The Literary Emotional Arms Race

I am really, really over the unrealistic circumstances and backstories the authors of today are saddling their heroes, or more often, heroines, with. (Yes, I ended that sentence with a preposition just to stick it in the eye of the literati.) These excesses are most prominent in the thriller/mystery genres, but they can be found across the spectrum.

A detective's every other story involves squaring off against a serial killer. Do you know how rare serial killers are in real life? If reality followed literature, we would all have been both murderers and murder victims to make up the numbers needed. I just read the summary of a book where a detective took a break from pursuing one serial killer to track down another.

I read another summary where a single pregnant mother was trapped in the woods with a couple who mean her no good. This is pretty good as it is, but the author decided that she broke her ankle in the accident that left her stranded. Because being with child is not challenging enough? She now presumably will have to shimmy to safety on her back because she can't walk on her ankle and can't crawl on her pregnant belly.

Another common plot variable is to have the main character be a recovering addict of some substance or another. While this certainly is a circumstance that can happen in real life, no one Googles for stories about alcoholic spies. The reason is that a successful recovery dampens the drama, and without it there is no redemption. And I have not once, in real life, given anyone the directions to the office of the coke-fiend database administrator. For multiple obvious reasons, it just doesn't come up.

Another overused literary device that the author will saddle their titular characters with is a missing/misshapen past/childhood. This usually comes in the form of a murdered or disappeared parent(s) or sibling. The trauma of this past is, of course, echoed in the circumstances of the current drama, forcing our hero to battle both the past and the present, or the story just wouldn't be an E-ticket ride. (Don't even get me started on amnesia, which is also way more prevalent in literature than real life.)

These elements weren't needed in the literary heroes of years past. Presumably because the emotional war had not yet been declared. While Holmes used cocaine, it was an eccentricity, not a crutch. Poirot was only saddled by his vanity. Ralen Givens just likes to shoot bad people. Mike Hammer was so tame that he was originally a comic-book hero. Columbo's only addiction was to "just one more question."

I do miss those days.