Over the years my reading experiences have moved from the Bobsey Twins and Little Women and Anne of Green Gables, to predicablt romance novels and eventually to murder mysteries and spy adventures.
In all of those genres, the style of haircut of each character was never a dominant requirement for the authors. We might learn that Anne of Green Gables was a carrot top and her friend Diana Barry was the envy of her friends with her curly and shiny black hair.
Readers did learn that Jack Ryan in the Tom Clancy spy stories had short dark hair and in our reading minds we immediately saw Ryan’s face and hair style in our imaginations.
In those books more time was spent on the plots and sub-plots and less on what kind of hairspray or barber tools produced what was happening atop each head. Even heads cleanly shaved of hair had shiny and polished pates.
In a recent murder mystery novel I read, I was tempted to call my hairstylist each time a new character was introduced by the author. Only someone fully trained in hair design and management would have begun to understand the unnecessary descriptions.
In the first 80 pages of the book, the author introduced the following hairstyles:
• Short dark locks in a quiff hairstyle, with blue eyes.
• Blonde-haired with brown highlights in a stacked pixie.
• Small brown eyes and long curly black hair tied in a low bun.
• Red hair blended with gray in a side-swept style to partially cover his pate.
• His thick brown hair was cut in a high razor fade.
• Strawberry blonde hair styled in a choppy bob.
• Blue-eyed professor with long wavy crimson locks and feathered bangs.
• Blondish boho braids.
• Long brown hair and curtain bangs.
• Dark blond hair in a layered men’s bob and chin puff goatee.
• Dark hair in an undercut fade.
• Jet black hair worn in a short pompadour cut.
• Dark blonde hair in a medium length A-line cut.
• Grey hair in a military undercut.
• Petite with long and multi-layered ombre hair.
Through all of these descriptions, I kept wondering: who murdered all those victims, and what sort of hairstyle did he/she have?
When the criminal was revealed, it turned out his style had been described early on in the book. He was the blond one with the layered men’s bob and the chin puff goatee. This description was lost on this reader because the young man in question was a charming, intelligent student teaching assistant, the right-hand man of the professor who was also profiling the criminal for his law enforcement lady friend. If he was unaware of the guilty party at his elbow, how could a reader be expected to see through the disguise by knowing he had a bob?
The secondary villian had dark hair in a disheveled cut and a corporate beard.
I’ve noted the author’s name, and that of one other who appears to have a hair-style fetish and I will bypass their books if given the opportunity.
Right now I’m off to visit my own hairstylist to see how she would describe my hair: mostly grey, with some silver highlights, backcombed strategically to hide the thinning spots on the back of my head, with tufts of hair that stick out on the left side, the side I sleep on and bury into the pillow.
That sounds to me like a paragraph that could be used by an author with a fascination for hairstyles on both villians and innocent victims. Which would I become?
Joyce Walter can be reached at ronjoy@sasktel.net
