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Like many mystery fans of my gender, I cut my teeth on Nancy Drew and graduated to Agatha Christie. But I confess that while I loved the fresh-faced bravery of our Nancy and kinda liked the fussy Hercule Poirot, I loathed the pokey, nosy, smug Miss Marple. She was like the nightmare granny: always up in everyone’s business.

So it was with mixed feelings that I read the squib from the AARP’s May 2008 Bulletin (hey, I may not be a member, but I read their periodicals.) written by mystery and non-fiction writer Pat Remick. (It isn’t posted yet, but Scribe Remick has reproduced it on her blog, along with more thoughts on the graying of mystery protagonists.)

And it brings me back to the continuing struggle I and many baby boomers have accepting the forward march of time.

So maybe my reluctance to embrace fictional age-enabled mystery solvers is yet another example of my fathomless denial. Sort of: I make a conscious decision to read mysteries to escape reality, not face it. I understand that sixty-, seventy- and even eighty-somethings can bring a lot of experience to the table in sussing out a mystery, but do I want the accompanying backstory of their struggles with short-term memory loss while they’re doing it? Sigh.

Harlen Coban, current president of the Mystery Writers of America – and no spring chicken himself – weighed in to Ms. Remick. “We’ve just scratched the surface on so-called geezer lit,” Coban remarks, “It could be the next big frontier in crime fiction.”

I guess it doesn’t matter how old the sleuth as long as the story is good. (For example, take a look at Christopher Fowler’s unlikely duo of Arthur Bryant and John May, the septuagenarian detectives of Scotland Yard’s Peculiar Crimes Unit.)  But here’s my caution to mystery writers contemplating hoary heroes: no getting up in everyone’s business. 

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