. And by the time he was 30 and had successfully operated his own real investigative service, Hitt was the real deal to a world that thinks PIs are cleverer than their situation.

Or so he thinks.