London has Sherlock Holmes. Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins, Philip Marlow, and Harry Bosch have all worked the streets of Los Angeles, while Sam Spade has done the same in San Francisco. Arkady Renko operates in Moscow, Harry Hole and Kurt Wallander are natives of Norway and Sweden, and New York City is home to Nikki Heat and Eve Dallas.
Any list of fictional detectives would be incomplete, however, without the addition of J.P. Beaumont, whose forty year career with the Seattle Police Department and Washington Special Homicide Investigation Team has not only resulted in the capture of a multitude of criminals but visits to the many landmarks and neighborhoods of the Emerald City – making him as much a part of Seattle as Sherlock Holmes is to London or Philip Marlow to Los Angeles.
“Beau started out as a divorced, middle-aged homicide cop with what my readers soon realized was a very real drinking problem,” author J.A. Jance told Subjectify Media in 2022. “That part of his story was finally pointed out to me during signings for book number four. In book seven he had his first undeniable blackout. In book eight he’s in treatment. Now in book twenty-five, he’s retired, remarried, still sober, and doing some volunteer PI cold case work. I think he’s gotten a lot older and wiser over the years, and so have I. Also technology, police procedures and forensics have all changed remarkably over the years. We’ve both had to keep up with all of that.”
Jance lived in Arizona before relocating to Seattle in the early 1980s, so it was only natural that her later characters – Joanna Brady, Ali Reynolds, and Brandon Walker – all reside in Arizona. While J.P. Beaumont has traveled south in a handful of crossover novels, Seattle has remained his haunting grounds for the four decades since his first appearance in Until Proven Guilty, published in 1985. As Jance noted to Subjectify Media, he has gotten older with each subsequent narrative, and the evolution of both his own life and that of Seattle are found within the pages of any J.P. Beaumont mystery, giving insights into the city as much as the character.
In Until Proven Guilty, for instance, computers were just finding their way into the workforce and cell phones were nonexistent – at one point, Beaumont and his partner Ron Peters search for a payphone instead of using their police radio so that the conversation wouldn’t be intercepted by the local media. Thirteen years later, Beaumont and his newest partner, Sue Danielson, were still consulting a Thomas Guide Map Book to find their way around the suburbs of Seattle as opposed to Google Maps and relying on paper instead of computer tablets for notetaking.
“In my opinion, if a cop wants to really go high tech, all he has to do is invest in a ballpoint pen,” Beaumont says in Breach of Duty.
By 2013, however, J.P. Beaumont finally begins singing a different tune. “People who know me well understand that I had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the computer age, first protesting the existence of cell phones and then trying to cling to a typewriter when Seattle PD was switching over to computers,” he explains in Second Watch. “So the idea that I would fall in love with my iPad was not exactly a foregone conclusion, but when Kelly and Scott teamed up to give me one for Father’s Day this year, I was hooked.”
In Until Proven Guilty, J.P. Beaumont’s regular hangout is a bar called the Doghouse. By Breach of Duty, the establishment has been replaced by the Hurricane Café. “The old Doghouse catered to working class folks – neighborhood secretaries and salesmen during the day,” he recalls. “I had heard rumors that the new place appealed to a far younger and much hipper clientele.” As the series of novel continue into the twenty-first century, the changes within Seattle become even more noticeable to the aging detective, who has by then left the Seattle Police Department to work for the Attorney General’s Special Homicide Investigation Team.
Throughout the narratives, J.P. Beaumont regularly visits Seattle landmarks for both personal and professional reasons. In the first novel alone, Beaumont catches a movie at the Cinerama – noting the nearby Fourth and Blanchard Building, better known as the Darth Vader building – walks along the Alaska Way waterfront before hiking up the Pike Street Hillclimb to Pike Place Market, dines at the restaurant on top of the Space Needle, and gets married in Myrtle Edwards Park, which stretches along Elliott Bay.
Author J.A. Jance doesn’t just allow her main character to visit these sights but give background information and commentary on them as well. In Breach of Duty, J.P. Beaumont mentions the Fremont Troll, explaining to readers, “The troll is a piece of Seattle’s whimsical statuary, built partially as a joke and partially to honor the Scandinavian heritage of many of the people living nearby. Made of poured concrete, it sits tucked under the soaring Aurora Bridge. In one knobby hand it clutches the metal remains of a full-size VW Bug. The VW is a long way from the old Norwegian folktale, ‘The Three Billy Goats Gruff,’ but in Seattle’s off-the-wall Fremont neighborhood, it works.”
In 2015’s Long Time Gone, meanwhile, Beaumont witnesses a Seattle rarity. “For nine months a year, the mountains around Seattle are mostly invisible,” he says. “Hidden by cloud cover, they sit there minding their own business, but when the ‘mountains are out,’ as we say around here, and Mount Rainer emerges in all its snow-clad splendor, trouble is bound to follow. Unwary drivers, entranced by the unaccustomed view, slam into fenders of the cars in front of them, and traffic comes to a dead stop.”
In addition to the Space Needle, Pike Place, and Mount Rainer, there is another characteristic of Seattle that regularly appear within the J.P. Beaumont novels and is even more synonymous with the Emerald City. “When the coffeepot – an engineering marvel straight out of Starbucks – beeped quietly to let me know it was done, I went into the kitchen and poured most of the pot into our two hefty stainless-steel traveling mugs,” Beaumont explains in 2011’s Betrayal of Trust. “This is Seattle. We don’t go anywhere or do anything without sufficient amounts of coffee plugged into the system.”
In 1985, J.A. Jance began telling the story of a homicide police detective named J.P. Beaumont. Over the course of the next forty years, that story has not only been about the murders he investigated and the ups-and-downs of his life and career but of the city he calls home as well – the story of Seattle itself.
Anthony Letizia