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.

Why A Librarian? by Anna Scotti

Anna Scotti, our guest blogger today, is a fellow member of the Short Mystery Fiction Society whom I knew and admired, but I became an enthusiastic fan a few pages into her new novel in short stories, It's Not Even Past. Everything she writes is a pleasure to read and deserves the awards her work has won.

Lori Yarborough is a bad-ass. She walks the mean streets of Los Angeles with only a battle-scarred pitbull for companionship, sleeps alone in the national forest, and - when finally pushed beyond endurance - slits a man's throat on a sunlit beach on Maui. She's also a librarian.

As It's Not Even Past opens, Lori is already on the run. She has traded demure sweater sets and a prim bun for raggedy yoga pants and flaming red hair. As the story progresses, Lori works as a nanny, a private secretary, a nurse's aide, a teaching assistant - she'll take pretty much any job that will allow her to keep a low profile and hide her education. She evolves from a naive, rather prissy pedant to a streetwise cynic. Lori changes a lot over the course of the ten-story collection. But make no mistake - she is a librarian to her core.

I knew, writing that very first librarian-on-the-run tale, that I wanted Lori to be smart and that she had to be brave. I couldn't think of a better job for her than librarian at the world-famous Harold Washington Library in Chicago, that owl-topped mecca for books and art and education. Lori is in many regards my alter ego - younger, smarter, fitter and a lot more courageous than I'll ever be, but like me in her fondness for Shakespeare and Donne, science and nature, good food, good wine, and good-looking men. I've held many of the jobs Lori has - teacher, personal assistant, lab rat - and I've worked with children and chimpanzees. If I can't blithely quote the classics as Lori does, I do know how to efficiently search my dog-eared Bartlett's. But I've never been a librarian, though I've admired them all my life.

Illustration by Helen John from
All of A Kind Family

My first hero was Kathy Allen, the "library lady" from Sydney Taylor's All of A Kind Family, who treated everyone with gentle but firm compassion. Ella, the family's eldest daughter, had an entirely inappropriate crush on Miss Allen's fiancé, but it was the lady herself I worshipped - her soft hands, her brisk manner, the swirl of hair she wore like a nest atop her pretty head. The librarian at my neighborhood public library in Washington, D.C., was not as young and pretty as Miss Allen, but she was just as kind, allowing me to check out books all summer long despite our family's terrible record for returning them. My siblings and I devoured books. We hiked with books, slept with books, read while standing at the bus stop, while waiting our turn at bat, and while hiding under the bed or behind a tree during hide-and-seek. We dropped books in mud puddles and bathtubs and left them behind in restaurants and at sleepover parties. But that wonderful lady never said no, just ran my tattered card through the check-out machine, sighing. She knew we were home alone while my parents worked, and she probably thought a few missing books were worth the cost of keeping us from running wild in the streets.

Our school librarian was a boss, too. The Alice Deal Jr. High library was a safe haven for weird kids, fat kids, foreign kids, new kids, smart kids, and anybody else who didn't quite fit in. When I became a teacher myself, decades later, I strove to make my classroom that kind of sanctuary. Along with the art room, the library, and the theater, my English classrooms were a hideout for anyone who needed to escape the vissicitudes of adolescent life.

Librarians have always been heroes; in World War II, the American Library Association provided not only reading material but lifesaving technical manuals to American servicemen, and in Cuba after the revolution, librarians hid "subversive" books from Castro's forces. In 2012, Abdel Kader Khaidara helped smuggle half a million books out of Timbuktu in order to protect them from extremists, while Saad Eskander defended Iraq's national library against Islamists and U.S. forces alike. American librarians have traditionally been champions of the First Amendment, standing in bespectacled unity, pastel sweater-clad elbows linked, to defend our right to freely access information.

But it's Barbara Gordon, equal parts sex appeal and erudition in granny glasses and skin-tight tops, who stands above all other librarians as a model of courage and hotness. Although she was the Head Librarian of a major city, chief tech advisor to a pantheon of superheroes, and a one-time candidate for the House of Representatives, you might know Dr. Gordon better by her other name: Batgirl. Maybe Brenda Starr, girl reporter, carried equal weight in my starved-for-female-role-models, pre-adolescent world. Brenda had a killer dimple and juggled two handsome boyfriends and a challenging career with ease. But Barbara was an intellectual. She would not have been ashamed to know the difference between placental mammals and marsupials, or how to count in base nine, or where to find Comoros on a map.

All of these librarians, fictional and real, swirled in my head as I wrote the first librarian-on-the-run tale for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine back in 2018. (“That Which We Call Patience” is actually the second story in the collection, because I added two new stories to supplement those that originally appeared in the magazine.) I suppose the librarians who made my childhood bearable have since returned to dust, but I hope their successors will read these words and will recognize themselves lovingly reflected in the pages of It's Not Even Past.

Want to know more about librarians or the books and resources I've mentioned here? Check out The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu by Joshua Hammer, Let's Talk Comics: Librarians by Megan Halsband, Sydney Taylor's All of a Kind Family series, and How Librarians Became Free Speech Heroes by Madison Ingram on Zocalo Public Square.

Anna Scotti's short stories appear frequently in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and can also be found in Black Cat Weekly, The Saturday Evening Post, and in various literary magazines and anthologies. Stories from her new collection, It's Not Even Past (Down & Out Books), have been selected three times for Best Mystery Stories of the Year (Mysterious Press). Scotti is also a noted poet and the author of the award-winning young adult novel, Big and Bad (Texas Review Press). She teaches poetry and fiction online. Learn more at annakscotti.com.