Suspension of Disbelief

I recently read SIRE AND DAMN, the latest (I hope not the last, but I fear it may be) "Dog Lover's Mystery" by Susan Conant. It started me thinking about the conventional but "unrealistic" elements mystery authors have an implicit agreement with readers to treat as believable, similar to the theatrical convention that actors can speak "aside" to the audience without being heard by any other characters onstage.

Most obvious is the convention that makes amateur detective series possible at all. We have to accept as normal that a hero or heroine not involved in law enforcement, an investigative profession, or the criminal underworld encounters dozens of murders in his or her daily life. It's the phenomenon that gives the small Maine town in the TV show MURDER SHE WROTE a higher per-capita homicide rate than Baltimore or Washington. Sometimes the author offers a sort-of rationale for the protagonist's repeated clashes with violent death. Walter Mosley's series protagonist Easy Rawlins, a black man in post-World-War-II southern California, builds a reputation in his community for solving problems people don't trust the police to deal with. Similarly, Barbara Hambly's "free man of color" in antebellum New Orleans, Benjamin January, after unraveling a few mysteries in which he accidentally gets entangled, becomes the person his friends and acquaintances—black, white, and mixed-race—turn to when delicate problems arise. Most "cozy" mystery series, though, simply ask the reader to accept the premise that a chef, a writer, or (as in Susan Conant's series) a dog trainer will trip over a murder or two every few months.

Likewise, we expect the murderer to be revealed as a member of the heroine's circle of acquaintances, not someone from out in left field she's never met. In the classic tradition established by such authors as Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers, pinning the crime on a character not included in the roster of suspects would be considered unfair to the reader.

The more hard-boiled varieties of murder mysteries, the kind with a higher level of onstage violence, feature another "unrealistic" convention: The hero or heroine usually gets knocked unconscious at least once per book. Yet he or she recovers (sometimes after a credible period of recuperation, sometimes "unrealistically" fast) and soldiers on through adventure after adventure with no sign of permanent brain damage. Given all the recent media publicity about the dangers of concussions (in children's athletic programs, for instance), we have to accept the hero's phenomenal toughness and good luck as part of our genre expectations.

More often than chance would predict, early in the story the protagonist comes across just the bit of specialized or confidential information that she'll later need to solve the case. This example seems to me a borderline case; the effectiveness of suspension of disbelief depends on the author's skill in planting the information in the natural flow of the action. It stretches the bounds of credibility, however, when the amateur detective just happens to overhear a fragment of dialogue that conveys the vital piece of missing information. There was a TV series about a crime-solving priest and nun that, although it was lots of fun, did that kind of thing too often. One of Elizabeth Peters's suspense novels satirizes this device when the heroine sneaks into the villains' lair and eavesdrops on them, lamenting that nobody conveniently says something like, "I will now go to the dungeon and check on our prisoner, who is in the third cell on the right."

In general, any reliance on coincidence to solve the mystery is problematic; an author might be allowed one such incident every now and then, but a little bit of coincidence goes a long way. There can be a fine line between disbelief being suspended and (as Marion Zimmer Bradley used to say) hanged by the neck until dead.

Then there's the direct opposite, Tolkien's "secondary belief," when an author draws the reader so deeply into a fictional world that it comes to life for us. No "suspension" is needed, because we experience the secondary world as a realm that could truly exist on a different plane of reality.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Astronaut kidney stones

If the label at the Johnson Space Center in Houston gave proper attribution to the astronauts who kindly donated their kidney stones for the public to peer at, and wince over, I did not notice it.

One specimen on display was the size of my little toe!

I don't know whether I can make much of astronautical (should that be a word?) kidney stones in my "Forking" books (the sequels to my alien romances in the Gods of Tigron trilogy). With Forced Mate, the carefully (but not personally) researched military uses for urine were left on the cutting room floor. However, I don't think my hero is going to want to be weightless for any long period of time. I'll have to upgrade his mothership.

That means that there wouldn't be a lot of point in tying him into one of those cool, grey, astronaut sleeping bags, which had seemed to me to have some vaguely sexy possibilities... While alluding to bondage, I'd never, previously, given much thought to the fact that astronauts in a zero gravity environment have to be tied down in order to exercise.

As for floaters, did you know that astronaut toilets have a rear view mirror, so astronauts can check before leaving the throne that they are not about to be pursued around the spacecraft?

If you ever thought that an airliner's toilet made efficient use of space, with every surface a repository for some compactly-stowed item, imagine the space shuttle as an airline toilet... without gravity, and without the running water.

Every pull-out drawer had a net inside it, to stop the drawer's contents escaping whenever the drawer was opened. The different space suits were interesting. One which had chilled water pumped through it reminded me powerfully of the costumes worn in "Dune". Another made the astronaut look like a human lobster.

I've thought of "contact suits" for visiting aliens, but never before had I realised that a stiff and bulky (and sealed) headmask would mean that one could not contemplate ones own navel ... or chest. Astronauts have small mirrors on the insides of their wrists, so that they can read the dials in the control packs on their chests and other places. That means, any instructions have to be in "mirror writing".

Of course, this would not be an issue if an alien language was in symbols like our H or O or X which read the same whether upside down or backwards. Then, they'd have to have a Yoda-like concept of grammar, where word order did not matter.

Much as I love Tolkein, I don't think I'll take world-building to the extent he did, and actually invent (and use) a complete language for my alien worlds. Until every book is an e-book --and there will come a day when it is illegal to cut down trees-- pulp fiction allows a writer ever fewer pages to tell a story.


Best wishes,
Rowena Cherry

Insufficient Mating Material