Fay Faron is an American private investigator, syndicated columnist, and author whose two Writer's Digest Howdunit books are among the most-recommended craft references for crime fiction writers. She founded The Rat Dog Dick Detective Agency in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1982, working real cases that later became the source material for her books and her column.
Her advice column Ask Rat Dog was syndicated by King Features in 1991 and ran in more than sixty newspapers nationwide. The column made her a regular guest on national television, including three appearances on Oprah and stops at Larry King Live, Good Morning America, and most of the other major talk and news shows of the decade. The combination of working PI credentials and broadcast reach made her one of the most visible private detectives in the country in the 1990s.
Missing Persons: A Writer's Guide to Finding the Lost, the Abducted and the Escaped (1997) and Rip-Off: A Writer's Guide to Crimes of Deception (1998), both in the Writer's Digest Howdunit series, draw directly on her casework. Missing Persons walks novelists through the actual methods PIs use to track skipped, missing, abducted, and escaped people. Rip-Off catalogs the major confidence schemes she has investigated, from pigeon drops and shell games to Ponzi schemes, identity theft, charity fraud, real estate swindles, and the language and psychology of con artists and their marks. She bought back the rights to both books in 2019 and reissued them in print and ebook.
Faron moved to New Orleans in 2001 and founded Market2Editors, a service helping writers launch their own syndicated columns. In 2012 the New Orleans City Council named her Ferrygodmother of New Orleans for leading the campaign that saved the Canal Street ferry. In 2019 she received the Marquis Who's Who Lifetime Achievement Award for her career as a private investigator. She also wrote A Nasty Bit of Business: A Private Eye's Guide to Collecting a Bad Debt and the memoir Journey of a Teetotaling Virgin.
