Recently, I have been introduced to Randall Garrett’s Lord Darcy stories. They were loaned to me in a omnibus volume, along with Fritz Leiber’s Conjure Wife, as excellent examples in a conversation about cross-genre writing. (Namely, that the divide into “stay in your lane” is pretty recent in the field of SF/F, and the foundations of the field have many, many great examples of stories that incorporated many things we view as incompatible sub-genres today, and sis most excellently at it.)
Fritz Leiber’s Conjure Wife has been marketed as Science Fiction, as Fantasy, as Horror, and as Romance. Which is it? Yes.
I am having a hard time reading it not because of that (and it’s really good), but because the author absolutely nailed the vicious, parochial, and ultimately self-destructive petty power politics of academia. Which I am all too familiar with, and loathe.
You’d think that’d kick me out of the story so I could better examine the structure and the words and learn from it, but no, he’s too good, and it keeps sucking me in.
So Lord Darcy. These are stories, mostly short, written in the 1960’s and 1970’s, that are Sherlock Holmes in an alt-history where magic works set in a steampunky present-day. With loving callbacks and fun poked at Hercules Poirot and a number of other mysteries, most of which I’m only catching like I do trilingual puns, in the sense of “I know I’m missing something here.” And puns. And fun poked at physics, and medicine, and several other fields.
They’re extremely frustrating to me, except for the novel-length Too Many Magicians, for the exact same reason that the original Sherlock Holmes was frustrating to me: that I don’t have enough capability to visualize the scene they set to see the foreshadowing. So to me, it’s like reading a mystery with no foreshadowing at all.
I’ll get to the end of the story where Lord Darcy lays out exactly how the murder was accomplished, and say “That makes no sense.” So then I have to go back over the short story, trying to find where that was referenced, and I come up on things like “Oh, right, we’re supposed to realize that a rafter beam in old English construction could possibly be wide enough to hold that, even though you never mentioned the size of the rafters.” and “The hell? They make that weapon in that long? How did that even fit in what you described such that I thought it was a tiny cramped room in stuffy Victorian style? And you never even mentioned the existence of that particular weapon in the collection!”
Too Many Magicians was actually really fun, because he had to pad out the length with lots of description, and when he got to the end, I was still wrinkling my nose and going “I hate reading unreliable viewpoint characters, especially when you make all the other viewpoint characters supposedly reliable and give no indication this one isn’t. Is that a trope in mystery, where I’m supposed to suspect any viewpoint character not the investigators? Maybe this is like the TV shows where you know the character in the opening scene is going to be the corpse, so don’t get attached to them; you’re just waiting to see how they’re killed, and then the rest of the episode seeing if the nominally-good-guys can catch the killer.” But! I could actually see about half the clues laid out and memorable enough that the reveal of the antagonist(s) felt surprising yet inevitable, and I was satisfied. (Except for one murder weapon/method. Again, have never seen or heard of an example of that in real life before, and so it felt like it was being made up whole cloth on the spot.)
…
Sarah Hoyt, blessings upon her, once remarked offhandedly to me that foreshadowing for anything important needed to be done three times. At the time, I thought that was overkill. She was right, and I was wrong. Since then, I have noted that it’s minimum three times; if I really want people to remember something, five is probably wiser. Twice, and more than half the readers won’t notice. Once, and the few readers that spot it think will it’s an Easter Egg.
This is one of the things that throws me hard on the Lord Darcy short stories: probably due to word constraints (as every time, he has to worldbuild enough to make the story make sense, and that takes up a chunk of verbiage), the clues are only mentioned once. It’s not enough for me to catch that they exist, much less are important, half the time. This sheer frustration… is good for driving home Sarah’s point.
I have also learned that how far into the story you put the foreshadowing is highly important, too. If it’s not near the beginning, like in the first chapter to first three chapters, most of the readers will have made up their own explanation or visual long before they get to the reference… and it’ll either not register, or throw them out of the story for being different.
In the case of the Lord Darcy stories, half the clues that are mentioned, are mentioned a good chunk of the ways in, sometimes not until right before the reveal, so there’s no time in reading to go “Oh, this goes with this, and with that, so…” (Well, not unless you’re smarter than me, and your brain has a lot more CPU cycles per hundred words read. Frankly, I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed, and that may explain why smarter people than me enjoy these sorts of stories far more than I do.)
Finally, the context of the foreshadowing matters a lot, too. This one I don’t mind, because it’s a common trick used across many a story. If you give A Clue in isolation, with a paragraph devoted to it, it is easy to say “A-hah! A Clue!” If you give in it a dense block of irrelevant information, it’s well-camouflaged, especially if you then give an irrelevant detail its own paragraph. That’s called A Red Herring.
How are you doing on foreshadowing? Any tips and tricks on it I missed?
Mad Genius Club 
14 responses to “I did not see that coming – It Already Went Past”
Sometimes I go back and fill it in later. Problem is that I’ve been IN that story for usually 6 months, I’ve discovered all the clues right along with the characters, and I know things like “obviously a spider drone can climb a concrete wall in one jump, because of the [lengthy handwavium explanation and details about carbon nanotube laminates ensues.]
But when I go back and read it another day, I might notice it is pretty important to know all the handwavium, or the Harley-Davidson-sized spider jumping up the wall will come as quite a surprise. It’ll look like I just pulled a Deus Ex Machina out of my butt.
So, I might add a little side adventure where some Normie sees a combat spider do something impossible, says “holy crap!” and then gets treated to the whole download from The Nerd, which also reinforces his nerd credentials. I can add some teasing from the other spiders, reinforcing their smart-ass credentials. And it can be funny, which is never wasted IMHO. Nothing like a lippy combat spider, I always say. ~:D
Music (song title, lyrics, even “that sounds like creepy-movie-music”) sometimes works, IF it fits the story. I’ve had a character worry about something, then later be reminded of the worry by something totally unrelated, then overhear a bit of gossip that reminds her of the something, or see something that sort of looks like the something. Then along comes the something.
The WIP will probably use birds as the foreshadowing, like I did in the first novella with the character. “Oh look, a hawk.” Followed in the next chunk by “a hawk hunting in the pasture” then “a dark bird, perhaps a hawk migrating through …” then a hawk trying to land on a too-whippy branch, and finally the hawk helps the Main Character in the boss fight. Because other birds are mentioned, and because the MC doesn’t pay specific attention to the hawk, it doesn’t jump out as A Clue.
“The criminal must be someone mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to follow.”
The FIRST of the famous ten commandments of the fair-play whodunit.
In the fanfic thing I tried to not actually hide things from the reader. Catch was, when I got to the last parts of it, I realized the antagonist had been sufficiently effective at ensuring plausible deniability that the reader could possibly miss what they were up to.
I ended up adding two more short stories specifically to have sections where the reader saw things the main character didn’t, where they could actually see the antagonist wondering why things hadn’t come off the way they expected.
And readers were still surprised at the ending. But in the “Oh, I should have seen that coming” way instead of the “alien space flea from outer space” kind of way.
The wip is going to be a challenge. The problem is it is a space western type setting, with weird west stuff going on, but the main viewpoint character does not know anything supernatural even exists, until probably around halfway into the story.
And Garrett, in his non-Darcy short story, “The Best Policy”, gives an essential plot point very early. And the reader doesn’t see it as a plot point — but the entire plot is counting on that unnoticed (by the reader) essential element. And he has enormous fun playing with the element.
I am still giggling at “he was tired of being honest.”
LOL
I didn’t remember that line but I remembered reading that story.
Oh, while I didn’t remember that line per say, I did remember him looking to see if that device was on. 😆
Slowly working on the “introduce the idea of Thing That Will Happen in the form of it being mentioned because POV character thinks it can’t happen for REASON,” and not making it ham-handed. Mostly by weaving it into the world building, which I only figured out I should do when I was going “But that CAN’T happen, he already said it’s impossible! … wait a minute, there’s a loophole…”
That’s probably the best way I can think of to slide in the “weird west” aspects into a space western without throwing the reader when they find out ghosts and ghouls are real.
I love these stories for the worldbuilding and the characters. The foreshadowing issues are definitely relevant, but when I read them years ago as a non-writer they escaped me completely.
And the PUNS. Dear Lord, Garrett was the king (or duke, at least) of the stealth pun. My favorite was the story featuring a young woman whose father’s brother lived on the Isle of Man. Yes. The Uncle From Man.
More than that — his name was Neapeler Einzig. Neapeler comes close enough in translation to Napoleon, and Einzig can translate to single, or perhaps, “Solo”. So, in full, he’s Napoleon Solo, the Uncle from Man.
Hmm, I guess it all depends. I love the Holmes short stories and Lord Darcy. Sometimes it’s just fun to walk along with the detective even if you don’t always see the clues.
Same. I’m not smart enough to spot the culprit in most short form mysteries, I’m just along for the ride.
I suspect part of the appeal of the Sherlock Holmes stories were the sheer spectacle of them.
American gangsters, African pygmes, Indian statraps, ghostly hounds, the series covered all manner of wild things, in, what was, at the time, contemporary London.