The name of this blog, if a blog can have a name, is Reappearing Ink. I don’t know why. It has no clear significance, and it may have even been called something else at first; I don’t remember, and that’s a problem since I’m not even asking myself to recall something very old. I have no special connection to ink, reappearing or otherwise. I do, however, have at least one story about disappearance. 

Years ago, I was in New York City, standing outside a bookstore. I can’t put a date on it, as the particulars of the trip are gone: how old I was, who I was with, even the season. It was night time, I remember that much, and a single book in the display window caught my eye enough to lure me inside the store: “How to Disappear Without a Trace.” It had a white cover, with the title written in gray font multiple times down the cover, getting progressively (regressively?) lighter each time, until there was a blank space at the bottom where the title should have been, but of course, it had vanished by then. Clever. 

I flipped through the book, and I remember little about it, aside from a chapter demonstrating that it was relatively easy to get a new social security number since they weren’t issued and discontinued from the same government office.  

I never did buy that book, and I regret it given the number of times I think about it. Although if I did buy it, who’s to say it would have survived all of my moves, and who’s to say its advice is even relevant today, given that it’s between 20 and 30 years old. Thanks to technology and connection, we have to be running out of ways to easily assume a new identity, don’t we? How easily can we disappear anymore? 

This has created some problems for crime writers, who often have to contend with a character’s disappearance. Recently I read a mystery story from 1949, and to avoid spoilers I won’t mention the author or title – the eBook was a buck on Amazon and was a pleasant enough way to spend twenty minutes, so who am I to deny you that? Because I’m about to spoil it, so at least this way it’s anonymous. The story concerns a suspect who is only able to avoid detection because he has assumed the identity of his deceased twin brother. Small town, bumpkin sheriff, lack of forensics, lack of procedure, lack of fingerprints. The story presumably worked in 1949, but today is worthy of a few raised eyebrows. It’s a story of convenience. 

Some friends of mine and I used to go through plot summaries for Seinfeld episodes to find ones that would still have worked had the characters owned cell phones, or if they were even passingly acquainted with social media or internet research. I’m sure we found a few episodes that would have still worked, but there couldn’t have been many – Jerry’s mystery girlfriend whose name rhymed with a part of the female anatomy couldn’t have dodged everyone when the phones came out, could she? That gag seems harder to pull off today. And that says nothing about wandering around a parking garage looking for a car in an age when you can snap a photo of your spot on the camera in your pocket, use GPS to track the route you’re walking so you never double back, use your phone to access the dashcam in the car to see the car’s surroundings, or just simply walk around pushing the panic button on your key fob to reveal the car’s location. 

Not everything ages well, and we’re not terribly great at predicting what’ll survive and what won’t. Some creative things do survive, but only barely, relegated to some archival status where we pull it out every time we need a reminder of how quaint things used to be. Other creative things seem ageless. I don’t know the formula. 

That crime story from 1949 is not the only thing I’ve been reading from that time period. I just read one of Lawrence Block’s very early pseudonymous novels (circa 1959-60ish), one he refers to as “mid-century erotica.” It was a fun read, extremely tame by today’s standards, but its plot is quite literally impossible to port to today. A similar thing happened while reading Fredric Brown’s The Fabulous Clipjoint, which I enjoyed a lot. Ditto Max Phillips’ “Fade to Blonde,” which is a contemporary novel that takes place in 1940s Hollywood. All you need is one security camera, one social media stalker, one stakeout with a 400mm lens on a digital camera, or one drone with an HD camera, and your novel’s missing person is discovered on page 17. Now what? 

Whenever I read crime fiction from today, I feel phones are a major presence, no matter what the author chooses to do with them. Either the writer has to invent reasons that the particular characters who populate the story aren’t heavy phone users (thus creating a plot that might not work as well if everyone’s phones were out all the time), or they aim for realism and include text exchanges and tortuous ways of avoiding the brand names of social media sites that the characters are swiping and tapping their way through. Burner, pre-paid, untrackable cell phones are basically near-permanent fixtures in crime fiction now. How do you commit crimes without them? 

A few years ago, not far from where I live, some high school seniors decided to play a prank at their school. They waited until midnight, when no one was around, and then they did their thing, which was some kind of vandalism. I don’t remember what they vandalized, but it was expensive, and big news for a small town. 

They were caught, of course, because all the school needed to do was go into the wi-fi logs to see which devices tried to auto-join the school’s wi-fi during the night. Who needs motive and opportunity when you have surveillance? 

Today we have apps that automatically “check you in” at a restaurant, then post it as an update to a public-facing social media site of your choice. This can be turned off, of course, but there was a major release recently and for security purposes it now has to be toggled off manually again; did you remember to do that? We have apps that let you know when connected friends of yours are nearby. Right now I can log into my Venmo account, click on some friends of mine, and read comments that their acquaintances have written about transactions I can view. 

Once a month, Google helpfully emails me my “Timeline,” which is a collection of links, maps, and data. It shows a map of where I drove, and when. It tells me my longest trip, how many restaurants I ate in, how much time I spent in them, and how far I walked. Hack my email and you too can see a detailed digest of everywhere I went, on which date, and for exactly how long. It’s as easy as ever to tell a lie, but much harder to manufacture proof when you need it. 

Classic problems of disappearance have to be totally rethought, which isn’t a bad thing; that “How to Disappear Without a Trace” book could very well have been used as a handbook for a mystery writer in 1996 (or whenever I saw it), but today only works for those setting a story in 1996. I don’t think it’s an accident that I’ve read so many stories about trafficking children in the last few years – they don’t own phones. Rural noir and GritLit are generally about people too impoverished or suspicious to own phones, too poor to have Ring doorbells, Teslas, and so on. I’m not sure those trends are about a sudden, genuine sympathy with rural culture so much as they’re about a readership already weary of security cameras conveniently facing the wrong way, otherwise known as a “city problem.” 

This all might sound a little like judgment, but it’s not really judgment; I’d never argue that technology has “ruined” crime fiction, or that it was objectively better pre-smartphone, or anything of the sort. All crime fiction is technology fiction, as protagonists either use technology to solve the crime, or the technology doesn’t exist to make the solving easier and they work around their limitations. The Fabulous Clipjoint depends on someone getting an unlisted phone number from their sister, who works at the exchange. Pre-telephone, the protagonists would be forced to follow a different line of inquiry. 

You could pack everything in a backpack, jump on a boxcar, pick fruit for cash, and assume a new life, and you could probably do it from 1949 all the way through 1989. It certainly feels like plots have a much narrower window now given how quickly the world changes – just as Seinfeld plots from 1994 don’t hold up that well today, I’d argue that a lot of plots from 2012 haven’t survived the last decade, and even things from 2016 are a little stale. 

I’m hardly the only person to have noticed this kind of thing. There’s even a long-standing issue for recurring series characters that age in real time, as they started out needing to tail people in a fast car, but ended their careers needing to access security cam footage and keep a good hacker on speed dial. In an article about Donald Westlake’s Parker character, Lawrence Block sums this problem up nicely:

Parker’s world changes, and that’s how the early books show their age. There are no cell phones or credit cards, and it’s a lot easier to live off the grid or fly under the radar. By the later books, it’s hard to find anything to steal; big blocks of cash, there for the taking, are hard to come by in a credit economy.

Even if the disappearance playbook has to be different today, and even if that book is simultaneously shorter and more difficult to pull off, people still try to run away from problems. I have a few theories about this stuff, but one of which is that we’ve reached a point where digital literacy so dominates plots of any book (not just crime fiction) that we are all basically science-fiction writers now. However, that’s probably enough for one day – I’m listening to the wind howl and doing my best to avoid the work for my Day Job, so I’ll pick up this thread another time.