Technological
changes have come at breakneck speed in the past few years, and I think a lot
of people are starting to forget that we weren’t always so dependent on our gadgets
and devices.
I’ve
been startled several times lately by reader complaints that my first Rachel
Goddard novel, The Heat of the Moon,
seems “dated” and, indeed, “weird” because Rachel doesn’t carry a cell phone
and doesn’t use the internet to look for old newspaper stories. Why, they ask,
would Rachel have to go to the Library of Congress to look up anything, when
all the information in the world is available online with a few clicks?
Let
me clarify a few things.
The Heat of the
Moon was
published in 2006. Books are seldom set in the year they’re published. In this
case, the book was written and set in 1997. (At one point I write, “It was the
summer of the comet with the funny name, Hale-Bopp.”) As with so many “first”
novels (this was actually the eleventh book I’d written), it made the rounds of
New York publishers for a year, had strong interest from two editors who loved
it and wanted to publish it but couldn’t get it past the committees that make
the final decisions. I put it aside for several years, until my friend Judy
Clemens urged me to submit it to Poisoned Pen Press. PPP kept the manuscript
for 16 months before offering a contract in 2005. It finally saw print in March
of 2006.
I
suppose I could have rewritten it to include cell phones and internet, but the
editor loved it as it was and published it without altering a single word. (I
believe she added a comma here and there, as she has strong views about serial
commas.) But here’s the thing readers may not realize: even if I had “updated”
it, Rachel’s search for information wouldn’t have been very different.
Rachel
was looking for newspaper stories about events that occurred in Minnesota in the
mid-1970s. This may come as a shock, but few newspapers had all of their
archived copies online in 1997, when I wrote the book, or in 2005, when I sold it.
In fact, not all historical copies are online even now. The Minneapolis
Star-Tribune, today, has digitized copies beginning with 1986 editions. That
wouldn’t have done Rachel any good, even if those back issues had been
available through the internet in 1997. The same is true of many other
periodicals. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, for example, offers online
copies starting with 1990. Older copies are available on microfilm.
Furthermore,
the Library of Congress is not the all-encompassing repository of digital materials
that some people imagine, and you can’t find every page of every newspaper ever
printed by going to the LOC website. The National Digital Newspaper Program
(NDNP), a partnership between the LOC and the National Endowment for the
Humanities, began to take shape in 2003, and the first grants were awarded in
2005 for the collection and digitization of selected
(not all) newspaper pages. The actual work is being done by state libraries,
historical societies, and universities, and each grant covers the digitization
of 100,000 pages that are considered to be of historical importance. The
digitization is up to 1922 so far. (See the collection at the ChroniclingAmerica site.)
As
for cell phones, when I wrote The Heat of
the Moon in 1997, I didn’t know a single person who owned one, and I never
saw people using them in public. Until the Motorola StarTAC, the first flip
phone, came out in 1996, all cellular telephones were bulky and heavy, some weighing
as much as a pound, and they cost a small fortune. The StarTAC was small but retailed
for $1,000. Most mobile phones continued to be hefty for several more years. The
precursor of smartphones was the Nokia Communicator 9000i (1997), the first
phone with a separate keyboard. It weighed 14 ounces and cost close to $1,000. Rachel
could have tucked a StarTAC into a pocket or purse, but not this Nokia. What's more important is that, as a low-paid junior
veterinarian just beginning her practice, she would have fainted at the thought
of spending $1,000 on a telephone. 
The
boom in personal cell phone use didn’t begin until the first decade of this century,
with the advent of 3G (third generation) technology and falling prices. By the
end of 2007, about 295 million people worldwide
owned mobile telephones. That was 9% of the entire planet’s potential customer
base. Even if The Heat of the Moon had
been set in 2006, when it was published, Rachel’s lack of a cell phone would
not have been unusual.
In
later books, Rachel does carry a cell phone and use the internet, and like a
lot of series writers, I avoid identifying the years in which the stories take
place. The aging of characters is a problem all authors have to deal with when
they write about the same people over a long period. Should we let them age
naturally with a year or so passing between books? Should we anchor them in a
specific time period, and allow only a few weeks to pass in story time between
installments?
Sue
Grafton’s Kinsey Milhone started out in the 1980s and there she remains, with
her land line and her little black dress. James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux, a
Vietnam veteran, now has an adult daughter and is nearing retirement. Harry
Bosch, another Vietnam vet, has aged in Michael Connelly’s books, but in the TV
version he’s back in his forties and has been transformed into a Gulf War
combatant. Robert Crais made his Elvis Cole and Joe Pike Vietnam veterans too,
but today they seem as young and active as ever, unaffected by the passage of four
decades. Crais hasn’t taken them into their sixties, yet he hasn’t noticeably slowed
the passage of time in the outer world either. It’s fiction. If you like the
characters, you don’t fret about such matters.
I
allowed Rachel to age, but I didn’t let 14 years go by between book one and
book six. She is now in her mid-thirties, not 41. What year is it? I have no
idea, and I don’t care, because it isn’t important to any of the plots.
Although
I’m sure most readers know a historical novel when they see one and don’t
expect the characters to whip out cell phones or search the internet, I fear—if
my own experience is any indication—that they’re less forgiving when novels are
set in the near past. The 1970s have at last achieved the status of history,
but do books set in 1985 or 1995 seem merely “dated” and therefore unreadable?
With
my first book, I apparently landed on a dividing line that some people are
unable to cross mentally. Trust me, though: cell phones and internet searches
are irrelevant. All that counts is the story. Of the books I’ve published, The Heat of the Moon remains my
favorite.
