Terry Prone: Multiplicity breeds contempt in the case of books received as Christmas gifts

In early detective fiction the sleuth was a hero but the job description for a detective now dictates they must be flawed

Spoilt for choice: The only thing a reader really needs to know about a writer is if they are alive or dead.

The thing about receiving books during these holidays is that multiplicity breeds contempt. The more you have, the pickier you get.

Five chapters into a thriller and you’re already fed up with the marital/moral/mental health/physical health of the detective.

In the early days of detective fiction, the sleuth was a hero, whereas the job description for a detective these days, here or across the Atlantic, lays down that they must be flawed.

Not flawed like Hercule Poirot, who was just pompous and Belgian. Flawed in a way that requires therapy or self-medication or both.

Even that reliable entertainer Robert Galbraith, aka JK Rowling, goes with the flaw flow. The central character of her massive door-stopper thrillers — more than 900 pages most of them — had half his leg amputated following a bomb blast when he was serving overseas in the British army.

He has a perfectly good prosthesis but because he drinks, smokes, and eats too much and is given to falling downstairs, his stump is always at him and by the third volume, the reader has had the recurring pain and inflammation up to here and is wishing the surgeons had gone higher up his thigh or that Galbraith had left him uninjured and just got on with the current story.

Non-fiction Christmas gifts are safer than novels. A solid Max Hastings history won’t cause you the irritation generated by giveaway phrases or references to be found in fiction.

References, to take just one example, to dropping eyes. Every reader of popular fiction encounters them. A character’s eyes drop to the table. Sometimes, they drop to the floor.

If the reader was told how they rolled off the table or bounced twice when they hit the floor, that might make the socket-departing eyes tolerable, but for the most part, they just drop. With exceptions like this, from James Patterson’s conveyor-belt thriller: “When my eyes danced over to the nine-millimetre on the table, I forced them back on her.”  More than the simple eye-drop, maybe. An improvement, definitely not.

The other thing that, unfortunately, tends to get past copy editors is that recent cliché, the messy bun.

The minute a female character is described as having a messy bun, you know the novel is doomed. Doomed, I tell you.

A novel can also be doomed by the kindness of blurb-givers. Lee Child and Marian Keyes can’t be trusted. They are promiscuously kind to other authors, so you can’t rely on them to steer you away from a dud.

One page of gratitude is fine. Two, ok. Three? Doubtful. Four moves into get-a-grip territory. Especially if they’re filled with references to every agent, agent’s assistant, line editor, copy editor, publicist, mother, schoolteacher, and bookseller the author has ever known.

All of these people — with the exception of the mothers — get paid for doing their job, so what’s with all this naming and back-patting? Some of us suspect that it’s designed to establish the humility of the author in order to make her more likeable.

Yes, her. It is a generality, with all of the necessary caveats attached, but most of the author acknowledgements in books are penned by women.

Writers such as Michael Connolly crisply register the contribution of police officers and other experts who let them in on procedures and systems. Picture: Haydn West

Male authors tend more to the terse. Writers such as Michael Connolly crisply register the contribution of police officers and other experts who let them in on procedures and systems so their cops don’t look like right nellies. That’s right and proper. But then you get the acknowledgments that talk of the agent or editor dragging the author out of the slough of despond, the seventh circle of hell, the panic attacks, and tears and conviction that they are an imposter.

All this therapy is, of course, driven by faith in the writer, so acknowledging it is a way for the writer to pat themselves on their own back while crawlingly expressing the hope that their faith is justified by the book the reader holds in their hand.

The last in the list of acknowledgements is the apology to the writer’s children, who left her the hell alone to complete her oeuvre, and her partner, without whom she couldn’t walk upright, feed herself, or write a single sentence.

Which brings us to the worst acknowledgment of all. The one that thanks YOU, dear reader, for investing in this volume, because YOU are all that matters and if you want to relate to the grateful writer, here’s her website.

More relatability. More irrelevant insight into a writer you might like more if you knew less about them.

The only thing readers really need to know about any writer is if they’re alive and, if not, how dead they are.

If you really like a book someone gave you, finding out that its writer is alive is a priority, second only to finding out that they’ve already written a rake of other titles, this proving them to be diligent and productive.

Finding out that a writer you love has gone and died on you is one of life’s great setbacks.

Most people my age claim to know where they were when they heard JFK had been shot. Me, I know where I was when I learned Josephine Tey was dead.

But at least she died and that was the end of it. The worst kind of dead in an author is zombie-dead.

Zombie-dead takes two writerly forms, each appalling. The first is where somebody finds early notes for the dead writer’s bestseller and works up a version of what the original author sensibly rejected, back in the day. Classic example being Go Set a Watchman, ostensibly a sequel to the wildly successful To Kill a Mockingbird.

In fact, the “second” (awful) novel, published the year Harper Lee died, was cobbled together from the rejected early drafts of Mockingbird.

'Go Set a Watchman', published the year Harper Lee died, was cobbled together from the rejected early drafts of 'To Kill a Mockingbird'. Picture: Rob Carr

Lee, in her youth, knew this second offering wasn’t worth publishing and accepted the consequential pain of being dubbed a one-book wonder, yet was unwisely persuaded, coming up to her death, to change her mind. Because of her name, the result was a bestseller.

Fans of To Kill a Mockingbird have to hope that, in time, the second botched horror goes out of print and is forgotten.

Someone other than the original author always does financially well out of them being zombie-dead, but there’s a qualitative difference between John D MacDonald’s son admirably keeping his work in print and Robert B Parker’s offspring authorising other copy-cat writers to craft his beloved characters into a half-life, sold with his name looming large on the cover, with — inevitably — the ghostwriter’s name in much smaller print.

And then there’s Lee Child’s half-life as a zombie. The Jack Reacher books are now written by his brother and shouldn’t be.

If a writer runs out of steam — particularly so phenomenally successful a writer as Lee Child — they should just stop. Dead.