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Notes -
@EdenicFaithful I just finished up Donna Tartt's The Secret History, which my wife bought for me after seeing it recommended by fashion girlies on social media. It is, at the end of the day, a high class thriller, John Grisham with literary pretensions. I enjoyed the book immensely, I wanted something relatively light after reading a lot of heavy non-fiction lately. And it felt made for me, it is a thriller following a bunch of weirdo pseudo-aristocratic classics students, and I'm the kind of guy who went to a northeastern undergrad school and wore a vintage camel hair sportcoat to a class studying Procopius' The Secret History. There's an effortpost brewing in my notes about the book's status as the progenitor of the "Dark Academia" aesthetic meme, and the memetics of online aesthetics more generally.
With the exception of classics (The Bible, Ovid, Dante, Shakespeare, etc.) which I can't avoid having an opinion on going in, I try to avoid reading about something while I am still in the process of reading the work itself. And because my wife bought it for me as a gift, and specifically referenced seeing it on social media, I kind of assumed that it was new fiction, from the past five years or so. Having finished it, I looked at a few reviews, trying to find things I hadn't caught on my read through. The setting felt vaguely 80s, but there weren't enough clear references to really pin it down, and it felt like an odd time period to pick if you weren't going to use it much and like reference Reagan or era-appropriate music...imagine my surprise when I found out the novel was written in 1992 and the reason it lacked a lot of period-references was because at the time it was written the novel was simply set in the present, with no need to let people know when it was because the underlying assumption was that elite liberal arts students would more or less always be like that, Tartt wouldn't have been able to imagine that two and a half decades later college would be so completely eaten by computerization that her novel would be rendered completely historical.
I had, of course, assumed that the novel was written today, and set in a vague past to avoid smartphones. It is tough to imagine much of novel's moody pacing working in the social media age, with characters texting or engaging in posting every event on social media. Indeed, I have trouble thinking of murder mysteries or thrillers that successfully integrate the smartphone into their plotting. Every modern novel in the genre seems to avoid them by various obvious crutches, such as lampshading that a character refuses to use cellphones, having the phone lose reception run out of batteries or be broken at every critical moment, or by the simple expedient of forgetting about it. I don't read a ton of new fiction, but I can't think of a thriller that handles cellphone usage well. Even the sci-fi novels I recall reading which featured greater communications advances failed to reflect how I actually use cell phones in reality.
So now to get to my Small Scale Questions: how does one successfully integrate the digital world into the classic murder mystery or thriller structure? What authors or works have done so? Is it even possible to do so, or does the digital age simply require that we maintain a higher willing suspension of disbelief? Does communications tech usage date any work to a particular five-year period, because communications tech is moving so fast (ie, in 2003 the gang of high school friends would have definitely used AIM, by 2008 AIM was lame and facebook messenger was everything, by 2013 nobody I knew in college used messenger for much of anything preferring snapchat, in the decade since we've seen the rise and fall of a half dozen social media services, data plans and wifi access have gone from very limited to universal, etc.)? Is there a similar literary discourse about prior technological transitions? Did the telegraph and telephone cause authors to go "oh, shit, so many plots out the window, better set this story in the past or in the wild west or something?" Did literary critics talk about how old plots were obviated by car travel?
Well I read some of the Robert Galbraith detective novels and those had cell phones being used to solve the problems one would expect a cell phone to solve, pretty much. To the extent that they didn't solve problems, it never felt forced. I can't recall anyone's phone running out of batteries at a crucial moment. I don't think lack-of-bars ever featured into the plotline.
It's probably easier to have phones not solve problems in a detective story than a thriller.
Edit: Really, cell phones obviate danger when you know you're about to be attacked soon but you have still have time for the police to show up, wherever you are. So that aspect is not that limiting.
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I've seen a few successful approaches:
Keep the time pressure high, and leave few clear authorities to call. See Knives Out, where police are brought in early and can't solve the crime (and aren't even sure there is a crime). For a lighter-hearted take, see Zootopia, where the convention is so transparent most people don't notice it, even to the point where they added the carrot recorder joke. Or see BNA : Brand New Animal, where anyone beastman the protagonists could call has been transformed into ravening beasts. It's not uncommon for these stories to have the interconnectivity be a major part of the solution -- the climax is the reveal and disclosure of the villain (and in BNA, that there are connected beliefs that still hold people together, transmitted from cell phone recording to mass media), rather than a physical tussle.
Make your story about that technology. Ghost In The Shell presumes its main characters will be constantly tied to the internet at every moment -- the one guy without a cyberbrain is the runt of the team -- and it's a whole thing if any ever have to go dark. Paranoia Agent takes this in more supernatural ends, and it does work best if it's weakly-speculative, but the same principles can apply for traditional thrillers.
Decrease your scope and scale. You can write thrillers that aren't about murderers: there's a wide variety of financial or social crime where calling the police will range from getting nothing to getting written up yourself. It's harder to write these lower stakes as interesting to readers, but it can still be very interesting once you've grabbed them.
Drastically reduce the time pressure. If you're trying to solve a homicide from the 1920s in 2020, it doesn't matter what tech you can bring to hand. Arguably, this is a major focus for a lot of older true crime.
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I recently reread this book after first reading it in either late in secondary school or early in my undergrad. I enjoyed it even more than when I first read it: the atmosphere is impeccable, the characters are so vividly drawn, it's extraordinarily readable even when nothing is really happening plot-wise.
Interesting bit of trivia: Bret Easton Ellis (to whom the novel is dedicated, IIRC) attended Bennington College with Tartt. Hampden College in The Secret History is a fictionalised version of Bennington, as is Camden College in Ellis's The Rules of Attraction. The two novels are essentially set in a shared universe: History mentions in passing a female undergrad who slit her wrists in a bathtub, and her suicide is a significant part of the plot of Attractions (several of the chapters are even narrated from her perspective).
I read Tartt's long-awaited follow-up The Little Friend and found it decidedly underwhelming - not bad, but nowhere near as good as her debut. I've heard from several people that her third novel The Goldfinch is as good as History or better, so I'm keen to read it.
Oh man, I'd love to hear more of your thoughts on the book.
My theories:
-- Richard or Camilla killed Henry. Shooting yourself in the head, twice, is difficult. Not strictly impossible, but difficult. In favor of Richard: Richard changes distinctly after the murder, in ways that mirror and follow the path of what Henry talks about in the garden conversation, he is able to shut up his internal voices and successfully graduate, get into grad school, for a time carry on a normal relationship. Part of his symbolic accession to personhood and his inheritance from Henry is receiving Henry's BMW; throughout the story Richard is limited by his lack of a car, he is dependent on the goodwill of others in a way that is both very symbolic and very realistic to an isolated rural school, who has what car where is a constant source of tension in the work. He kills Henry, and symbolically inherits this grant of full personhood. He becomes more human after the murder, more functional, the rest of the group becomes less functional, drifts outward into their dysfunctions. In favor of Camilla: Camilla was much more involved and agentic than indicated in the work. She is the unsung glue of the group in a big way. Richard and the other boys are always vaguely frienemies, it is never clear which boys are closer and which boys are in competition or enmity, who is in and who is out, while Camilla is always in with all the other boys. Three out of the four are constantly besotted with Camilla, Francis is also shown to be closer with her as a friend. Everyone else is willing to lie about, cover up, or minimize her involvement in their accounts; both because they want to protect her and because they don't want to admit they were under her spell.
— Richard wrote the note from "Bunny," for the purpose of bringing the group back together. Richard feeds off the group, off feeling in on the secret. They’re all starting to drift apart, the group is tearing at the seams, so he creates another crisis for them to keep their secret to try to bring them together again. He liked the game of murdering Bunny, so he creates a new crisis, maybe they will murder Julian? It fails, spectacularly, with Henry’s death.
One of my favourite fan theories came from TV Tropes:
I read this and was initially like "ha ha funny" but then I was like "I been sayin tho"
I always found Richard confusing in that he seems so unlikeable, and is clearly the butt-monkey of the friend group, then he'll report just randomly pulling normie chicks as soon as he leaves the group, who disappear as quickly as they appear in the narrative.
Depending how heavily one finds his narration unreliable, it's not hard to imagine him lying about all sorts of things, that a lot of the positive things he gets are lies or hallucinations.
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I remember a bit in an early Culture novel where a “phone” call is interrupted by a strange rushing noise. The resident supercomputer, which is naturally mediating all communications in its region, deduces that one participant is falling near terminal velocity, and dispatches a drone to rescue him. I can’t tell if this is Banks preempting the consequences of a surveillance state, or if he just forgot that inertial measurement already existed.
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The answer is that for whatever reason, the digital world is a mountain of red herrings distorting and disrupting informed observation. The laziest way to do it would be that an influencer who has faked their death multiple times for clicks is murdered for real, and their dipshit following is muddying all possible genuine search ability with "We did it Reddit!" mass broadcasted armchair investigation. Even better if there is an "influencer detective" condensing the phenomenon.
For very tangential reasons, this question reminds me of the how to show texting/internet in film addressed by Every Frame a Painting https://youtube.com/watch?v=uFfq2zblGXw
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Maybe in the last few decades. I recently watched You've Got Mail on an airplane and it really struck me as a warm and fuzzy period piece (this probably dates me, but the late 90s are generally considered to be a good time). Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan initially meet over email (AOL, dial-up) and hit it off online, sight unseen, despite being business rivals in real life. It's a major plot point when they decide to meet IRL, but then can't contact each other until they go home and log in. To someone who's had an always-connected smartphone in my pocket for at least a decade now, it's hard to think about how people really lived -- commuted, planned events and trips, and so on -- before.
Amusingly, the business drama in the film centers around Hanks' Big Box Bookstore moving in and displacing the small, local Shop Around the Corner (a classic movie reference) bookstore. But it doesn't foresee that the Internet, which is crucial to the story, will bring Amazon around to presumably drive the big store out within a decade anyway.
It really is possibly the greatest unintentional period piece. It couldn't have been written five years in any direction and made sense.
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My novel certainly does, though cell phones are more of a quaint throwback rather than the typical means of mass communications when most people have neural laces or at least smart contacts. There is a large group of people who are forced to rely on them, or the just as outdated smart glasses/contacts, because their brains reject an invasive implant. But they're not the focus of the story, the protagonist has a 6th gen Neuralink, is about as cybernetic as a Tesla Cybertruck, and possesses an Internet of Things connecting his fingers and toes to his spine.
Then again, I'm a stickler for consistent worldbuilding, it's a self-describedly rational work of literature, and I make a genuine effort to avoid convenient worldbuilding sins because I'm explicitly writing the kind of book I wish I could read.
It's hardly impossible, just a bit harder. The most obvious solution is to have crises where just knowing what's going on or being able to get a message out is hardly sufficient to resolve it. If an author or screenwriter can't come up with any, they deserve to be tarred, feathered and run out of town, or at least denied writing gigs made for thinking folk.
The Neuralink can run out of power, and is only recharged by sleeping, but unfortunately our protagonist is - get this - an insomniac.
I would nominate you for winner of /r/TwoSentenceHorror, but after closer inspection, that spooky tale was just one. Still absolute shivered me timbers and roasted my almonds!
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In The Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix, cellphone and modern technology play a significant role. Unfortunately, the main character is pretty isolated and has no one she trusts or loves outside a houseplant, so possessing a cell phone doesn't avail her much.
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