> Contemporary mystery authors too often feel the need to create the illusion of depth by having alcoholic protagonists with messy personal lives. It's a trope

> Contemporary mystery authors too often feel the need to create the illusion of depth by having alcoholic protagonists with messy personal lives. It's a trope that makes some sense though. People who are doing work that requires them to travel for long periods of time, spend lots of time alone, or where they obsess over every detail of something for days on end could easily strain relationships and cause issues in their personal lives, while constantly dealing with cases involving horrible things can easily lead to drugs/alcohol use. It's still a cliche and it's sure to get old, but I almost feel like you'd need a good explanation for avoiding it. How does a character who has spent years seeing the worst things have zero issue dealing with it? How does a person whose income in inconsistent, whose lifestyle has them disappearing for days at a time, and whose work consumes them not have issues with their personal life? Not that you can't have a detective who is independently wealthy or works as part of a team, or who never travels, or never deals with the kinds of cases that would cause them to have trouble sleeping at night, but if you do have that kind of character the rest of it just sort of follows.