Comic Book Time / Literature

• Remarkably common in mystery fiction.
  • Nero Wolfe appeared in over 30 novels and more short stories published between 1934 and 1975. Each story is set in the year it was written, but Wolfe, Archie, and the main supporting characters don't age, even though Archie celebrates more than one birthday.
    • One client appears in two books about twenty years apart; he and his son age, while the residents of the brownstone do not.
    • The 2000-2001 television adaptation runs with this. Each episode is set at roughly the time the story it was based on was originally published (with some minor adjustments for what works for the plot or what looks best), but the stories that are adapted aren't done in any particular order or with any real chronology in mind. As such, while the brownstone set doesn't really change, the clothes and settings outside the brownstone can vary from mid 1950s one week to late 1960s the next and early 1940s the week after. The use of a regular 'repertory company' cast of actors magnified this, as last week's flapper could just as easily be this week's flower child.
  • Hercule Poirot is introduced during World War I as a retired policeman. By the 1960s, although he has taken to dyeing his moustache, he still doesn't appear to be much over sixty. Similarly, Miss Marple, originally presented as a subversion of the "Victorian Aunt" stereotype in 1920s fiction, is described as having had a Victorian Aunt of her own in At Bertram's Hotel (published 1965). Each series ends with one novel in which the protagonist has aged and, in Poirot's case, dies; both books were written during the Blitz and were originally intended to finish the series if Christie was killed. They were instead published in the 1970s as is, which makes them somewhat anachronistic.
  • Jim Qwilleran of the Cat Who novels is 46 years old in the first novel, written and set in 1966. He's 50 years old in the last novel, written and set in 2007.
  • Robert B. Parker's famous PI Spenser fought in Korea and fought Jersey Joe Walcott (who retired from boxing in 1953). He's still in business and in something of his physical prime. While Parker allows Spenser to age, he's taken on something of a "timeless" quality as a character.
  • Not only does Mike Hammer not age from 1947's I, the Jury to 1997's Black Alley, New York City doesn't age either.
  • Ellery Queen goes through numerous changes during his run, but he stays at about the same age from 1929 to 1971. Oddly, some of the later books in the series (especially The Finishing Stroke) try to establish that the Ellery of the present day was the same Ellery as that of the 1920s, with mixed results.
  • Dalziel and Pascoe, who debuted in the days when men walked on the moon, are still in harness and haven't aged nearly as much as the elapsed time would suggest. When the series reached its 20th year, Reginald Hill wrote a brief essay on the issue, noting that if they kept it up the two detectives would still be on the job when men walked on the moon again — and published it as the foreword of a story, "One Small Step", depicting just that.
  • In the Adam Dalgliesh novels by PD James, the first novel is set in 1962 and has Dalgliesh a Detective Chief Inspector, a rank he surely has to be at least thirty years old to attain. Furthermore he has lost his wife in childbirth 13 years before 1963's second novel, realistically making him at minimum mid-30s. Dalgliesh is still active in the contemporary police force in 2008's The Private Patient, which would make him at least 80.
  • While Kate Shugak and company have aged over the course of the novel, they have not aged as many years as have passed in Real Life. Kate's father's service in World War II—which was plausible in the early 90s, but really isn't in 2020—is no longer mentioned.
  • Ellis Peters' Felse novels were published from 1951 to 1978. The first novel is explicitly set in 1949; after that, they're not specific, but the background setting details keep pace with passing time, while the recurring characters age a year or two from book to book, even when the gap between books is larger. This is particularly noticeable with the second book, which was published a decade after the first, and has a plot point depending on a law enacted in 1957, but George and Dominic have aged only two years.
• The 87th Precinct series started in the 1950s and continued for over forty years. In a clear sign of a sliding timescale, the children of the police officers never grew up, with references to their ages not lining up to the amount of publishing time between entries in the series.
• The Alex Rider books supposedly take place over the course of a year (if that), but technology has kept pace with reality. Alex's gadgets are the most obvious example — in early books, they were hidden in Game Boys or a copy of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, but they since moved on to iPods. As of the 13th volume, the real-world publication span is 20 years. Anthony Horowitz is fond of this; the first Diamond Brothers book came out in the eighties, while a later book features the London Eye and is stated to be set in 2004.
• Played with in Animorphs.
  • Early books in the series had the Unreliable Narrators worry about how they would adapt in winter, which implies that their adventures are taking place in Comic-Book Time prior to the first winter after receiving their powers. By the end of the series it turns out that It's Always Spring because of the setting, the worries about winter playing up the Direct Line to the Author that they could not give away their location, and about three years pass from beginning to end of the series.
  • Especially hard to nail down timescales because they pointed out over and over that they were changing details so the Yeerks couldn't figure out who they really were. Maybe they were trudging through the snow when they said they were, maybe that's a lie to convince you they're in a colder climate than they are. Only the meat of the story is known to be true; some of the rest is known to be false.
• Patrick O'Brien did this for the Aubrey-Maturin series: around book nine or so, he encountered the problem of running out of Napoleonic War years. To get around it he had to fudge an "1812a or 1812b" to allow for the long sea voyages. Since he's pretty meticulous about Doing The Research, he admits this fact in the forewords of the books affected. Because he's so good, almost everybody forgives him.
• In The Baby-Sitters Club books, the characters started the series at the end of seventh grade and moved to eighth, but stayed there for the rest of the series—leading some to suspect the author originally intended to age the characters but didn't once the series proved to be so popular. Similarly, the books originally covered a month each while being published once a month, but later moved to covering only a week each. The series began in the 1980s and ended in the 2000s.
• Mary Stolz did it with her three Barkham Street books. In A Dog on Barkham Street (1960) Edward asks his dad if he could get transferred to Alaska, now that it's a state. The Explorer of Barkham Street (1985) is supposed to take place about a year later, but Martin reads his library book through a M*A*S*H rerun.
• Characters aged similarly in Judy Blume's Fudge books, though later editions of Superfudge changed a few details to catch up with the times: Fudge watches Cartoon Network instead of The Electric Company (1971), and Peter asks for a laptop instead of a pocket calculator for Christmas.
• The original editions of the first few The Bobbsey Twins books took place in a clear timeline that affected the characters. The first book took place over most of a school year, with the older twins eight years old at the beginning and the younger twins four. The second book was set in the first half of the summer, the third tied up some plot threads from the second, and the fourth opened the following autumn, with the older twins "nearly nine" and the younger set "almost five". Then someone at the Stratemeyer Syndicate apparently realized that the characters would soon age beyond their readership; so in short order Nan and Bert aged to twelve and stayed there, with Freddie and Flossie stuck at six.
• This was retro-fitted into The Boxcar Children series. In the original 19 books by Gertrude Chandler Warner, the series took place in the 1930s — and the Alden children have aged several years. When the series has been picked up again, the Alden children went back to their original ages, and the series was set in the modern era.
• Beverly Cleary's books tend to take place around the time they were written, so Ramona Quimby goes from being 4 or 5 in the 1950s to just turning ten in the 1990s. In Ramona and Beezus (1955), she is 4; in Ramona the Pest (1968), she is 5; in Ramona the Brave (1975), she is 6; in both Ramona and Her Father (1977) and Ramona and Her Mother (1979), she is 7; in Ramona Quimby, Age 8 (1981), she is appropriately enough 8 and stays that way in Ramona Forever (1984); and in Ramona's World (1999), she starts out 9 and turns 10.
• Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Greg has been in middle school, more specifically 8th grade, for the entire series since book 5 whereas he actually did go through Grades 6-7 in books 1-4. Lampshaded in Old School:
  Greg: And to be honest with you, I feel like I've been in middle school FOREVER.
• Madeleine L'Engle appears to have scrambled her own timeline in her "Chronos" books. The original edition of Meet the Austins (1960) was five chapters long: the sixth chapter, "The Anti-Muffins", was removed at her publisher's request for length. The action in Meet the Austins is not specifically dated, but its direct sequel, The Moon by Night (1963), is very definitely set in 1959: Vicky goes to see West Side Story, her father mentions having met Princess Grace "back when she was plain Grace Kelly", and the family are in the Hebgen Lake earthquake. "The Anti-Muffins" was published separately in 1980, and has been included in the text of all printings of Meet the Austins since 1997: it includes a mention of the Kenny Rogers 1978 song "The Gambler". (Not to mention the hobbyist-spacesuit reference buried at the beginning of Meet the Austins, which sounds like a nod to the 1958 novel Have Space Suit – Will Travel. L'Engle justified this in a letter by noting that she was more interested in kairos, the "appropriate time," than in chronos, rigorous clock time.)
• One of Kim Newman's short stories, "Coastal City", featured a Commissioner Gordon-like character for heroine "Amazon Girl", on the edge of noticing that, among other paradoxes created by the sliding timescale of the universe he lives in, his war-hero past was being repeatedly updated, shifting from World War II to The Korean War, The Vietnam War, and now The Gulf War. Fortunately for him, a fresh crisis distracted him from the potential existential breakdown.
• The Executioner action-adventure series was created by Don Pendleton in 1969, and after being purchased by Gold Eagle is still going strong. The series starts with the protagonist Mack Bolan as a Vietnam veteran (early novels even mention service in the Korean War), a fact that's not even mentioned now as it would make Bolan seem too old.
• In The Fine Art of Murder, on page 214-215, Ed McBain admits to using the sliding timescale. In the section "On the Eternal Youth Syndrome", he says "I think I am going to have to inch Carella's kids toward puberty. That was a conscious decision I had to make a while back, to freeze the ages of the characters." McBain admits to having read comic strips when younger, noting that he had read Gasoline Alley (no sliding timescale), Little Orphan Annie (sliding timescale), and Terry and the Pirates (McBain recalls "little Terry grows up and has an affair with the Dragon Lady").
  The detectives in my books were originally veterans of World War II, or later the Korean War, but that got awkward later on. I tried to put that all to rest in one of the books by saying "Every male of age in America is a veteran of one war or the other." Now I just say "He was in the war." Maybe soon people will think of that made-for-television war-Desert Storm.
• Unfortunately averted in the Book Within a Book Amazing Amy series in Gone Girl. Amy (the real one) notes sourly that no one particularly wanted Amy (the fictional one) to grow up, and that it makes the books faintly disturbing since she still thinks and talks like a ten-year-old despite being in her thirties. The success of the series has declined drastically as a result.
• It looks like the revived Goosebumps series is heading this route too. A few protagonists from earlier books have appeared, all still the same age as they were over ten years ago in real time.
• In Harry Dickson's adventures, the titular hero and his young sidekick have lived over 100 adventures, covering, it seems, the late Twenties and the Thirties. However, the hero is always described as being in his late forties, and his assistant as being a young, hot-headed, immature young man.
• Averted in the Honor Harrington series. Characters age as the books cover about 30 years of conflict. However due to quasi-magical "prolong" therapy, the vast majority of characters will live for about 300 years and be at peak physical state for most of that.
• The first book in The House of Night is implied to take place in 2007, by Zoey's mention of having gone to see 300 with her friends. Each book takes place over at most about two weeks, which would place the most recent book in 2008 at the latest. However, the books often mention pop culture popular at the time the book was published, such as Game of Thrones in Destined.
• P. G. Wodehouse wrote stories about Jeeves and Wooster and Blandings Castle from the 1910s to the 1970s. The characters don't seem to age, although it's hard to specify the time period the novels are set, especially since they all take place in a fantasy version (in the sense of "the world never existed this way", not in the wizards-and-unicorns sense) of Edwardian England. However, the scattered pop culture references do indicate that decades are going by while Bertie somehow remains a young gentleman. In early Jeeves and Wooster short story "The Love that Purifies", Lillian Gish and Clara Bow are mentioned as screen idols. In the last novel, Aunts Aren't Gentlemen, Bertie complains about an anti-war rally causing traffic congestion, and there are jokes about Billy Graham.
• Archer Mayor's Joe Gunther is a Korean War veteran; the novels are always set in The Present Day, making him at least 75 years old and still a working detective for a state police agency. Mayor's website gleefully lampshades this:
  Joe Gunther, who has the additional affliction of being arrested in time (please, no puns.) Having lived a full and interesting life, and achieved a position, both physically and emotionally, in which he is relatively comfortable, he has stopped the clock, and ages no more. As a man in his early to mid-fifties, therefore, and yet as a veteran of the Korean War, we all have to simply take for granted that when he was a combatant, he wasn't three years old.
  Okay. So much for self-serving excuses. Without further ado, and with as little specificity as I can escape with, here is Joe's story as I presently recall it.
• John Putnam Thatcher, protagonist of Emma Lathen's mystery novels, spends the entire series (from 1961 to 1997) "a youthful 60". Slightly averted with recurring character Kenneth Nicholls — while he doesn't appear to age and remains a junior trust officer, he goes from single to married with two kids.
• The Judy Moody series plays this trope straight. Although many assume all the books could take place in one year, the book Judy Moody: Girl Detective is stated to take place the October after the Christmas Special book Judy Moody and Stink: The Holly Joliday. Although there should have been a summer vacation (and a change in grades) between those books, both books (and all the other books) show Judy as being in the third grade and aged eight.
• Junie B. Jones was created in 1992. From 1992 to 2001 she was a kindergartner, with everything else taking place in first grade. It doesn't seem like she'll ever become a second grader. A book released in 2009 states the title characters mother was a first grader in 1983 to 1984, despite the fact that she should have been a first grader in The '70s or even The '60s if the series still took place in The '90s.
• William Brown of Just William is always eleven. He was eleven in the early stories between the wars. He was eleven during the stories set in World War II. In one, he says, "Mother, I don't seem to remember when there wasn't a war on." His mother replies, "Don't be silly, William, the war's been going on two years and you're eleven now." He was eleven when he celebrated V-E day. He was eleven when he tried to copy the pop stars he'd seen on colour TV. He experiences three birthdays during the books, none of them numerically identified.
• Averted in Ephraim Kishon's satirical short stories. We see Kishon's kids age in Real Time, from toddlers to teenagers.
• Antonia Forest's "Marlow" books (published between 1948 and 1982) featured schoolgirl characters, who only aged a few years throughout the series, experiencing post-war rationing, colour TV and punk-style make-up. Her comment in an interview was similar to that of the Young Wizards author Diane Duane: setting the books in a consistent timeline would be more work for her and irritating for the readers.
• The books in the Mrs. Murphy Mysteries series by Rita Mae Brown follow the seasons.
• Nancy Drew:
  • Similar to The Bobbsey Twins, Nancy Drew appears to have solved most of her seventy-three original mysteries the year she was sixteen years old, giving a rate of approximately one every five days.
  • This was even more weird in the 80s-90s updated series The Nancy Drew Files, in which Nancy was 18 (as in the revised editions of the original series). With the modern setting, it becomes increasingly unconvincing that the bright daughter of a lawyer wouldn't be either working or at college.
    • And in the games. Time passes, as made clear by calendars with dates spotted in the games, along with various references to recent events in history (such as the revelation that Pluto is no longer a planet), yet Nancy is still referred to as a "silly American teenager" by game 18.
  • The series has lasted long enough that this now applies to its House Pseudonym. Are we seriously meant to believe that the Carolyn Keene currently writing Nancy Drew books is the same Carolyn Keene who wrote The Secret of the Old Clock in 1930? Even if she had been aged just 10 at the time, that would still make her over a hundred years old now.
• Possibly averted to a degree by Nick Carter, which ran from 1886 to 1990, as the Nick Carter of 1964 to 1990 referred to himself as Nick Carter III, suggesting him as the grandson of the 1880's Nick Carter.
• Nick Velvet: In his first appearance in 1966, Nick is described as "pushing 40." In the introduction to Ellery Queen Presents the Spy and the Thief (the first collection of Nick Velvet stories) in 1971, Edward D. Hoch gives Nick's birth date as March 24, 1932. In the introduction to the 1978 collection The Thefts of Nick Velvet, Hoch says that would make Nick 45 as he writes these words and he he doesn't expect Nick will age much beyond that. The stories continued until the late 2000s with Nick seeming to age very little.
• In Clive Cussler's NUMA novels, Dirk Pitt has been an eternal thirty-something (and Kurt Austin an eternal forty-something), even though roughly four decades have passed in-universe, where the fictional timeline approximately mirrors that of real life. Subverted in the later Dirk Pitt novels, where his age was advanced by approximately a decade, he discovered he had some kids that he never knew about (now college-age), and he got promoted to the head of his organization, though given that the early novels mentioned that he was a decorated fighter pilot in the Vietnam War, he should be pushing retirement age by now.
• Richard Stark's Parker initially did not require a sliding timescale. Parker's series initially ran only eleven years, from 1963 to 1974. Westlake did not revisit Parker for another twenty plus years, till the second wave from 1997 to 2008. In The Outfit Parker states that he had been in the Army from 1942 to 1944. In The Outfit, Parker also does state he had already been a thief for 18 years, and refers to a heist he committed in 1949.
• Quiller repeatedly says he's "getting old" in the first novel, written in 1965. His last mission is in "Quiller Balalaika", written in 1996 — as Quiller was a secret agent during the Second World War this would put him in his seventies.
• Repairman Jack follows a sliding timescale. F. Paul Wilson only wrote two novels about Repairman Jack before 1998; 1984's The Tomb and 1992's Nightworld. When Wilson wrote Legacies in 1998, he decided to have it as the start of a series of novels about Repairman Jack, and set it just after The Tomb. However, to do so, he decided that the amount of time since Jack's first appearance in 1984's The Tomb would serve as a constant snag, so he rewrote The Tomb to update various topical references. In the 2000 novel All The Rage, on page 82, Jack notes, when someone says he cannot operate as a mercenary for much longer, "I'm thinking maybe four or five more years and I'm out. I'll be forty then", and he says at age he would not feel sure of himself in combat. That places Jack as 35-36 in the present day of All The Rage, which would make him roughly nineteen in 1984, probably a tad too young for the way The Tomb presents him. Wilson notes that Legacies and subsequent Repairman Jack novels will serve as interquels between The Tomb and Nightworld.
• Zig-Zagged with the Riordanverse; while Percy Jackson and the Olympians doesn't do this, having a year pass between each book, the two Sequel Series, The Heroes of Olympus and The Trials of Apollo, take place within a single year, and Rick Riordan has confirmed that Percy is still seventeen at present after continuously aging throughout the original series.
• Leslie Charteris' The Saint has flitted back and forth in print between period pieces and a sliding timescale. In the introduction for Catch the Saint, published in 1975, Charteris notes that these stories took place before 1939, since "literary detectives sharper than Inspector Teal" would realize that, based on topical references in earlier adventures, the Saint would have grown too old to fight crime, and only a rejuvenation out of science fiction could deal with this situation. (While some Saint stories did feature the paranormal, which later collection in the anthology the Fantastic Saint, Charteris declined to pursue such an approach for the Saint's aging.) However, later books did not follow this trend. In 1997, Burl Barer wrote a new Saint novel that, in his blog, Barer stated took place in contemporary times. Viola Inselheim, a young child in 1934's The Saint in New York, has aged to adulthood in Capture the Saint, but Barer otherwise sidesteps the issue of time. Film and TV versions of the Saint have never gotten down as period pieces. The Roger Moore version took place in the then-contemporary 1960s. Post-Roger Moore TV versions such as those with Simon Dutton, Andrew Clarke, and Ian Ogilvy also eschewed the period piece approach.
• Sexton Blake's adventures ran from the 1890s to the 1970s. They feature the usual signs of the sliding timescale, particularly due to the presence of Tinker, Blake's younger sidekick.
• Most of the "pulp heroes" such as the Shadow, the Spider, Doc Savage, etc. did not run into this, as few of them lasted in the 1950s (though the Black Bat and the Phantom Detective [Richard Curtis Van Loan] did, and the Black Bat returned for 700 adventures in Germany). However, in the 1960s, Walter Gibson wrote The Return of the Shadow, and Dennis Lynds continued from there with stories of the Shadow set in contemporary times.
• Some Spider novels from the 1930s and 1940s appeared in redacted versions in the 1970s, with Wentworth's military service changed from World War I to the Korean War. Another redaction; a collapsing building in The City Destroyers called the Sky Building replaced by the World Trade Center.
• Handled in-universe with The Supervillainy Saga by C.T. Phipps. Gary deals with something called "time compression" where the seven years he spent in prison end up becoming six months despite his daughter remaining the same age. It's apparently a flaw in the universe and a deliberate homage to this trope according to Word of God. Later, it is revealed to also be the work of the Top God Destruction.
• Sweet Valley High and Sweet Valley Twins are known for doing this.
• Tantei Team KZ Jiken Note may start off as an aversion of this trope as it involves the main cast moving on a grade in the first three novels, but thereafter the cast have always been seventh graders.
• The entire Vampire Academy series doesn't even cover a year. Including Bloodlines, the 10 books published so far cover a year and a half.
• The first of the Young Wizards books by Diane Duane was published in 1983, and the most recent in 2016, but only a couple years have passed for the characters. Despite this, each book takes place in approximately the year it was released. The usual fan response to questions about this is "Just go with it." In 2012, Duane released new Millennium Editions of the series in order to update them, especially the earlier ones. The old editions remain available in the major on-line bookstores, and as "International Editions" on Duane's own e-book store. As it stands, "You don't even have a colour TV!" was changed to "widescreen TV" (or possibly "cable TV"?) in later printings. One of the books actually contain an author's note to this effect, basically shrugging and admitting it's easier that way. The books are good enough that most readers are willing to roll with it, though the impetus behind the New Millennium Editions was that an increasing number of new readers weren't.

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