Mobile phones, the internet and technology – the enemy of suspense
It's often said that the mobile phone is the curse of storytelling. It punctures tension, allowing characters to pass on vital information at the moment it’s needed and call for help when they’re in trouble. Most of the Biggles stories I read when I was young focused their plotting on one of the team going missing, someone going to search for them and then going missing themselves. This would all have been ruined if they had carried mobile phones in the 1950s, although come to think of it, it’s odd that the Royal Air Force didn’t seem to provide better comms for their pilots.
You will see Hollywood thrillers go to a lot of lengths now to silence the mobile phone – remote islands with no wi-fi, high-security compounds with restrictive firewalls, phones which fall into water or run out of battery at the crucial moment. I was delighted when I was writing The Day The Earth Caught Cold that the apocalyptic plot meant that all phones and internet connections were rendered useless early in the plot – although a mobile phone message does play a very important role at one point.
The easiest answer is to set your novel in the past or the future or an alternative world without this technology, but the novel I’m writing now, The Crooked Man, is a contemporary detective story/thriller. It's also a homage to the thrillers of the 1920s, such as those by John Buchan. Characters constantly fiddling with their mobiles would ruin the retro mood. I’ve got round this to an extent by making my protagonist, Xan Ross, a professional security specialist, professionally wary of the digital footprint left by mobile phones and social media.
While mobile phones kill thrillers, the internet is a bigger threat to the detective story genre. Almost all questions and puzzles can be quickly answered by heading to a search engine. Why send your detective to hang around the murder victim’s neighbourhood in a soft felt hat posing questions to neighbours when he could just go online and check out the victim’s social media profile? But just as Hollywood has learned that shots of people typing at computers are not interesting to watch, they’re not great to read about either.
To try and get round this, my investigator outsources some of his internet research to minor characters or does it offscreen, but he still prefers to do his investigating the old-fashioned way by talking to people in person, and so do I.
I'd love to hear other people's views about how the problem of technology is managed (or not) in books and films.
You will see Hollywood thrillers go to a lot of lengths now to silence the mobile phone – remote islands with no wi-fi, high-security compounds with restrictive firewalls, phones which fall into water or run out of battery at the crucial moment. I was delighted when I was writing The Day The Earth Caught Cold that the apocalyptic plot meant that all phones and internet connections were rendered useless early in the plot – although a mobile phone message does play a very important role at one point.
The easiest answer is to set your novel in the past or the future or an alternative world without this technology, but the novel I’m writing now, The Crooked Man, is a contemporary detective story/thriller. It's also a homage to the thrillers of the 1920s, such as those by John Buchan. Characters constantly fiddling with their mobiles would ruin the retro mood. I’ve got round this to an extent by making my protagonist, Xan Ross, a professional security specialist, professionally wary of the digital footprint left by mobile phones and social media.
While mobile phones kill thrillers, the internet is a bigger threat to the detective story genre. Almost all questions and puzzles can be quickly answered by heading to a search engine. Why send your detective to hang around the murder victim’s neighbourhood in a soft felt hat posing questions to neighbours when he could just go online and check out the victim’s social media profile? But just as Hollywood has learned that shots of people typing at computers are not interesting to watch, they’re not great to read about either.
To try and get round this, my investigator outsources some of his internet research to minor characters or does it offscreen, but he still prefers to do his investigating the old-fashioned way by talking to people in person, and so do I.
I'd love to hear other people's views about how the problem of technology is managed (or not) in books and films.
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