When I'm reading a mystery, I don't much care what color a female character's eyes are, I want to know about her hair. Is it long, short, thick, thin? What color is it? Does she color it or let it stay natural? If I know what she does with her hair, I know more about her character and history than I would if the author spelled it out for me. Stephanie Plum's teased-out-to-Jesus mop of brown curls marks her as a “burg” girl more than anything else. When we first meet Stieg Larsson's Lisbeth Salander, we're told that her natural red hair has been dyed raven black and cut “short as a fuse.” Even without her piercings and tattoos, we don't need to know many more details to know that her temper is probably short as her hair. In Marcia Talley's All Things Undying, there's a character-revealing moment when Hannah Ives looks at her reflection in a store window, fluffs out her curls, and confesses to an old friend that she got highlights because she'd been panicky about the gray in her hair.
My hair naturally waves and curls, but no two hairs curl in the same direction, so I've probably spent at least five years of my life smoothing it so it looks good in my bathroom mirror. But in the time it takes me to get from the bathroom to the front door, it has frizzed and kinked, and little hairs have sprouted all over my head in a kind of electrified halo. For one of the Florida mystery writers' conferences, I got my hair professionally hot-ironed. The stylist not only ironed it, she put something like mustache wax on it to keep it smooth. But a tropical storm blew in and roared around the veranda of the hotel where a group photo of the writers was taken. In the photo, all the other women look charmingly wind-blown. I look like Einstein if he'd just stuck his finger in a light socket.
It's enough to make a woman think of turning to crime. Like robbing a bank for enough money to get hair extensions.
Blaize Clement is the author of the Dixie Hemingway Mystery Series.
I take for granted that a character will live up to his or her hair. Unkempt hair–disorderly mind and so forth, but your analysis of the hair on the heads of some of my favorite writers is an avenue I hadn’t thought of–hmmm–I wonder if there is a relationship between their hair and why I read their books. 😉
My hair is a flipping disaster. For more than forty years it was so straight that even a perm couldn’t make it hold a curl more than a couple of weeks. And then, and then, and then…they changed my epilepsy meds. My hair fell out in huge chunks and the places it fell out, it grew back curly. Which means that it’s now half and half. Even my hairdresser doesn’t know what to do with it.
I find my characters are often controlled by unruly physical issues like frizzy hair or migraines. I never thought of that as an echo of myself, but now I am beginning to wonder!