As "participating author of the month," I have a few comments
on the
"no-more-than-seven" in a series view. Frankly, I thought my
seventh Cuddy book, SHALLOW GRAVES, was the best to that
point. It dealt with modeling and the Mob in Boston, and
mixed mystery puzzle and novel of character about as well as
I could muster. However, I continued to have new ideas for
the Cuddy series, and the eighth, FOURSOME, set mostly in
rural Maine, was about as different a whodunnit as one could
imagine after its predecessor. The ninth book, ACT OF GOD,
was profiled in NEWSWEEK, the tenth, RESCUE, was a Main
Selection of the Mystery Guild, the eleventh (INVASION OF
PRIVACY) and twelfth (THE ONLY GOOD LAWYER) were both
nominees for the Shamus Award (which, as many of you already
know, is a peer, not fan, award from the Private Eye Writers
of America), and the thirteenth, SPIRAL, was nominated for
the Flamingo
(Best Mystery Set in Florida).
I think the major problem with ANY series, of whatever
length, is not so much avoiding redundancy in plot (there are
only so many homicide motivations) as avoiding it in
characters. The problem for a lot of long-running series is
that the author keeps recycling the same repertory company of
characters, either literally or functionally, so that the
reader sees very little new in a succeeding book. Personally,
I have a theory on why this repetition of characters occurs:
Once you are successful enough to become a "full-time"
writer, you by definition are cut off from a lot of the
"real" world, "day-job" stimuli of meeting new people who can
BE credible characters as realistic players in a mystery
novel.
Comments?
Best from Boston,
Jerry
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