Lone wolf or cast of thousands?

Yesterday's post, which asked Who is the hero in a Sjöwall and Wahlöö novel?, has given rise to a vigorous, ongoing discussion that suggests some practical advantages to deploying a cast of protagonists rather than a lone-wolf hero in a long-running crime-fiction series:

"As I.J. notes, it's simple common sense. The "lone wolf" detective (à la Harry Bosch), as appealing as this type can be, is not very realistic. Eventually, it's a dead end."

and

"another `why' might be: to keep characters and plots from growing stale."

Do multiple protagonists make it easier for an author to keep a long-running series fresh? How? Why? How do series with lone-wolf protagonists compensate?

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

How series change over time: Montalbano and performance

Conversation during and after yesterday's Sandra Ruttan-Jeff VanderMeer reading in Baltimore turned to the joys and frustrations of writing a crime-fiction series and the changes authors make from book to book. Ruttan's new novel, Lullaby for the Nameless, jumps back and forth between plot lines in the present and in the past. And VanderMeer makes changes in narrative form and even, to some extent, in genre from City of Saints and Madmen to Shriek: An Afterword to his new novel, Finch.

Talk of these radical formal and stylistic changes within a series struck me all the more because of the subtle changes within the series I'm currently reading, Andrea Camilleri's Inspector Montalbano novels. Early in the series, Camilleri exploited his theater background for metaphors and similes. This tendency is especially notable in Excursion to Tindari, the fifth book, published in 2000 and translated into English five years later.

That novel includes an admonition to "Calm down, you look like a character in a puppet theatre." A few pages later, "As if following a script, Montalbano first wrung his hands ... " and, my favorite of the bunch: "`The stakes are extremely high.' He felt disgusted by the words coming out of his mouth. ... He wondered how much longer he could keep up the charade."

Elsewhere, Montalbano impersonates Jacques Tati's Monsieur Hulot and, as if to underline the motifs of performance, toward the end of the novel Montalbano reflects on the town of Tindari, destination of the couple whose murder triggers the story: "What Montalbano remembered of Tindari was the small mysterious Greek theater." And that's not Camilleri's only invocation of Athenian drama. Several novels in the series feature family dynamics unmistakably redolent of Greek plays and epics.

That's why there's a decided edge of humorous introspection to an exchange in August Heat (Italian publication 2006/English translation 2009) between Montalbano and his junior colleague Fazio as the two speculate over the case of man whose stepson has been found dead"

Montalbano: "In short, you don't see Speciale as a
murderer?"

Fazio: "No way."

M: "But you know, in Greek tragedy—"

F: "We're in Vigàta, Chief, not Greece."

M: "Tell me the truth: Do you like the story or don't you?"

F: "It seems okay for TV."

(Click here for more on how series change over time.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

On the overlap of different series by the same author

I don't know how applicable this is to authors other than the one in question simply because few have written as many crime fiction series over so many years. So think of this post as some interested comments on the ways of Donald Westlake.

Dirty Money is the twenty-fifth in the long-running series of novels about the thorough, amoral thief, Parker, that Westlake writes under the name Richard Stark. The novel is given to bits of grim humor of the kind not found in the earliest Parker books:

"`You kill a lawman,' [Parker] said, `you're in another zone. McWhitney and I are gonna have to work this out.'

"`But not on the phone.'

"Parker yawned. `Nothing on the phone ever,' he said. `Except pizza.'"

Earlier incarnations of Parker never would have cracked wise like that. Now would they, upon being told by a bounty hunter that "The last time I saw you, you were driving a phony police car," have replied: "The police car was real. I was the phony. You were there?"

Similarly, Comeback, the 1997 novel that revived Parker after a twenty-five year hiatus, opens with the sort of farcical touch far more characteristic of Westlake's comic caper novels about John Dortmunder than of the pre-hiatus Parkers. The tone is grimmer, but the comic touch is decidedly present.

Elsewhere in the sprawling Westlake/Stark oeuvre, recent novels seem touched by the sombre sympathy for the economically hard-pressed that marked Westlake's novel The Axe. That book's protagonist is a laid-off executive driven to extreme acts by his induced unemployment. In the 2006 Parker novel Ask the Parrot, Stark/Westlake drops the earlier device of having Parker assemble a string of specialists to pull a robbery. Instead, Parker joins forces, against his will at first, with an embittered recluse to rob the racetrack that laid him off unfairly.

The cross-series boundary jumping also marks what might be Westlake's finest work, Walking Around Money, the Dortmunder novella that forms part of the Transgressions series edited by EdMcBain. The goings-on are farcically funny, as they usually are with Dortmunder, but the vignettes of a troubled upstate New York town are touching.

So, what about it, readers? What other crime writers have, if not quite borrowed from themselves, let one corner of their work influence another?

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Technorati tags:
Donald Westlake
Richard Stark

When series go ... er, not as good as they used to be

I've asked how authors build up a series character over time, how series change over time, and how authors keep interest alive in a long-running series.

Now it's time for the hard questions. What makes a series go bad, or at least lose its luster? For me, Bill James' great Harpur & Iles novels lost something once Panicking Ralph Ember made it to the top and the manic Desmond Iles lost his chief target with the departure of Chief Constable Mark Lane. Have you had similar experiences with long-running series?

Or does the fault lie with the reader? Does the intensity of reading many books in a short time bring on impatience and fatigue? A reader commented on one of my earlier posts that she had bought almost the entire run of one series at the same time and read the novels one after another. "These books are quite good," she wrote, "but if you read them as I did, the formula is obvious." (italics mine)

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

How do authors keep interest alive in a long-running series?

How does a writer preserve continuity while avoiding stagnation?

Readers of Donald Westlake's comic Dortmunder novels know that Dortmunder and his gang begin planning each heist with a meeting at the O.J. Bar & Grill on Amsterdam Avenue. We know the impassive bartender Rollo and the bathroom doors marked "Pointers" and "Setters." We also recognize the addled cast of regulars who bellow hilariously garbled questions and answers at one another.

The thirteenth Dortmunder novel, What's So Funny?, preserves the traditional opening by eliminating it:

"When John Dortmunder, relieved, walked out of Pointers and back to the main sales floor of the O.J. Bar & Grill on Amsterdam Avenue a little after ten that Wednesday evening in November, the silence was unbelievable, particularly in contrast with the racket that had been going on when he'd left. But now, no. Not a word, not a peep, not a word. The regulars all hunched at the bar were clutching tight to their glasses as they practiced their thousand-yard stare ..."

That works for readers new to Dortmunder, who may wonder what the silence is all about, and it was delicious for me, letting me relive memories of previous trips to the O.J. Bar & Grill while jolting me with a delightful surprise.

This got me thinking of the things authors do to keep a long-running series new while preserving its best features. How do your favorite crime writers do this? Pick a series that's been around awhile, preferably for eight or more books, and tell me what the author does to keep it fresh.

(Click here and here for previous posts on how series change over time.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

Technorati tags:
Comic crime fiction
Donald Westlake

How do authors change their series over time?

Five months ago, I asked how series characters change over time. This time I'll focus on their creators. Recently I've noted that Andrea Camilleri and his Inspector Salvo Montalbano have become more sympathetic and tender as they've grown older. Earlier, I discovered Colin Watson's delightful tendency to apply slightly spicier touches of naughty words as his Flaxborough Chronicles series progressed.

Those are two of the more creative ways I've seen of changing a series just enough to keep it interesting while retaining the features that made it distinctive in the first place. How do your favorite crime-fiction authors do it?

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

Technorati tags:
Andrea Camilleri
Salvo Montalbano
Colin Watson

When authors spring a surprise in mid-series

A discussion at the Oz Mystery Readers group sparked thoughts of the ways crime writers shake things up mid-series. Peter Lovesey, whose novel The House Sitter is the Oz group's current subject, has brought Peter Diamond back into the Bath police force and killed off his wife. In He Who Fears the Wolf, Karin Fossum pulls her protagonist into the background and makes him part of an ensemble cast in which suspects and victims are far more prominent.

The late Michael Dibdin livened things up in the fifth of his Aurelio Zen books by basing the story on a Mozart opera. And then there's that gushing fountain of ideas, Donald Westlake, who has shared chapters with other authors, who has had the characters in his comic Dortmunder series plan a heist based on an imaginary novel in his decidedly un-comic Parker series, and who has used the same opening chapter in novels in two different series, with the action in each book then following a different character.

How have your favorite writers changed things up in mid-series? Did the changes work? And tell me about some of the stranger changes. Can you think of anything wilder than Dibdin's wonderful opera plot in Cosi Fan Tutti?

© Peter Rozovsky 2007