In Robert Galbraith’s The Cuckoo’s Calling , (J.K. Rowling’s crime-solving, deerstalker hat-wearing pseudonym) the lead detective pair, Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott get all the information they need on a suspect, a famous rapper, before interviewing him, using Google. They also chance upon videos of his press conferences on YouTube and send each other urgent texts when in trouble.
As one of contemporary crime fiction’s newest entrants, Rowling’s whodunit follows an unwritten rule in the genre — that it is nigh-on-impossible to create a plot set in modern times and not have the characters use the technology of the day, and in turn make it a storytelling device.
A crutch that suspense writers have used for a long while — the protagonist trying to find a phone booth to make that one call just in time to save himself, or the world — is non-existent, not to mention hard to believe. Time, the greatest suspense agent of them all, is now no longer as effective as the immediacy of the mobile phone wipes out the possibility that a character finds it difficult to get in touch with another. One doesn’t see a detective whipping out a magnifying glass á la Sherlock Holmes and tracing the victim’s activities leading up to the murder. GPS solves this for the police. Rapid strides in forensic science too easily eliminate the number of suspects.
Writers, as self-aware as they can be, are working around these hurdles in their own way. Ian Rankin, in the sequel to The Complaints , The Impossible Dead , has detective Malcolm Fox look into a suspicious death that happened 25 years before the timeline of the events in the book. Even then, instead of walking into a library to pull out back issues of old newspapers, Fox turns to Google, ferreting out not just old news stories, but online discussion forums on the very death he is investigating.
In the second book of the Millennium Trilogy by Stieg Larsson, The Girl Who Played With Fire , Lizbeth Salander communicates with others using only texts or email, and virtually no dialogue.
Quite often now, an entire plot can revolve around something that happens on the Internet. Harlan Coben’s Caught is the story of a television reporter trying to uncover sexual predators on the Internet by publicly shaming them, something the medium revels in doing. The very presence of the Internet has somehow made plotting a story more complicated, since there is a more information available to both the sleuth and the reader. But as Raymond Chandler said in his seminal essay on literary criticism The Simple Art of Murder , “Fiction in any form has always intended to be realistic. The classic detective story has learned nothing, and forgotten nothing.” While any reader would not want to read a novel set in today’s times where the detective doesn’t make the first, most obvious step — going online for related information, the plotting and the storytelling still reign supreme.
After all, crime fiction, as Dorothy L. Sayers called it is the “literature of escape”, not the “literature of expression”. The wonderful thing about a whodunit isn’t the shiny gadgets used in it, but the fact that the reader is trying to keep pace with the author and solve the crime along with the sleuth.
