Fiction cliches you hate

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I read mostly crime and thriller.
Can't bear books that take the first hundred pages to describe the landscape. Thick frost, frozen lake, snowy trees, onto the action please.
Detectives that drink lots of coffee and work all night but somehow seem to actually work very little

Grendel - Interlinked fox troll chicken shed crime GENIUS!

I have shuddered with desire. Ooh, that was long ago. I must admit I thought it was a cliché until it happened.

Fictional people wake after a Night of Luurve and immediately start shagging again. Real people have bursting bladders and bed breath.

Unmarried Victorian women who get seduced by an unprincipled bounder, and then die. Of what?? Frequently, there is also an "innocent babe" involved, who also dies and gets buried in the cold hard earth etc.etc.

If they don't die, they seem to have to spend the rest of their lives lying on the carpet, clasping peoples' knees and begging for forgiveness for being so unspeakably wicked as to have had sex.

The pale light cast deep shadows into his craggy face, emphasising the glint of his hard brown eyes beneath a dark, jutting brow. The lines etched around his sardonic lips tightened. "Let's go," he growled, tensing strong hands on the wheel.

This character is a high-flying lawyer whose urbane charm is a complete mystery, given that he appears to be a cross between a Cro-Magnon and a broken pavement.

an unprincipled bounder - Oh, stubborn, whatever happened to unprincipled bounders? They should be brought back immediately, along with cheeky rogues!

I think nowadays unprincipled bounders are just absent fathers who don't pay their child support.

Unprincipled blunders are in the same place as cads, buffoons and impudent young whippersnappers.

bounders!!

The buffoons commit unprincipled blunders, though, don't they.

Absent bounder + blundering buffoon + impudent whippersnapper = Nick Hornby millions?

People in crime fiction and time-trotting historical dramas never throw incriminating things in the bin. They always burn them or bury them in the garden, or else handily hoard the evidence somewhere in their house. No-one does this.

People with mental illness are either murderous avenging angels like Lisbeth Salander, or fragile waify creatures who never go out, like all those Victorian attic-dwellers. No-one ever muddles along, takes pills and remains under the care of the community nurse.

I thought the whole point about Lisbeth Salander was that she didn't have a mental illness: the dominant men in her life were making out that she did because of her actions.

I love bounders and cads.
Georgette Heyer does them wonderfully, and so many writers tried to copy her and failed miserably.
I agree Tanith, Lisbeth is one of my favourite characters in recent fiction.

LadyBeagle today I have been perusing my audiobook copy of The Convenient Marriage and vastly enjoying Robert Lethbridge who is an unrepentant fight-picking, heroine-kidnapping Cad of the First Water.

Jilly Cooper is a repeat offender for the following: fat woman has unhappy marriage, finally gets arse in gear and loses weight via unhappiness diet (have tried this is RL and does not effing work), scales fall from husband's eyes when he sees wife is now thin and waif-like and stops philandering etc

Very annoying. She regularly spouts the whole "losing weight will solve your problems" mantra - or did in her Riders, Rivals, Polo phase

Can anyone recommend any new authors I like crime, thriller, particularly psychological thriller
I like them when they're cheap on itunes

Ah, by your nn I can tell your'e a GH fan Horatia.
When I got my kindle, I bought all my old favourites again.
My favourite was Damarel in Venetia.
He was a bounder, no mistake.

Jilly Cooper also serial offender when it comes to anthropomorphising animals - thus the lurched that cried big fat tears which rolled down its cheeks and the racehorse that stopped to admire itself on the giant screen as it cantered past. Seriously?!

Tut - lurcher. Bloody autocorrect

Yes, but we all know that Roberth Lethbridge is actually more interested in getting the Earl sweaty and in his shirt sleeves than in Honoria. It's all an elaborate plot to be wounded so he can have his arm bandaged.

TheSmallClanger, you should read The Cauldron by Colin Forbes. It is deeply, DEEPLY shit, but the whole plot centers around Henchman #1's being told by Arch-Villain to carefully destroy a piece of evidence but instead just throwing it in the bin. Then Our Plucky Heroes launch a raid against Evil HQ where they are beaten back with only time enoigh to grab a single piece of paper from the top of the bin...

Re: Lisbeth Salander - I've only read the first book. She's the sort of character that people with certain mental illnesses are often portrayed as, I think.

Something else I've noticed in crime fiction, mainly - anyone who is fanatical about cleaning and related tasks is a potential murderer. Any person who was raised by a domineering older woman, preferably not their birth mother, is also a murderer. Yes, Ruth Rendell, I am looking at you.

I never liked "an ear piercing shriek" because I didn't know if it meant a shriek that goes right through you or the shriek you make when someone makes an earring hole in your ear.

Any cliche involving women's intuition, "she just knew she was pregnant, she just knew her time had come" having had a bleed during my first pregnancy and all my pregnancy symptoms disappeared and then I was late a few weeks later and eventually ascertained that no I hadn't had a miscarriage, but had just had a bleed and was still pregnant, and then having found false starts many times during labour, I realise that the idea of a woman "just knowing" is bullshit. Or it is for me anyway, I am a crap woman, I never seem to "just know" anything.

me neither!

Well by the end of the 3rd book, Lisbeth Salander's whole head and body had gone dark.

Neat trick.

First post of 2013 for me! What about heroines who love their children with all the heart no matter how wicked they are and just want to hold them in their arms even though they are serial killers...Jodie Picoult..as opposed to those of us who would cheerfully kill them if they leave the fridge door open ONE MORE TIME!!