THE VARIOUS SERIES CHARACTERS IN THE ROGER AND SUZANNE BOOKS

Roger:  Let’s begin at the beginning.  Roger Bowman and Suzanne Foster first meet in the novella, “The Empanada Affair”, which started out in life as a full-length novel and evolved to the current novella format.  The story is featured in “Five Quickies for Roger and Suzanne”, and includes the detailed backstories for both characters.  Also included in the “Five Quickies” is a short story, “The Dog With No Name”, which describes Roger’s first case as a P.I.   For series aficionados, you’ll know that Roger has also been a detective with the Los Angeles Police Department and a licensed patent attorney

Suzanne:  We first meet Suzanne and learn her background in “The Empanada Affair” in the “Five Quickies”.  I’ve sprinkled bit and pieces expanding on what we know about Suzanne in most of the other novels, so trivia snippets about her life, past and present, are dribbled out through the series.  Suzanne appears in all of the stories, albeit just being mentioned in the shorter stories “The Dog With No Name” and “The Haunted Gymnasium”.  I’ve thought about letting Suzanne have a book (or novella) all her own without Roger, or with Roger in a less prominent role.  Maybe Suzanne will need to step up into the lead role when Roger gets a concussion or a bullet hole to recover from.  Opportunity beckons!  That may happen eventually, but I know not when.

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?