Keep ‘Em Coming: A Reflection on Series

Let me confess something about myself as a reader. Once I find a protagonist I love and a world I don’t want to leave, there’s nothing I crave more than another of those books! I love series! They’re especially successful for the investigative mystery or police genre, and that idea goes back a long way.

Roulletabille and Maigret are lovable French prototypes, and the modern equivalents are legion. One has only to think of Inspector Gamache or Amelia Peabody or Lord Lynley or Inspector Brunetti. Put their adventures together and you have one very long episodic novel, and as far as I’m concerned, they can go on forever.

Lucky me — this pattern is also popular in the historical fiction category, where a reader can find numerous Roman or medieval detective series and even some Egyptian ones.

Episodic

But the operative word with detective novels is episodic. These protagonists are professional solvers of cases, and each case is usually investigated and solved in a discrete book. You can read each book separately, without any knowledge of the others — if you have enough self-control! What drifts from book to book is the world-building and the characters. In the best examples, there are elements of the protagonist’s life that follow an arc across all the books of the series, even while individual cases come and go.

And that points out a fact about series: they don’t have to be episodic.

Continuous

Because there are other series that really do constitute a single long continuous story, broken up into bit-sized pieces. This was the original idea of the serial, a piecemeal form in which many famous novels were first published (for example, A Christmas Carol). Successful modern examples include Harry Potter and Robin Hobb’s Tawny Man series. Sure, each book has a story that can stand alone, but in fact they all build together toward a series climax. You really can’t read one of the later Harry Potter books without all the knowledge imbedded in the earlier ones.

Loosely Related

Then there are the generally related novels, often set in the same world but about different characters. Sometimes an old friend from one book makes a cameo in another. Ursula LeGuin’s Earthsea books are like this. Several more closely related series can be clumped together in a larger world-sharing. A great example of the latter is the relationship of Julian May’s Pliocene Exile and Galactic Milieu series within a larger framework.

So What Is the Secret?

Is either form of the series better than the other? Not for my money, although I think the interlocked series must be harder to write. They have to be conceived as one long novel, with subplots that must all be tied up at the end, so a lot of careful planning is necessary. Not for “pantsers,” I think.

What fans love—and series do generate loyal fans—is the luxury of remaining in a comfortable, familiar world with characters they feel close to. There may or may not be suspense from one book to another, but there will always be a strong attachment to characters and places.

As a reader, all I ask is more, please!