The Better Mousetrap, Part One

A week or so ago, I offered the following backhanded gallantry toward Tom Holt’s “The Better Mousetrap,” though I did leave the title of the book a mystery:

I said this after reading (and re-reading, and enjoying) “Flying Dutch” and “Who’s Afraid of Beowulf,” thinking the former was better but lamenting with each read how similar the two novels were.

Nevertheless, when I saw “The Better Mousetrap” at the local thrift store, I scooped it up because I knew I liked Holt enough to give him a fourth try (the other is “Blonde Bombshell,” which was okay).

But “Mousetrap” is growing on me.

I’m learning more about Holt as I go. He’s almost as prolific as Terry Pratchett, to whom he’s compared. But he writes a different kind of novel – less silly, just as thoughtful.

But why am I writing about “Mousetrap” now?

Because of this:

Character Frank Carpenter is off on an impossible mission – picking out a shirt to wear on a date. As a fashion-ignorant individual, I thought the scene clever. And it’s a great way to show character – not in the derring-do of preventing deaths at the behest of an insurance company that doesn’t want to pay out, but at an ordinary task that’s just as daunting, viz:

[S]ome of these shirts were right and some of them were wrong, and he had no idea of how the rules worked. All he knew was that if you got it right, you looked a million dollars and lovely women melted into your arms alike an ice cream on a hot day, and if you got it wrong, children pointed at you in the street. It was, he couldn’t help thinking, a bit like the other incomprehensible scary thing, the one he was buying the shirt for [a date with Emily, a woman whose life he has saved at least three times]. Finding the right one, having the wit to know it when he found it, keeping it, looking after it properly, never letting it go. Washing it occasionally. Ironing. Life is so much easier, of course, if you never bother.

Make your characters relatable, even if they’re magical or clever or both, far beyond the ken of your readers, and the readers will beat a path to your door, or at least to your books in the thrift shop with the hope that maybe in the future they’ll pay full price for one of your novels.

So now, one more thing to do in my own novels . . .