The TV series "Watching the Detectives" introduced a large audience to William C. Dear, one of the most flamboyant and successful private eyes in the world. The hand-tooled boots and diamond jewellery, the Texas ranch, the cars, the boat, the planes - all these are a world away from the traditional image of the seedy gumshoe in his grubby office with nothing in the filing cabinet but a bottle of bourbon. Bill Dear uses the most modern techniques and the most high-tech equipment in the service of his clients, who hire him for just one reason - because his is the best, and he gets the job done. From the time he joined the Florida Highway Patrol as a skinny kid of 18, his pursuit of the bad guys has been relentless. He has been locked for hours in sweltering car trunks, crawled through rat-infested tunnels in search of missing children, and landed planes in the black of night to uncover buried bodies. He supervised the exhumation of Lee Harvey Oswald in order to disprove a conspiracy theory. Inevitably he has got up the noses of the police, who do not take kindly to having thier blunders exposed. He has had at least one contract out on his life; he has been knifed in the back; he has disguised himself as a doctor to nab a hitman on his hospital bed; he has been left for dead, throat slit from ear to ear and then reappeared for the sequel. "I guess I've been lucky" he says. Bill Dear has racked up more column inches than any other P.I. - and was featured in True Detective five times before he was 22. Now he tells his own story in his own inimitable way, a story as full of drama and incident as any crime novel.