Necessity is the mother of this question to readers

I had intended to post about the remake of a movie I discussed here some time back, but that will have to wait, thanks to a defective DVD from the video store. This was just the second defective disc I'd rented, and I believe the first one was of the same movie. Oh, well. You remember what George Santayana said, don't you?

Instead, I'll share some observations about Kittyhawk Down by Garry Disher, whose books about the professional thief Wyatt I've discussed recently. Disher's approach in this novel, the first of his Hal Challis books that I've read, dovetails nicely with some readers' comments on my recent posting about crime series and freshness. The discussion turned to writers who change the central point-of-view character from book to book, and names including Michael Robotham, Karin Fossum, Olen Steinhauer and Ed McBain came up.

Disher does something vaguely McBainian in Kittyhawk Down's early chapters, opening each with a different point of view in a pattern that seems almost symphonic, if one diagrams it: Hal Challis gets the first chapter; followed by his sidekick, Ellen Destry; then Pam Murphy, another officer; then Challis again; Destry again; a local eccentric; and a return of Challis, a kind of ABCABDA structure.

Disher discusses his ensemble approach and other issues here and here on the State Library of Victoria's summer reading blog. In the latter piece, he writes that he became more interested in Destry as the series progressed. What began as the Challis series, and was billed as such, is now the Challis/Destry series.

Thus, today's question. The Challis series became the Challis/Destry series. Similarly, Bill James billed early books in his great series as Detective Chief Inspector Colin Harpur novels until the manic Desmond Iles came on the scene, and the books became the Harpur & Iles series. Who else has done this? Who has started writing a series with one protagonist, then brought in a co-star or changed protagonists as the series progressed?

© Peter Rozovsky 2007Technorati tags:
Garry Disher
Australian crime fiction
Hal Challis
Ellen Destry
Bill James
Harpur and Iles