On Randy Craig and the quest for an "authentic" sleuth

My husband and I been binge-watching some television series recently, and we've noticed that it somehow feels much easier to live in the world of a British series than it does an American one. Much of this I think has to do with the level of authenticity offered. British actors, on the whole, seem less airbrushed, don't you think?

Authenticity may be an odd thing to wish for in fiction, and yet even though we know it's make believe, there needs to be a knell of truth to the experience. That is why Randy Craig ages over the span of her stories, from a young-ish grad student in her first adventure to a middle-aged woman in her latest. It's also why she worries about her choices and decisions, and why she doubles back on herself on occasion. Many of those elements of characterization are incremental layers to the formula, as well. It is important to take the audience along on the quest, but a quest that goes in a straight line is satisfying to no one, neither detective reader or football fan. Real people second guess themselves five or six times a day, if not an hour. (I almost erased this whole page three times already.)

Vulnerability in our heroes is something we embrace warily. We think we want Superman. More often, though, we veer to the tortured Batman. Contemporary detective fiction is a world without the astonishing August Dupin, Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot or Philo Vance — who seem impossibly outrageous if placed in a modern context — and without their stalwart if duller sidekicks. It is a world in which ordinary people pit themselves against extraordinary circumstances. If you are lucky, a writer will enhance that formula with explorations of that detective's psyche, circumstances or political position in the world. That is when it becomes really fun to immerse yourself in their world.

I'm not saying we need to read a shelf full of anti-heroes, that characters have to be representative of some great political ideal, or that we can’t make our detectives into attractive figures. If you're asking a reader to live with them for a while, though, it helps to make your characters into someone they'd like to have a cup of coffee and some bread pudding with. I’m looking for someone who isn't airbrushed and who, like me, will have to walk off that last dessert.