Meet our Managing Editor

 

Linda Doty

 

I joined the PI Magazine team in 2020, after I got a call from one of the owners.  I was one of only two people on LinkedIn who had been a PI and wanted to do proofreading and editing. I like to think of this as the culmination of a journey that began when I read every mystery book in the children’s section of the Carnegie library in my hometown, and armed with my dad’s library card, made a large dent in the library’s adult mysteries before I turned 12. I often say I was raised by my parents and the public library.

I took journalism classes in high school and was on the newspaper staff the last two years, and I was a feature writer for my community college as a freshman. However, by the time I graduated from the University of Tulsa, my degree was in sociology with a heavy minor in business—I had been working in offices since I was in high school, so I knew I had to be prepared for whatever career path opened up. As it turned out, that career was in banking.

Because of my love of reading, I was still determined to be a writer, but after my first novel was finished, I discovered I had no patience for the brutal process of finding an agent and publisher. (I was working full time as a bank auditor and had a new baby, so time and patience were in limited supply.) I realized I liked writing essays better than novels, likely because I wrote when the mood struck, and it rarely took more than an hour for a first draft. I won a local library writing contest one year, read a few of my essays for broadcast by the local NPR station…and then got a 20+ year case of writer’s block and eventually lost the urge to write. But I never stopped reading mysteries, many involving PI’s, and eventually, after 25 years in banking and a few more consulting, I took the classes required to obtain a PI license.
When I acquired my PI license, I was not prepared to find clients; I called a few attorneys, got discouraged, and eventually did not renew my license. Other than being hired to find one person, I mostly did process serving, which I enjoyed. In fact, I was surprised at how much I enjoyed making up effective backstories in an effort to find people…it was like becoming a character in those mystery novels I loved.
I think the reason I did not succeed as a PI is because I did not have the resources that PI Magazine provides subscribers. There are articles in every issue on marketing; growing and effectively managing your business; improving your investigative, surveillance, and process serving skills; how to utilize open records laws to find information that perhaps you never even knew existed; and many other things that make you a better PI—resources that I did not have because I was not aware that PI Magazine existed.

So, with my long and winding path full of mysteries and reading, being the editor of a magazine for PI’s was the perfect gig for me. When I read, if there is a typo or error in punctuation or grammar, it stops me short, unplugs me from the content I am reading. Those errors keep the writer’s message from coming through clearly. My job here is to try to make sure that what is printed in the magazine is what the writers thought they wrote. And I love my job.