by Nina Wachman
Mystery readers are a loyal bunch. Once they discover a story with a setting and characters they like, they’ll read every book in the series. A receptive audience awaiting more of your characters, more of your ideas, and more of the worlds you’ve built. An author’s dream, right? An author’s responsibility, however, is to deliver on the audience’s expectations for the story and the character and the world in which they operate in every single book.
The most prolific authors must have a ‘secret sauce’ for keeping a series going for so many books, shouldn’t they? How do they make each new installment interesting and fresh? I interviewed a few of my favorite authors with long-running series and they provided insight into their success.
Kerry Greenwood
Kerry Greenwood writes the Miss Fisher Murder Mysteries set in 1920s Australia, a series of novels, including short stories and an Acorn TV show. The series features an intrepid young private investigator, Phrynee Fisher, who is rich, wears fabulous clothes and drives a red fancy motorcar, and has been described as a female James Bond.
When Kerry wrote the first book in the series, Cocaine Blues, it was her first published novel; but the seventeenth she had written. So many remained unsold when she received her first two-book contract. Thirty years and twenty-two books later, here’s how she describes what she’s learned:
“The biggest challenge is making sure that every book is different. After more than thirty years continuity is also a challenge. Occasionally I make a mistake, and my legion of fans always tell me about it. I don’t mind. They’re welcome, and I accept this in the spirit in which it is offered. If the canon didn’t matter to them, they wouldn’t bother.”
Martin Edwards
Greenwood describes how creativity prevails across one series, but how does an author keep two series or three going? It takes a master crime writer like Martin Edwards to describe what he does across his two contemporary series, and in the Rachel Savernake series set in prewar England.
When asked how to keep the stories fresh while keeping true to the character, he shared the following:
“This is an absolutely key issue. The danger of a long series is that the writing becomes samey and formulaic. There’s nothing wrong with that, if that’s what you want to do—in fact, it can be a good way to achieve commercial success, because many readers like long series. However, I’ve never written a series longer than eight books. I have always been determined to make each novel within a series a bit different from all the others in the same series, despite the common factors. This is quite a challenge, and it slows down the writing process, but personally I think it makes for better books that are more satisfying to write.
“One way to achieve this variety is to experiment with storytelling structure—something I do quite a lot, although not, I hope, in an irritatingly obtrusive way. The over-riding question is: what do I, as a writer, want to achieve? I’ve always had a pretty clear idea about this, which isn’t to say I’ve always managed to achieve it! My firm aim is always to excite myself about what I write. Because if I’m not excited, how can I expect readers to be? This can be a risky approach, especially if you’re not writing ‘for the market’ and if what you are writing doesn’t coincide with the fashion of the moment, but I find it liberating rather than self-indulgent. And, on the whole, perhaps thanks to good fortune, this approach has worked well for me.”
Peter Lovesey
Peter Lovesey, who recently celebrated his 90th birthday, concluded his long running series with detective Peter Diamond set in contemporary Bath, England. He writes two other historical series, one featuring Bertie Prince of Wales as the main character and sleuth.
I asked him about how he’s managed to write so many novels and keep so many different characters and series going. He was very candid in his answer:
“Never to fall into the trap of repeating a plot. You need to plunge your main character each time into wholly new circumstances.”
In describing how he applies this to his twenty-two Peter Diamond novels, he added:
“In the second book, Diamond Solitaire, he has left the police and is traveling, trying to solve the mystery of an abandoned autistic child. By book six, I realized the series was getting too cozy, so the next one, Diamond Dust, starts with the murder of his beloved wife, Steph. Even in book twenty-two, the latest, he is ripped out of his familiar police office and goes undercover in a village murder case. “
I agree with Peter’s conclusion about how to keep characters fresh, “If the character lives in your imagination, you get to know how he or she will cope with anything…”
In the most recent book of my own series, the Venice Beauties mysteries, set in seventeenth century Venice, I’ve put my main character, the elite former courtesan Belladonna, far from her comfort zone. In the first book of the series, The Gallery of Beauties, she is in her element as a Machievellian strategist who unravels the murders of the city’s most illustrious women, chosen as the subjects of an Englishman’s portrait gallery.
In the latest book, The Courtesan’s Pirate, Belladonna is roughing it on the windswept islands of the Caribbean facing roguish pirates instead of urbane gentlemen and brandishing a poison-tipped dagger instead of her rapier-sharp wit. Since this is the third book in the series, it was important for me to recognize the limitations of a woman of Venice, a natural on the balcony of the Doge’s palace, but at a loss in a tropical island’s mosquito-ridden swamp. Though my heroine does manage to get back to her natural place in Venice, changing up the setting added different twists and new challenges for my character to face.
Reiterating Peter Lovesey, “You need to plunge your main character each time into wholly new circumstances”, which allows your character to change and grow even as she is returning to the setting of her old life. I only hope to learn from these three masters to achieve the same longevity for my own series.
Nina Wachsman is the Agatha and Silver Falchion nominated author of historical mysteries The Gallery of Beauties, The Courtesan’s Secret, and The Courtesan’s Pirate. Her recent historical short stories are “The Deadly Portrait” featured in Feisty Deeds: Historical Fictions of Daring Women and “Murder at the Ziegfeld Follies” in New York State of Crime 6.
