Suspending Disbelief

For an hour or two last night, Murder at the Murder Mystery Weekend was at number 19 in the UK Kindle Crime & Mystery, British Detectives chart.

It didn’t last. It’s since slipped back to number 24, a part of the top 30, where it’s been sat since Christmas. But for a short time I gazed at the charts with a sense of disbelief. One of my cosy whodunits had become a top twenty hit.

And that spurious mention of disbelief brings me nicely to today’s topic, the suspension of disbelief.

I never look for reviews. Readers read and if they’re so inclined they comment. I don’t ask for them, and good or bad, I never respond to them, except for a brief note of thanks for reading.

It irks me, however, when I read reviews of other writers’ works and I see a comment like… “That could never happen in real life.”

Couldn’t it?

There’s a scene in The I-Spy Murders where Joe bumps into his brother’s ex-wife. He’s ninety miles from home, he turns a corner and there she is, with her husband, drinking tea at an outside cafe. Impossible, you say, and if not impossible, too big a coincidence for the reader to swallow.

And yet it’s based on a real life incident. My wife and I were in Skegness (a British seaside town) in 2011. We had just finished coffee at a pavement café and were making ready to leave, when my ex-wife and her husband walked in. We were 150 miles from home, they were 100 miles from their home and we had no idea they were in Skegness. Coincidence? Yes, but not impossible.

When it comes to cosy crime and the amateur sleuth, disbelief has to be suspended before you begin to read. Ask yourself, is it likely that the police would turn to Mr ’Olmes or M Poirot for advice? Would they really allow an interfering old biddy from St Mary Mead shove her oar into a case of murder? When it comes to reality, you can’t get much further away than Holmes, Poirot and Miss Marple, but it never stopped millions of readers (me included) becoming lost in the intricacies of their deductions.

Everywhere the Sanford 3rd Age Club go, they come across a murder upon which Joe can let loose his agile mind, ably supported by Sheila, Brenda and the rest of the gang. Is that likely? Of course not. Does that stop the readers’ enjoyment? Of course not.

How many great detectives would we lose without suspension of disbelief? Campion, Lord Peter Wimsey, Jessica Fletcher, Agatha Raisin, Libby Sarjeant… I could go on, and on.

If the reader is looking for a good dose of reality, then they should be reading police procedurals, not cosy whodunits.

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My Deadly Valentine, the sixth STAC Mystery from Crooked Cat Books is released February 6th 2013.