Did it just cough while I was holding it?
“It all sounds a bit ... I don’t know. Improbable?”
“Doesn’t it? One might think it’s the stuff of a spy novel.”
-The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest
How does an author feel in that moment when his pen has one of the police officers in his spy novel concede to another that the goings-on sound so improbable you’d… think them the stuff of a spy novel? The reader feels the book having a moment of self-consciousness, acknowledging itself, without the characters even breaking the 4th wall. The story suddenly steps away and aside from the reader to reveal to him the author, across space and time, as he blinks and shrugs: I know, I know… indulge me.