"Incidentally, the other day I saw an annoucement of a new
Constantine
novel - Mario Balzic is now retired, and Carlucci is the
protagonist.
This following of the hero until retirement and then
replacement by a
subaltern as protagonist may well be a first in crime
fiction. But then,
nothing about Constantine's fiction is ordinary - he's a
great American
original."
Do any other instances of "protagonist replacement" come to
mind? And
let's make it hard by saying the protagonist has to have had
at least a
two-novel run before he or she was replaced. How was he or
she replaced?
(Speculate why.) Was the new protagonist successful?
To kick things off, I can think of one instance, though a
police
procedural. Nicholas Freeling, to the dismay of many, killed
off his very
personable Dutch policeman, Van der Valk, after a ten-year
run. He
replaced him with his widow, Arlette, who was featured in (I
think) one
more novel, "The Widow." Then Freeling went on to create a
more
conventional French policeman, Henri Castang, in a new
series.
As for the "why," George Dove ("The Police Procedural")
argues that the Van
der Valk series was, in the first place, an attempt to write
a more
literate kind of detective fiction. When Freeling felt his
protagonist had
become predictable or even self-parody, the author ended him.
Since
Arlette lasted only one novel, she can't be termed a
successful
replacement, I guess.
What other examples can folks think of?
Bill Hagen
<billha@ionet.net>
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