The hubster and I were working a crossword puzzle, and one of the clues we couldn't get easily was a three-letter word for "gumshoe." After scratching our heads for awhile, we finally realized the answer was "tec," which in reality would be 'tec. This is one of those words (abbreviation, really) we had run across before, but couldn't remember the exact references.
After a little searching, I realized the abbreviation goes back quite a bit, to at least the time of George Bernard Shaw who used it in his 1916 play Pygmalion (later the musical My Fair Lady) at the beginning of the story when Henry Higgins is identifying everyone by their accent: "Whats the row? What she do? Where is he? A tec taking her down...He aint a tec. Hes a blooming busybody: thats what he is. I tell you, look at his boots." Although from the context, it's clear they were referring to a police detective, not a P.I.
In a letter to Hamish Hamilton in 1949, Raymond Chandler wrote, "What a queer attitude the better minds have to mysteries. 'Oh, it's just a mystery, a thriller, a 'tec.' I read them in bed to put me to sleep. I read them when I am sick. I read them with I am too tired for serious reading.' The deprecation is so obvious, but does anyone ever reply, 'And what, my good sir, would you do if you were sick or tired or wakeful and there were no mysteries?' The very people who declare they read them rapidly and forget them at once declare in the same breath that they cannot exist without them. And they know God damned well that they could exist indefinitely without the more massive classics."
Another use came in the 1960s and 1970s, Detective Comics was abbreviated as 'TEC in letter columns and other places, but it's hard to find 'tec used much today.
Like Chandler's detective protagonists, "'tec" is usually used to refer to hard-boiled detectives mostly from that particular era. But still, I couldn't find the first use of that abbreviation for detective, nor when it really came into mainstream usage. Any takers for that little mystery?
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