Over at Crooked Timber, Harry Brighouse recommends mystery writers, and touches on something that’s always puzzled me about the genre:
Like Symons [Robert Barnard] has largely eschewed the detective series, which is probably has kept his profile lower than it could have been, but there is one recurring character–the english way of death.
I’ve really never understood why it is that mystery novels always seem to come in series. In fact, it’s not unusual to see a debut novel hailed for introducing a series, which always seems sort of premature to me.
Why is that, anyway? That is, why is the series the default form of mystery novel, while other genres are more prone to stand-alone? Suggestions (and recommendations of mystery authors, though my own tastes run more to Raymond Chandler than Agatha Christie) are welcome in the comments.
(Grading? What grading?)
In the case of John Connelly’s Charlie Parker novels, it appears to be so that he can gradually slide from a mystery story with wierd elements to full out supernatural horror (took him five or so books, which is pretty impressive).
As to more typical authors in the genre — they like the lead character, maybe?
I have no idea why other genres don’t latch on to the series idea. If an author goes to the trouble to develop characters who resonate with the reading public, wouldn’t it make sense to explot that?
My tastes run towards the hardboiled series, and away from the English cozy. Most of these aren’t “mysteries,” per se, perhaps best classified as “crime fiction.”
* Lawrence Block’s Scudder series. The early books were much darker, as the protagonist struggled with alcoholism, but retain their quality today as he struggles with age.
* Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer.
* Donald Hamilton’s Matt Helm. Hardboiled spy genre, as gritty as anything Chandler came up with. Hard to find paperback originals.
* Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch.
* Richard Stark’s Parker.
* Robert B Parker’s Spenser. The anti-noir hero. The series is now several dozen books old and feeling its age, but the first 10 or so are among the best of the genre — confident and funny and alive.
Fantasy novels are also notorious for being series – or at least trilogies.
Yes, fantasy novels are, but it’s usually because the *plots* overflow the individual books, which is not the case for mysteries.
For some reason, mystery stories seem to have characters that people want to see more of. It goes back at least to Sherlock Holmes. Readers loved the character so much that even the author couldn’t kill him.
Some older European authors
Maj Sj̦wall-Per Wahl̦̦ РMartin Beck stories
Georges Simenon – Maigret
Nicholas Freeling – Henri Castang
and the books by James McLevy a real-life Edinburgh detective written in the 1860s, see Meercat Press
It’s all marketing. Publishers realized a long, long time ago that readers like to read more of the same, populated with familiar characters, on a regular basis. That’s why we have so many bed-and-breakfast, cozy mystery series in paperback, along with 20 other sub-genres. If a writer can get away with this, more power to him. James Lee Burke comes to mind as a series writer whose mysteries are so well written that his flaws are overwhelmed by the power of his prose. Robert B. Parker used to be of the same quality, but a lot of mystery experts think he lost track of his characters in the ’80s and is now just churning them out. Bottom line: if an original novel sells well, sequels will prove almost equally as popular, and publishers don’t have to pay the writer anything approaching any kind of Hollywood, mega-million scale.
* Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer.
These come about as close to capturing the Chandler feel as anything I’ve found. He doesn’t quite have the same gift for the memorable turn of phrase, though.
* Richard Stark’s Parker.
These are a fair bit of fun, in a dark way.
* Robert B Parker’s Spenser. The anti-noir hero. The series is now several dozen books old and feeling its age, but the first 10 or so are among the best of the genre — confident and funny and alive.
Somewhere in there (in the neighborhood of Looking for Rachel Wallace, IIRC), he kind of fell in love with the character, though, and it starts to get tiresome having Spenser always turn out to be right about everything.
I view Jeremiah Healy’s John Francis Cuddy novels as being basically Spenser books populated by human beings.
As Kate notes, series in fantasy tend to be more a matter of one long plot spread over several volumes, while mystery series are more likely to be relatively self-contained stories featuring recurring characters. Sometimes you get an overarching plot (Parker’s Spenser novels have some of that, with various characters moving in and out of the books over time), other times you don’t (Stout’s Nero Wolfe doesn’t even age…), but each book contains a complete plot.
I think series with similar characters are all over Science Fiction and Fantasy. Harry Potter, Steve Perry’s stuff, Known Space, Thieves World, 1632, Honor Harrington, Lazarus Long, R Daneel, Elric … Just off things I can remember, I am sure I can come up with 100 more if we include the tie ins to games and movies. (Trek and Star Wars books anyone?) In fact it would be interesting to know the sales of series vs. individual books.
I’d guess “genre” books are often in series because A – it sells, and B – Often the auther is really commenting on a culture or subculture, and so the various books are looking at it over time. For example look at the Nero Wolfe series – it is a fascinating look at American culture from the late 30’s to the 60’s and what cultural change we see over time! From knowing your local barber and his family troubles, to J Edgar Hoover betraying America.
I will join the chorus: Once you’ve got a good set of developed characters who sell once, they’ll sell again, and save you a lot of work.
And fantasies come in trilogies because of the necessities of the narrative structure:
Book 1: Everything goes to shit.
Book 2: Everything is shit.
Book 3: Plumbing is installed at great risk and expense.
It’s an easy pattern that resonates with the human mind.
Because all genre writing is about selling the familiar? Romance novels have identikit plots, fantasy and SF series reuse the same world, and mysteries have the same characters (and TV spinoffs have the familiar world and/or characters)
Lit fic rarely has that level of continuity. (The counter-examples that come to mind first are Updike’s Rabbit and Roth’s Zuckerman, but neither is frozen in time the way genre leads usually are. Their aging, and changing surroundings, are important features of the books)
Actually, there are some fantasy series that are episodic (ie, not part of some huge, overarcing plot, but just “further adventures” of the protagonist), but they look to be a minority, since Lord of the Rings-style epics have been big for the last couple of decades. Sword and sorcery and whatever they’re calling “hidden magic in the modern world” novels this week (urban fantasy? slipstream?) tend to work in an episodic manner when they run in series.
And that’s not including tie-in series, naturally.
Just for fun, I downloaded a list of the books in the Internet Book Database of Fiction, which has each book categorised into various genres. Books can be catalogued into more than one genre. I ended up with a list of 44,139 books, and 86 genres. 24,321 (55%) of those books were shown as beloging to a series of books. Here’s a breakdown of the 7 most populous genres: the genre, followed by the percentage of books in that genre that are series books, followed by the total number of books in that genre.
Genre %Series Total
Mystery 84% 2448
Juvenile 82% 2041
Fantasy 78% 3479
Science Fiction 63% 5273
Childrens 49% 2256
Historical 39% 3247
Romance 38% 5338
(Sorry, couldn’t get the fixed-width format to work.)
To take a reverse angle on why, though, in the case of mysteries, I think it has to do with something inherent to the genre: plausibility.
Most mysteries have protagonists who solve crimes, which is generally a habitual activity for people who do that sort of thing. Therefore, depicting the same person investigating another crime in a later book is perfectly plausible.
On the other hand, if the genre tends to center around remarkable events in the lives of the characters, episodic series come off as less plausible. There aren’t nearly as many horror series, for instance, for the simple reason of “Gee, why on earth would this guy move into another creepy old house that give him the willies?” And there aren’t many romance series that follow the same woman over multiple relationships.
I think media tie-in series seriously skew the Fantasy and SF numbers there, though. Tie-ins tend to get broken out into their own sections in bookstores due to their prominence.
“Series all written by one author” might be a better measure, if possibly hard to find.
I found some errors in my previous calculations, and after correcting them decided to take Eric’s suggestion to look at single-author series. The following table is a sorted list of the percentage of all books in that genre which were part of a single-author series:
Genre %age
Juvenile 86%
Mystery 81%
Fantasy 77%
SF 47%
Childrens 44%
Historical 37%
Romance 30%
Eric’s answer is very close to what I was going to say.
Novels (most?) often involve one of two things (or both of them): an unusual event or development of a character.
In many genre’s it is implausible for the same character to repeatedly happen upon implausible events.
While one novel, even a long one, can be filled by a character’s development, I don’t think a series of novels where this is a focus works as well. If the character’s development doesn’t reach a significant point in a development-driven book, it isn’t likely to be satisfying. If there is a significant change, however, following it up becomes difficult. How do you make a character who changes significantly over an over again remain appealing? How do readers develop a connection to such a chameleon?
It’s not that you can’t have character development in mystery. A fairly common approach (at least by good mystery writers) seems to be to make this part slow, stretching over many books, while whatever mystery is involved necessarily takes on urgency in a given book. This way, the character development acts as a hook to continue reading the series, while the solving of a crime give some sense of conclusion at the end of each book.
Another mystery/horror series is the Repairman Jack books, by F. Paul Wilson. While I haven’t read the first of the novels, the ones I have read show a definite trend toward stronger and nastier horror elements as the series continues (Yes, this follows an overarching plotline).
For SF/Fantasy, the author has a definite incentive to get more use out of those lovingly-detailed universes! Consider that Mercedes Lackey’s Valdemar has run to something like 25 novels, and all but the most recent trilogy (“Owl”) were following up on background and hooks from the first trilogy (“Arrows”).
Then again, sometimes the readers take over…. I’m thinking especially of Piers Anthony, who had readers howling for more Xanth long after *he* was sick of it.
it’s because you can have the attachment to the main character the audience gets attached to, while at the same time introducing a whole new ensamble of characters in every novel.
The main story is the new charachters, but we are already quite familiar with the main charachter.
It’s less likely to work with a romantic novel where, say, a heroine meets a whole new circle of new friends in every novel and becomes emotionally envolved with one of them.
Or other similar situations.
I used to wonder the very same thing about SF: Why so many series?
In SF, there’s supposed to be at least a gesture toward novelty and fresh ideas.
TNH once explained it (and I’ll attempt to paraphrase from memory): something to the effect of, “In the entire history of reading, no reader has ever finished a book and exclaimed ‘That was great! I never want to read anything like that ever again!’ “
There are several reasons to serialise – keeping the characters, keeping the fictional universe. I see David and Bob has pointed out that it is mainly the keeping of the universe that SF and fantasy does. If it is the plot that is too large they usually goes for trilogies instead.
I would add to Bob’s explanation with that I think the author doesn’t have to invest an effort to invent a new fictional universe entirely from scratch. It’s a reader-author win-win situation. Until one part gets fed up.
This is probably another of the reasons why genre fiction doesn’t get any respect from literature. Or maybe another facet of an underlying reason.
There has been a (fairly recent?) trend in romance novels to have a “series” be a set of books about siblings, friends, co-worker, or the like. Each sibling/friend/co-worker gets a turn being the center of a book, while the rest hang out in the background. The success of this varies.
I don’t know about literature discussions or analysis, but if genre fiction gets disrespect for repeating set elements, it feels misguided to me. Some fictional universes in SF and fantasy are major creative work, and is hard to repeat consistently.
It would be more satisfying if the creations of art, literature, movies, television and gaming were compared for things like creativity instead of specific technique.
I suspect you can blame Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The Sherlock Holmes stories were an astonishing publishing phenomenon in their day, and more or less defined the genre because for the next hundred years everybody has been trying to repeat the tric.
The problem (I think) is not so much that elements are repeated, but that elements are repeated because reader familiarity makes for an easier sale.
But maybe the problem is the repetition of elements. The point of creating a new world should be that it allows you to tell a particular story. If you’re writing stories because you want to return to a particular world, or because you saw the world creation as the most important creative work in your book, that’s a problem.
“The point of creating a new world should be that it allows you to tell a particular story.”
Not necessarily. The world as creation and/or backdrop is also a creative element.
“If you’re writing stories because you want to return to a particular world, or because you saw the world creation as the most important creative work in your book, that’s a problem.”
Not if the world (or characters) were very effort expensive to create. Any of the elements world, characters or story must change of course. (I read more SF since other genres has so repetitive and/or predictive characters and stories – it quickly becomes boring.)
I suspect whatever literary establishment it is that doesn’t respect genre fiction would see these things as problems.