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This article contains minor spoilers for How To Kill Your Family and A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder.
Technology has always shaped literature. One of the most interesting aspects of Dracula is the way it segues from the more traditional framework of Jonathan Harker’s diary entries and the letters between Lucy and Mina, to developing the story via the medium of Dr Sewell’s wax cylinder recordings. With the 20th and 21st centuries bringing a boom in technological advances, literature has adapted to feature, and often exploit, new tech as it becomes available. Epistolary novels have seen updates in the form of emails and texts becoming part of the narrative, and plots must adapt to take technology into consideration — for example, the resolution of A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder hinges on the heroine’s perusal of Facebook photos.
Smartphones, like other new technology, have had an impact on contemporary mystery stories. In many ways, they’ve presented a problem for mystery writers, in that they can provide a too-easy fix for various plot points. It’s unbelievable for the protagonist to have to go it alone in the final act when friends or the authorities are just the touch of a button away. The common mystery plot of a missing person becomes a knottier problem for a writer when so many people have apps like Find My Friends. For the same reasons that they’re such a useful tool in real life, smartphones can completely kill the tension of a mystery novel, and so the problem — or rather, the speedy resolution — they create has to be dealt with in some way. The rise in stories set in the 1980s may not just be because of nostalgia, and the fact that ’80s kids are now the adults creating new media — it’s also a historical sweet spot, where enough easily-available technology exists to help the protagonists solve whatever mystery they face, but communication is still restricted to landlines and face-to-face conversation, with mobile phones being the preserve of the extremely rich.
Of course, not every mystery writer wants to set their book in the 1980s, and so some have to get rid of their characters’ smartphones, sometimes in rather contrived ways. The Guest List by Lucy Foley takes place on a remote island off the coast of Ireland, where phone service is patchy at best. The destroyed or lost phone, seen in books such as Take Me Home Tonight, is also a common device used by authors to remove the problem of “why don’t they just call for help?” While authorial decisions like these eliminate a common plot stumbling block, it can be unsatisfying for the reader, feeling like the author didn’t want to adapt their narrative to the presence of this particular form of technology.
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However, there are many mystery novels out there that have incorporated smartphones into the narrative in much the same way as people in the real world have incorporated them into our everyday lives. In Zakiya Dalila Harris’ The Other Black Girl, protagonist Nella uses her smartphone as another tool in …….
Source: https://bookriot.com/how-are-smartphones-used-in-mystery-novels/