Mirabile Dictu

I’ve been bitching about this piecemeal for a while, so I thought it would be nice to have it all here and organized.

I have a love-hate relationship with mass-market mysteries. When they’re good, they’re great. (Lord Meren is my fictional husband, and he agrees.) The problem with them, though, is that somewhere along the line the genre became more saturated with Mary Sues than ff.net, a thing that takes some real doing. And I mean Mary Sues in the purest sense - they might not have amethyst eyes, they might not be universally beloved, their mere presence might not cause men to behave like idiots (though, then again, it might), they might have money problems and unpleasant relatives, but they are, quite literally, authorial self-inserts. You pick up a mystery off the shelves at Borders, and the odds are that you’re going to be reading someone else’s daydreams about themselves and their lives.

Which is kind of creepy, actually, when you think about it. Two prime examples of this phenomenon:

1. First, and no, I am not ever going to let go of this: The main character of the book has short dark hair. She owns a joke-goods business. She takes Tai Chi. She lives in Marin County. You turn the book to the author bio, and there’s the author, looking exactly like her character. She (the author) takes Tai Chi. She (the author) lives in Marin County. I bet you can’t guess what she does for a living! No, you were right the first time - she (the author) owns a joke-goods business. Yes, this is an actual book. No, I do not make this stuff up. The author is, literally, writing about herself, and making not the slightest attempt to disguise the fact. Unless you’re Vladimir Nabokov, that takes some chutzpah, especially if all you’re writing about yourself doing is hanging around with your boyfriend and solving rather trite mysteries.
2. Second, one that was actually a little disturbing. No, more disturbing than the last one. This woman lives above a bookstore that’s haunted by the ghost of a private detective. Most of the story is from her POV. She’s clearly an authorial self-insert. But the action diverges from her POV just long enough for the ghost to watch her in the bath and swoon over how hot she is. I can’t figure out how this could have been written that wouldn’t come across as frankly creepy narcissism, but if there’s a way, this author didn’t find it.

An entire genre, O my sisters, of women telling us about their fantasies, their issues, their jobs, their dreams, and where they think they went wrong in their lives, in a way that I guess is supposed to allow us all to pretend they haven’t just run us over with the Bright Orange Hummer of TMI. The books aren’t about the mystery. They’re about the author-characters, whom the publishers hope we’ll like well enough to buy the rest of the books in the series, and the mystery is just along for the ride, to showcase the author-character and her wonderful fantasy life. This isn’t mystery as Agatha Christie wrote it. This is mystery as reality TV, and after a while it starts running together in this strange, joyless, compulsive drone, the literary equivalent of the author cornering the reader at a cocktail party and rambling about how she’d always wanted to open a bed and breakfast and would have done it too if she just hadn’t married that asshole right out of college.
Fortunately, all you have to do to get away from the author in this situation is put down the book. Some of the things I’ve read, the only way to get rid of the author and her Issues at a cocktail party would be to fake your own death, and that might wind up causing more problems than it solves.

So let me start with Mirabella’s Law of Mary Sues: If you want me to read about Your Fantasy Life Starring You, you better have a really fucking interesting fantasy life. And all your friends that you write into your books? They better be damn interesting too. (I’m looking at you, Joke Shop Woman. If that chick you hang around with says “Ye gods and goddesses!” one more time in a completely unironic manner, I’m going to force-feed her a My First Baby Pagan Barbie.) Authors of this kind of mystery, as a rule, bank awfully hard on the chance that you’ll like their Mary Sues. Like I said, they’re selling the character, not the story. Which sets up an even less savory dynamic - the author is standing in the background of the story going “Pleeeeease like meeeeee!” Worse, she wants you to like her enough to pay to like her. There are very few characters in this genre I like enough to pay to like. Very few. Out of the whole, whole lot of books like this on the market. From the rumblings that have reached my ears about the steady decline in mystery sales, I suspect that I’m not alone in this.

I am just saying, it’s possible that someone might want to look into the relationship between that decline and the rise in the percentage of mysteries that depend for their success on my willingness to become the author’s BFF. Well, I mean, not on my willingness or the genre would crash and burn like a thousand Hindenburgs, but you know what I mean.

The question here, it seems to me, is… well, there are a lot of questions, starting with what the fuck Shower Scene Woman was thinking and proceeding from there, but there’s a question to be raised, I think, about character investment. By definition, all fiction is Your Fantasy Life Starring Somebody. If some part of that character is not present in some part of you, you can’t write them effectively. But there’s always, it seems to me, been this unspoken rule that your characters are People Who Are Not You, sort of like your kids are people who are not you despite carrying your genes. Even teenagers on ff.net sending their American exchange students to Hogwarts realize this, which is why they get all “OMG she iz so not meee!” when you make pointed mention of the fact that their character in fact shares their screen name. So how did the message blow right past these authors? Because you cannot, cannot tell me that they don’t know they’re writing about themselves and their imaginary adventures. Of course they do. (And it’s not just women either. I’m halfway through a Dean James book and literally cannot figure out whether it’s him that’s annoying me or his character. One or the other of them needs a clout upside the head, either way.)

Second, why in the world does anyone write these, other than because they sell? I mean, Mary Sues in the ff.net sense I get. I too would like to have a glorious mane of hair, eyes of some improbable color, and sparkly magical powers. But to put myself into a book, as I am (more or less), with the same job and the same issues and the same apartment and the same addiction to coffee, cigarettes, and Chinese takeout? The same clothes, the same hair, and the same cat? (Not that my cat would not make a good Mary Sue familiar. She would, because she is just that awesome. Sadly, however, I think she’s too lazy to participate in the crime-fighting.) What does that buy me? I’m not new and improved. My life probably isn’t in any better shape, and considering that my life currently does not contain cadavers and bloodstains it’d probably be in worse shape in my mystery incarnation. Is it really just that when people say they like my character they’re quite literally saying that they like me? Is it just that I like to write stories about my life as is just with a little more excitement? Sheer narcissism? Some sort of exhibitionistic thrill at the thought that five thousand people know what I keep on my mantlepiece?

Connection?

What?

I don’t know. But… look, people. I’m sure you’re perfectly nice in person. But the cold fact of the matter is that there are not too damn many real people who are interesting on paper as is. Sylvia Plath, maybe. Elizabeth I. Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen. The average mystery writer? Not so much. This is not a put-down - I’m not interesting on paper either, and neither are any of my loved ones. But frankly after a while you all run together into some sort of Ur-character, a well-meaning, good-natured, middle-aged woman with an adequate boyfriend and a self-employment-type job that you sort of obviously want us to think is cooler than it actually is, who manages to twist the laws of probability until they vanish in a puff of logic by collecting a pile of cadavers every season or so.

She’s… okay, you know, in small doses, this Ur-character. But Sylvia Plath she ain’t. She’s not even Nancy Spungen. Get back to me when she gets addicted to heroin and runs off with the lead singer of a proto-punk band, and then we’ll talk. Until then, maybe I’ll check you out of the library sometime, and we’ll have coffee and talk about the relative merits of different vacuum cleaners or some shit.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 7th, 2006 at 9:20 pm and is filed under Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.