Laughter of Dead Kings

FOREWORD

R ecently I discussed, with several mystery writer friends, the problem of what we sometimes call “the current now.” One of my series is set in real time; the characters age appropriately with each passing year and with each volume. The Vicky series, and those of many of my friends, don’t work that way. Vicky made her first appearance in 1973. She was not yet thirty. The most recent volume was published in 1994, more than twenty years later, but Vicky had aged only a few years. She’s still in her early thirties, although the world in which she lives has changed a great deal. The Cold War has ended, the horror in Iraq is under way, the Internet has its tentacles into everybody’s lives, and people go around with cell phones glued to their ears.

So how do we writers explain the inconsistencies and anachronisms? We don’t. We can’t. So please don’t bother writing to point them out to me, ignore them as I have, and place yourself in the “current now.” To quote my friend Margaret Maron, to whom I owe that phrase and other excellent advice, “Isn’t it fun being God in our separate universes, where we can command the sun to stand still, and it does?”