SOME OF THE DISADVANTAGES OF WRITING A MYSTERY SERIES

            Elaine was editing my newest work in progress when she suddenly asked, “Why did you have to name Roger and Suzanne’s son Robert?  Now we have to struggle with remembering a murder victim named Roberta Roberts and a boy named Robert Bowman in the same novel.  It’s confusing!”

LEFT BRAIN, RIGHT BRAIN

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With a B.S. degree in Chemistry and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Biochemistry it’s a pretty good guess that I’m predominantly left brained.  My wife Elaine is excellent at all kinds of crafts and is an accomplished weaver.  It’s a pretty good guess that she’s predominantly right brained.   We can see the ‘he’s from Mars and she’s from Venus’ stuff when she edits my manuscripts.  I tend to plot and write linearly while she craves visual scenes and better realized minor characters.  We had several excellent examples of this dichotomy in the current WIP, “The Deadly Dog Show”.  For example I originally wrote a scene in Chapter 2 with Roger introducing Suzanne to hot pastrami sandwiches in a stereotypical New York City Delicatessen as follows.

Sallie's Book Reviews and More: The Three R's of Book Series Characters: Recycle, Reuse, Resurrect by Jerold Last

Sallie's Book Reviews and More: The Three R's of Book Series Characters: Recycle, Reuse, Resurrect by Jerold Last

A post I wrote for an interesting blog by Sallie.

The Three Rs of Book Series Characters: Recycle, Reuse, Resurrect

            One of the decisions that the author of a series has to make is whether or not to recycle your secondary characters through subsequent books.  For green-thinking authors, recycle, reuse, and resurrect is a natural answer to this question.  If you've already invented Joe and Mary, why start over from scratch the next time?  You already know what they look like, what they sound like, and a little bit about their character.  Who knows, there may be a few Joe and Mary groupies out there who will buy your next book because they want to know whether Joe got his promised promotion at work or whether Mary's unborn child from the previous book turned out to be a boy or a girl.  Maybe Mary can work her way up the literary food chain to star in her own novel some day.

            On the other hand, recycled characters can easily become boring as they make their guest appearances in subsequent books.  They really need to be there to advance the story, not just to pad out the book length by introducing extraneous subplots centered on them.  And if they do show up, readers expect the author to peel away a few more layers of the onion so we get to know them better, in more depth, in each succeeding appearance.  Several months ago I did a guest interview for Pat Bertram's blog from the point of view of the character Eduardo Gomez, a Paraguayan policeman who had appeared in my second novel, The Ambivalent Corpse.  In that interview, Eduardo indicated that he wanted to play a bigger part in subsequent books.  He gets a chance to do this in my newest novel, due later this summer, The Matador Murder.  And we get a chance to know him better.  There are still some things we don't really know about him----maybe we'll be seeing more of him in books to come?