Aging Dicks: Still Fighting Crime After All These Years

     Bring Your Shovels: How to Move a Body

     Now there's a panel topic you don't often see.

     Unless, of course, you attend Bouchercon. Figuring out how best to dispose of a corpse is all in a day's work for people who show up to the annual gathering of mystery and crime writers and their fans.

        Usually Bouchercon (named after critic Anthony Boucher who pronounced his name to rhyme with voucher) is held in a large city like Toronto (last year's) or Dallas (next year's). This year's convention, however, was held at the Vinoy Hotel in my hardly metropolitan hometown.

     St. Petersburg, Florida. Population: 244,769.
                                                                             
     Of course, I signed up.

     Anyone who loves to read a good book of mystery and mayhem would kill to see this all-star cast: Ian Rankin, Lawrence Block, Sara Blaedel, Laura Lippman, Lisa Unger, Tim Dorsey, James Swain, Jonathan Lethem, Michael Connelly, Sara Paretsky, Cara Black, Mark Billingham, Amy Stewart, Lisa Scottoline and the appropriately named Karin Slaughter.

      For three and a half days, these authors and dozens of other mystery, crime and thriller writers addressed such subjects as Holding You Hostage, Who We Kill and Why, Threatening Families and Aging.

      Aging? Yes, I was fascinated by how often the subject of aging cropped up. Not the aging of the crime writers but of their fictional creations. The world of crime and mystery fiction, it turns out, is awash in aging dicks.

      In many cases, these detectives, cops and private investigators were never intended to last beyond one book. Their creators had no clue that they were destined to become iconic and would continue on and on in many books to come. But as those books kept selling and the series continued, these protagonists moved forward in time, getting older and older. Now twenty plus books later, they are still fighting crime -- but also the ravages of age.
 
      Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch, for example, now retired from the LAPD, is a sixty-something with creaky knees and poor eyesight. Ian Rankin's John Rebus, forced to retire from the Edinburgh police force, is overweight and prone to fits of coughing. Lawrence Block's Matthew Scudder, an ex-cop, ex-alcoholic P.I., has slowed down to a snail's pace: He's 80, the same age as Block.

Ian Rankin and Lawrence Block at Bouchercon

          "I started writing about Matthew Scudder in the mid-1970s, and it's been a great pleasure watching him grow and evolve over the years," Block says on his website.  "An aspect of the realism of the series is that Scudder has aged in real time; he's forty years older than he was when I started chronicling his fictive existence."

        Sharing a stage at Bouchercon, Block and Rankin talked about the aches and pains their protagonists have experienced as they have grown older. Both Scudder and Rebus started out in their forties, but now, as Block put it, they are no spring chickens. "Most of Scudder's friends are dead," Block admitted. Rankin's hard-drinking, chain-smoking curmudgeon now has a good reason to be cranky. "Rebus is facing a gruesome disease," said Rankin. "COPD."

      "To quote Eubie Blake who said 'If I knew I was going to last this long, I'd taken better care of myself,' I would have taken better care of Scudder," said Block, turning to Rankin. "You would have taken better care of Rebus.  But they are still here."

      Fictional crime fighters didn't always age. For 40 years Perry Mason never had a birthday nor did his secretary Della Street for that matter. Los Angeles, where they operated, was changeless, too. Rex Stout, on the other hand, moved time forward in his Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin series, from Prohibition to the era of J. Edgar Hoover, but Wolfe never moved out of his mid-fifties and Goodwin was always in his early thirties.  Nancy Drew began as a teenager and remained one throughout her various updates.

     Agatha Christie also never aged her detectives -- although, to be fair, Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple were already long in the tooth when we first met them.

     Now, in crime fiction, however, characters are expected to age.  Readers want to see their heroes face all the challenges of real life. Murderers. Serial Killers. Arthritis. It's far more interesting -- and believable.

     In Cara Black's latest installment of her Aimée Leduc series, which takes place in 1999, Leduc is a single maman who needs to juggle her job as a P.I. with taking care of her now 10-month-old child. At Bouchercon, Black talked about the tricks she's used to stop the flow of time: flashbacks to fill in the backstory of her character (in Murder on the Quai she took us back to Leduc's college years when she first inherited her detective agency) and the art of slowing down the aging of her characters.

      Because, after all, fictional characters don't age exactly as we do.

    "Older. Braver. Better," said Sara Peretsky, when asked at Bouchercon to compare herself to her serial character, the Chicago-based V.I. Warshawski. Why better? "Because she doesn't age anymore." Peretsky had been aging Warshawski, letting her complain about her "tired middle-aged legs" and about Chicago winters, "no country for old detectives," but in recent books, she's frozen her in time. In fiction, authors can slow time down to a crawl.

    When Sue Grafton started her alphabet series with A is for Alibi, P.I. Kinsey Milhone was 32. By the time she reached Y is for Yesterday, Milhone, born in 1950, was only 39. Writers call it novelization time (as opposed to calendar time). Grafton never completed the alphabet: She died at the end of last year.

      Some mystery writers have made aging an integral part of their story. "I might not be the best but I am certainly the oldest," says the gumshoe who narrates Barry Fantoni's spoof on the private eye genre, Harry Lipkin, Private Eye. Too sore to get up on the roof of his decrepit house to fix his tiles, Harry keeps up his job as a P.I. because what else is there for an 87-year-old to do in Miami?  With a 40-year-old Impala, a spare set of dentures and a .38, he solves the caper -- moving as slowly as possible, all the while complaining about acid reflux.

     Inspector Salvo Montalbano, a middle-aged cop working in a small Sicilian town, also constantly complains about growing old, worrying about his fading virility. Author Andrea Camilleri, who himself is 94, has already sent the last Montalbano book to his publisher so he can control just how Montalbano is finished off. "When I get fed up with him or am not able to write any more, I'll tell the publisher: publish that book," he told a Guardian interviewer. "Sherlock Holmes was recovered, but it will not be possible to recover Montalbano. In that last book, he's really finished."

     I wish John D. MacDonald had done that for Travis McGee.  When The Lonely Silver Rain, the 21st book in John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee series, came out in 1985, a New York Times reviewer said it was "about McGee's vulnerability to loneliness and advancing age."  McGee, the reviewer reported, had grown "a bit flabby, a tad slower, a good deal less caring." He was convinced that McGee -- whose age never was determined -- had to be using bifocals to read. The reviewer speculated that MacDonald was about to end the series. In the book, McGee does seem to be tying up loose ends: questioning the wisdom of clinging to his loner status ("the most deadly commitment of all is to be committed only to one's self. Some come to realize this after they are in the nursing home") and happily discovering a grown daughter whom he didn't know existed. But I think in this last Travis McGee novel MacDonald might have been haunted by feelings of his own mortality. He died the year after The Lonely Silver Rain was published.

    At Bouchercon MacDonald was honored as the Ghost of Honor. I couldn't help but wonder how he would have imagined his new Travis McGee -- ready to leave his beach bum existence behind -- coping with aging.

    Maybe we should all take a page from these fictional heroes, throw out the calendar and embrace novelization time. That's Block's advice:

     "If I have one piece of advice for y'all, it's this: Don't age in real time. I'm talking about you, not your characters. Slow down. What's the damn hurry?"