What would you put into Room 101?

                                   

There are some  things in crime fiction that  drive me mad. When I reach that point in the book, I want to throw it at the wall, where it will rebound to the floor where it will be attacked by any  cats or dogs present.

 During my whirlwind round about tour of here and there, I have been interviewing authors- and interviewing the audience when it seemed appropriate, about what they would banish into the dreaded room 101.

                                  

Here’s  my top ten  crime fiction no-nos.

1)      Never going to the toilet, eating or blowing their nose.

 I think Cagney and Lacey were the last tv detectives to go to the loo. Some detectives do of course, do nothing but eat. Frost can’t get to the first ad break without a bacon sarnie.

2)      Never growing old

Those weird characters who live a half life in some temporal ether; they exist but they do not age. Their kids go to uni, but their hips don’t wear out. And nobody ever pensions them off.

3)       Not suffering the consequences of physical injury.

This really winds me up.  A dislocated elbow on page 208 will still bring tears to the eye on page 232. And, in one famous book the hero is stabbed, shot, knocked unconscious then buried underground – shallow grave that was filled in with earth – for a few chapters. Then his hand appeared, scraping at the ground, bullet in the head, and suffering from a loss of blood and credibility.

4)      In serial fiction,  no carry over of PTSD, as if reborn emotionally in the gap between one book and the next. People who suffer loss carry it with them in real life and should do so in fiction.

5)      An ailing relative for no reason than to give a cardboard cut out hero a  bit of empathetic back story.  This was a common one talked about during the tour, not one I had noticed in my reading but it really gets the goat of some Tartan Noir authors. I sat red faced, as my fictional fiscal (Coroner type)  has just put his wife into a  home with early onset dementia. I did point this out, and they replied that I was really following point 2. People get to an age where stuff like that happens.

                                            

6)      Stupid women, running in graveyards at midnight because they heard a noise. Leaving the mobile phone, the pit bull and the hatchet behind.  Sometimes they move so quickly they don’t have time to put clothes on the poor darlings.

7)      The mobile phone coming to the rescue…on page 320. It has been in their pocket since page 1, so why didn’t they just call Police Scotland, The FBI and Auchtermurchty Tourist Rescue on page 2 and save us all the bother. Having said that, the mobile signal in Auchtermurchty is iffy at best.

8)      Too much harping on about soap box issues. If you want to be an activist, then do so, but leave the crime fiction to tell its own story and the reader will get the idea by osmosis.

9)      A really stupid argumentative boss. How often do we see that? Drives me mad. The boss wouldn’t be more superior in ranking than the hero if he didn’t have some talent for the job surely. Personality conflicts ok, conflicts of interest ok but not a lack of the little grey cells.

10)   Bending facts just a wee bit too far……fiction is fiction. But there are boundaries to what I acceptable. And if it has to happen to make the plot work, then the writer should go back to the drawing board with a rubber.

                                          

So what twists your lemon?

Caro Ramsay 15 12 2017