Unreliable, unlikeable, unbelievable

When I was a kid in Brooklyn, some of my wise-guy friends — comic wise guys, not criminal “wiseguys” — would often tell stories that would get you going, only to have them say, “only kidding, haha” at the end. They did this so often that I learned a good lesson that stood the test of time: Don’t believe everything you hear.

Then in high school, the seniors would try to sell pool passes to the freshmen. First they’d tell you there was a secret pool on the roof for the teachers and staff. Then they’d say they were going to be studying really hard to get into a good college, they wouldn’t have time to swim anymore, and they’d sell the pool pass cheap because they weren’t going to use it anyway.

I don’t know if anyone took them up on this. It was a non-starter for me because I never learned how to swim.

I’m bringing up these stories of tall tales and outright lies for a reason. I read a lot of books, and my favorite categories are mysteries and psychological thrillers.

Trying to figure out “whodunit” is always fun. The thing is, lately, I’m finding more and more writers using a technique that I’ve grown to dislike immensely, the so-called “unreliable narrator.” According to our friends at Wikipedia, an unreliable narrator is a narrator “whose credibility is compromised.” Tell me about it!

Every time I come upon one of these unreliable-narrator books, I think about my old BS-ing friends and the seniors with the pool passes. What a bunch of baloney. I mean, if you can’t trust the narrator, what chance do you have of figuring out who the guilty party is? It’s just not fair.

I would love to give an example of this so you can get the drift, but at the same time I don’t want to spoil a book or movie for you. In light of that, I’ll go back to a book from 2012, hoping that is long enough ago that you already know the ending at this point so it will not be ruined. That book, which became a hit movie as well, is “Gone Girl” by Gillian Flynn.

“Gone Girl” is great because it is intense and full of plot twists. But the whole thing is based on the fact that the narrator — the person telling the story so intently and passionately — is unreliable. She’s just not telling the truth. This is why, when the plot hook gets revealed about halfway through the story, you sit there with your jaw dropped and just go “damn.” At least that’s what I did.

Don’t get me wrong, “Gone Girl” is a great story. In fact, it became so successful it inspired a whole new genre of “Girl” books, where the heroine goes missing under mysterious circumstances. To inspire a whole new genre is pretty impressive, I would say. But still, the frequent use of the unreliable narrator trick has just gotten out of hand at this point. It’s just been beaten to death, really.

We can all agree that we don’t like to be lied to. If we can’t be honest with each other, what else is there? Nothing at all. That’s why I so dislike the whole “fake news” and “alternative facts” stuff going on in the world these days.

Now, with the release of publicly available and easy-to-use AI (Artificial Intelligence) programs like ChatGPT, it’s only going to get worse. Truly, you can’t trust that anything you see, hear, or read in the media anymore is authentic. These so-called “deep fakes” are only going to get better and better — that is, harder to tell if they are true or made up — as time goes on. What a way to live.

Being that we are so inundated with questionable content everywhere we turn, you would like to think that, when you find the time to sit down with a good book, at least you’re getting the straight story. I think it’s the confluence of fake everything and unreliable narrators that has got my blood boiling lately. I hate to be negative, I really do, but enough is enough.

Now look, it’s one thing when the old guys get together and tell the same old stories over and over. That fish that got away gets bigger and bigger all the time. The old hot-rod from high school gets faster and faster as the years go on.

And the number of girlfriends us old guys had gets bigger and bigger too as the years fly by, don’t you know it. We all love to embellish the old stories — many times we don’t even know we’re doing it — but outright lying is not cool. Give it to me straight or don’t give it to me at all.

Fortunately, there are plenty of old mysteries and thrillers to read that don’t use unreliable narrators and are great fun. I’m talking about Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle, Raymond Chandler, Dashiel Hammet, and many more.

Like old well-made furniture and old whiskies, these authors age very well. If you’re looking for a good read, one to really sink your teeth into, pick up anything by these writers and try to find out “whodunit.” Great fun.

My old pals in Brooklyn and the seniors in my high school were the type of people who loved to put one over on you. What’s that old cliché? “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.” You’ve been warned.