DEBORAH CROMBIE: I've been thinking a lot this week about Hallie's Monday post on anachronisms and frames of reference. I always look up the most popular UK names for the years my characters were born, for instance, and I try to get music right for their time frames.
But because my series is long running and sort of floats in time, it's full of anachromisms for current readers. Many of these are unavoidably technological. I mentioned in a post last month that we've been watching Grey's Anatomy, which debuted in 2005. The show has aged remarkably well because the scope is so limited: the hospital, Meredith's house, the local bar. Oh, and everyone is in scrubs, which pretty much takes fashion out the equation. You may notice that the doctors are using Blackberries (remember those??) in the early seasons, but other than that the show could be set today.
It's not so easy to limit the world in novels, however, and as the first Gemma and Duncan book was published in 1993, there have been a lot of changes (not necessarily progress!) (Duncan has a phone attached to his car in the first book!)
I made a decision with that very first book that while every book would be contemporary, the characters would not age in real time like Ian Rankin's Rebus, who is forty in the first book and has now had to retire! So while three decades have passed in the "real" world, Duncan and Gemma and their family and friends have only aged about six years. (The ages of the children help me keep track of this.)
The snag in this system comes when you bring things into the story that are fixed in real time. I've tried to avoid it, but have goofed up a few times. A good deal of the plot of A FINER END revolves around the Millenium, for instance--ouch. But while I thought when I was writing NO MARK UPON HER that it would be glaringly obvious that Becca was training for the 2012 Olympics in London, now thankfully that seems a little fuzzier.
Despite my efforts (with a few slip ups) to write around things that so obviously date the books, some are unavoidable. Although I've decided that the pandemic (a very specific fixed point in time) didn't exist in my books, l must from now on refer to the King, not the Queen, etc., etc. It's all very tricky and I envy Rhys having control over how her characters fit into their historical framework!
Readers, do you notice these things? Or do they worry me more than than they bother you?
