The Secret to Never Growing Old

My name is Anna Scotti, and I am delighted to present my inaugural blogpost for SleuthSayers (though I did guest post for Liz Zelvin in September). Coincidentally, I was given a debut date close to my birthday, and that got me thinking about characters' ages… and my own.

For millennia, people have searched for a cream, elixir, recipe, spell, or fountain that will grant eternal youth. Literary characters from Peter Pan to Dorian Grey have grappled with the wish to be forever young. Jay-Z, Alphaville, and Bob Dylan sang about it. One of the best kids' books ever written, Tuck Everlasting, deals with a family's discovery of a spring that grants immortality. Snow White's stepmother and Death Becomes Her's Madeline and Helen tried for eternal youth, too.

Few of these tales end happily, but if these pitiable literary figures only knew! The real secret to slow aging is to be the main character of a series that takes place over years, or even decades.

Nancy Drew is a dewy 18 in all of her 175 eponymous adventures, except when she occasionally, inexplicably, becomes 16. Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple didn't start young, but aged erratically – and sometimes backward – from their initial late-middle age inceptions.

Sherlock Holmes is in his late twenties – perhaps even early thirties – in A Study in Scarlet, and is sixty in His Last Bow, which takes place in 1914, and finds him already retired to the English countryside to keep bees.

All 58 stories and four novels Doyle wrote about the sleuth take place during that span, which means Holmes is living – and aging – at a different pace from the rest of us. Kinsey Millhone is 32 in A is for Alibi, but just 38 in Y is for Yesterday, although Sue Grafton's series was written over a span of thirty-five years. This kind of sliding timescale, or floating timeline, isn't at all uncommon in fiction. You can probably think of examples of your own.

Mid-thirties may be a sweet spot for female protagonists to linger. When I created my "librarian-on-the-run" character in That Which We Call Patience (Ellery Queen, 2019) I had no idea I'd be writing a series. I made Audrey Smith – who is eventually known as Cam Baker, Sonia Sutton, Dana Kane, Lori Yarborough, and by a handful of other monikers over the course of her fourteen-story saga – "thirty-something," and she'd already been on the run in witness protection for a few years as the story opens.

The age just seemed right to me – I wanted her to be young enough to be fit, active and still fairly naive, someone who could step into an entry-level job without raising eyebrows. But she also had to be old enough to be well-educated and to have a bit of experience under her belt (she's working on a PhD when her life is interrupted by witnessing a crime).

In the fifth story of what became the series, The Longest Pleasure, Lori says she's thirty-two, and in It's Not Even Past, the sixth story, she's thirty-four. When Lori finally comes out of WITSEC, in Traveller from an Antique Land, she says she's thirty-eight, and that she's been on the run for eight or nine years. That would mean she went under in her late twenties, which fits the timeline established in Patience. So the ages add up, sort of, except that there are gaps between stories that must surely equal months or years, and references to other adventures not yet chronicled… and all together, they add up to far more than nine years on the run unless our girl is stumbling over a random corpse every five or six months.

Readers who get hooked on a series know when we're pulling a fast one with a character's age. But what Coleridge identified as a "willing suspension of disbelief" works in our favor as writers of fiction. If a character is engaging enough, and stories are good enough, to compel readers to demand more, time can be manipulated to serve us.

The trick is to make everything else believable. Lori may age at a third the normal rate, and she discovers corpses with alarming frequency, but she is in other regards perfectly ordinary. She's attractive but not a knock-out. She's smart but can be fooled. She drinks Earl Grey Tea, drives a beat-up Honda CRV, enjoys a trashy beach-read, and behaves recklessly – even inappropriately - with more than one man over the course of her adventures. In other words, she's very much like a real person, warts and all. And that's how we pull off the magic trick. Don't ask your readers to believe a dozen strange things – just ask them to believe one. Then make everything else absolutely plausible- even commonplace.

So, yes, if readers keep asking for librarian stories, Lori will eventually grow old – just not at the same, sometimes distressing, rate as her creator. 

Anna Scotti's librarian-on-the-run collection, It's Not Even Past, went out of print when Down&Out Books folded in October. She is hoping a white knight publisher will swoop in soon, but in the meantime, if you'd like to order a copy, go to annakscotti.com. Watch for the next "librarian" installment, When Bright Angels Beckon, early next year. Anna's short fiction appears frequently in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and Black Cat Weekly, and her poetry can be found in The New Yorker and other literary magazines.  She's also a young adult author - Big and Bad was awarded the Paterson Prize for Books for Young People in 2021.