Mr. Bland Man

 Mr. Bland Man

 

Everybody has their own preferences about what they like most about fiction.  For me, I can’t connect with a book unless I can form some sort of emotional connection with the characters.  I don’t necessarily have to like the people, though it helps.  I can be annoyed by them, I can despise them, and in the best cases, I’m intrigued by them and wonder about the aspects of their lives outside of what’s recounted in the novel.

 

As I’ve been reading a lot of mysteries lately, I’m sad to say I’m often disappointed by the characters.  All too often, I have the same disillusioned, brooding protagonist who’s licking the wounds of a failed relationship, is a total skeptic about everything, and is generally a cookie-cutter copy of a hundred other antiheroes just like him.  One of the problems with reading a lot is when something’s unoriginal, it’s a lot easier to catch it.  Ultimately, it’s a little sad to realize that the protagonists of fifty books are essentially interchangeable.

 

And the problem is, so many of these characters in fiction today are utterly bland and boring.  None of them are in any way distinctive or memorable.  Looking at the pantheon of great fictional detectives– Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple, Father Brown, Lord Peter Wimsey, Harriet Vane, Nero Wolfe, Archie Goodwin, Perry Mason, DCI Dover, the Hon Con… they’re all larger than life characters.  Not only do they linger in the reader’s imagination forever, but it’s an extreme challenge for actors to play the roles without seeming too small for the part, and those rare actors who are able to embody the role properly become legends.

 

Writing is a challenge in the best of times, but creating characters that aren’t just well-developed, but are actually legends, is a true achievement, one that is all too rare these days.  In the last thirty years, how many fictional detectives have actually entered the general public imagination?  Indeed, in the last three decades, how many fictional characters outside of Harry Potter and a few other youth series have entered the popular imagination, if film and television adaptations are not taken into account.  Not very many…

 

 

–Chris Chan

 

 

Chris Chan’s first book, Sherlock & Irene: The Secret Truth Behind “A Scandal in Bohemia” was released on August 27^th from MX Publishing, and is available for sale at Amazon.com and the MX Publishing website, as well as at Book Depository (with free worldwide shipping there).  It is also available in a Kindle edition.