I enjoy the light reading crime/mystery novels by people like Joanna Fluke and Janet Evanovich, and while the books aren’t classics they are good reading.
However since these books (and others like them) tend to be series novels they are now up to current times and current technology.
In the old books the heroine (or hero) gets trapped and has to find her/his way out.
But now with a cell phone all they do is have to call or worse yet the author has to figure out a reason WHY the protagonist isn’t carrying one. Which makes little sense, because in the last book the protaganist was in the same situation without a cell phone and swore she’d/he’d never be without one again.
So this kind ruins the whole thing, I mean it doesn’t RUIN it but it distracts. I feel like saying “YOU IDOT, bring the darn phone.”
And the excuse is always usually the battery wore down, or they left it in their coat or purse…
I have no examples to cite, but I think a competent author can plot a book in such a way that the thought should never even occur to you. Work-a-rounds, like mysteriously being in some dead zone, draw too much attention to the conceit.
Historically, I don’t see where the telephone affected fiction too much either.
No. I might wonder why a character doesn’t carry one, but in a thriller, I’d be upset if having a cell phone is all the character needs to resolve whatever situation he’s in. That wouldn’t be much of a thriller.
I wonder if this issue came up years ago, when people stopped getting their mail twice a day. I’ve read a lot of Victorian era fiction where people put something in the post and the recipient got it a couple hours later. How cool was that? But when it started taking two or three days to deliver a letter, writers had to figure out how to deal with it. Good thing telephones were invented.
I found that 24 manage to juggle suspense and cell phones quite well (or did in the five seasons I watched before I gave up for non-cell-phone-related reasons). There are plenty of believeable reasons why a cell wouldn’t work in certain cases, so it’s just a matter of steering the protagonist into a one of the many scenarios Reality Chuck listed or any number of other ones.
I agree with the OP. Transparent workarounds are annoying and distracting.
But when I read the thread title, I expected something slightly different. I was reading Philip Marlowe recently and I really enjoyed the lack of technology – mobile phones, faxes, answering machines, email, etc.
Getting a hold off someone was difficult and unreliable and it could lead to interesting situations. Getting an answer from South America meant you had to fly someone down there; the answer to a simple question would take days. Marlowe had to do a lot of legwork – he’d drive across town to find the old lady just isn’t home and the questions he wanted to ask her would have to wait another day.
Obviously you can create some of these types of tensions despite modern technology, but using too many constructs will seem artificial (as mentioned in the OP).
