Tell me it isn’t so, Jeffery Deaver…
By now I suspect that many Jeffery Deaver fans know he has gone over to “the dark side.” Either he’s an Ian Fleming wannabe, is tired of Lincoln Rhyme, has run out of ideas to write about, or was enticed by a multi-million dollar contract, but his new 007 adventure Carte Blanche has been released. Too bad. Even Jeffery Deaver can’t haul me kicking and screaming back to 007.
Now, don’t get me wrong—writers pick up famous series and do marvelous things with the settings and characters that are already established. The continuation of Ludlum’s Bourne series comes to mind and even some of the Star Trek books aren’t bad as space operas, although they’re more fantasy than sci-fi, of course. The difference is that the writers of those series’ continuations aren’t as well known as Jeffery Deaver. C’mon, Jeff, what gives?
Maybe this is an opportune time to revisit the pros and cons of writing a series. The advantages of writing a series are that characters and settings are well known to the readers—a typical reader will look for the next book and feel right at home when he sees his favorite characters continuing to do what they do. Famous characters from series abound as a consequence. Besides Deaver’s Lincoln Rhyme, we have David Baldacci’s Oliver Stone, Lee Child’s Jack Reacher, Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch, Barry Eisler’s John Rain, Dean Koontz’ Odd Thomas, Jon Land’s Caitlin Strong, and James Patterson’s Alex Cross, just to name some of my favorites. Older series’ characters I liked were Robert Parker’s Spenser and Agatha Christie’s Poirot (Miss Marple was a little too colorless for me).
The disadvantages of writing a series are that characters and/or settings are too well known to both readers and author. Both might grow tired of them. For example, the Lincoln Rhyme books have a plot that can be summarized as follows: The setting is New York City (to be fair, Deaver has left NYC in some books). Some nut threatens someone or kills somebody. The usual law enforcement types can’t solve the crime. Lincoln, sometimes with the help of Amanda, comes on the case to save the day. This is perhaps an unfair summary because there are generally many twists in the tale and Deaver’s characters grow in their humanity, or lack thereof—the devilish fun is in the details. But the latest Lincoln Rhyme book, The Burning Wire, was a bit anorexic—not much meat on those old plot bones.
I still read The Burning Wire—I’ll admit it, I’m hooked. Moreover, Deaver also got me interested in forensics—I love his detailed treatment of the CSIs. Maybe he just needs to take a break. However, I hate to rain on your 007 parade, Jeff. I just won’t read any more 007 books. I’m more tired of James Bond than I am of Lincoln Rhyme. I read all of Fleming’s books when I was a kid and saw most of the movies (who can forget Ursula Andress coming out of the water in Dr. No?—she makes Halle Berry look like Twiggy). However, there my interest started waning even before Sean Connery was no longer Bond.
So, Jeff, I can understand why you’re tired of Lincoln. He can be a whiny SOB and now that I know I have no chance with Amanda, she’s become a little tiresome too. But they are great characters. Forensic science performed by a quadriplegic? What a great concept! But, Jeff, why can’t you just take a break and write another stand-alone book like Garden of Beasts? I always thought that was your best work anyway. (Oops! You do have another stand-alone, Edge. I’ll have to get that one.)
Another possible advantage of a series is that a best-selling author can usually spin out yarn after yarn fast enough to keep one of the Big Six publishers happy—until the readers start losing interest. It’s easier to be a prolific writer perhaps, but generally the writer still needs to do background research. Time spent on that can be stolen from character development, if he’s lucky. It’s true that many a series writer is also a prolific writer, but this might just be coincidence. It’s probably just that the editors and publisher get comfortable with the series too—many people start running on cruise control. This could be a disadvantage as well. My worst subject in grade school was arithmetic because I ran mostly on cruise control. I’d learn the algorithm for long division, say, and then become bored with the whole thing. Maybe that’s why I see simple editorial lapses in so-called bestsellers.
There are famous series in sci-fi as well. Three favorites are James Hogan’s Giants trilogy, Frederik Pohl’s Hee Chee trilogy, and Greg Benford’s Galaxy Center series. There are more recent ones but so far none of this quality. Then there’s the famous robot and Foundation series of Isaac Asimov. This master storyteller pulled off a neat trick—maybe Jeffery’s trying to follow in his footsteps? Isaac stopped writing sci-fi for a long period of time and then came back and tied his two famous series together. Jeff, if you’re reading this (I can always dream, can’t I?), why don’t you write 007 drivel for only a few years and then come back gangbusters and with masterful strokes of your word processor kill off Rhyme?
Here’s my suggestion: Amanda falls out of love with Lincoln and in love with the new villain on the block. Lincoln is torn between solving the crime, thus sending Amanda to jail, or not. His indecision gives the villain enough time to kill Rhyme, but the cops catch the villain anyway. Amanda commits suicide as her new love is carted away to the rest home for bad guys in upstate New York (or gets the needle—you can never tell about courts these days). This is a complex plot which could endure over several books, but by the end of the series it would become as famous as Hamlet, where everybody also dies.
Do I write series? Well, yes and no. My four novels The Midas Bomb, Full Medical, Soldiers of God, and Survivors of the Chaos, follow one time-line in the same metaverse of my imagination. The first three together with the serialized novel Evil Agenda all have the same villain. That’s a twist, I guess, but Conan Doyle’s Sherlock also had a common villain for many of the novels about the famous detective. Even my young adult novel The Secret Lab is set in the afore-mentioned metaverse. Consequently, while the protagonists are not carried from book to book, I guess you can call this a series.
One of the requirements of good fiction writing, series or not, is that every book must stand alone. I ensure that’s the case in my books. I called Garden of Beasts a stand-alone and the Rhyme series not, but that’s Deaver’s terminology (or his publicist’s—see his website). Every book in every series I have mentioned here is one you can pick up and enjoy without backtracking through previous installments in a series. This is a requirement writers should not forget. At the risk of repetition, an author must ensure that readers will not finish his book feeling swindled. And this brings me to cliffhangers.
I don’t like cliffhangers when they’re used to drag me screaming and yelling from one TV series season to the next. Both cable and legacy TV are notorious for doing this. If the writers are the ones responsible, pox on their houses. If the producers are…I’ll think of a worse hex (where’s Hermione when you need her?). I’m more ambivalent about them in books in a series, but I prefer a soft cliffhanger to a hard one. Let me explain.
An example of soft cliffhanger occurs at the end of Full Medical when General Vargas is tossing the NASA model up and down. You know the conspiracy has shot off new branches—you just don’t know exactly what they are. A soft cliffhanger is just such a whisper of things to come. The writer never has to follow up on it, it’s so soft. It’s what should be used in a series, if a cliffhanger is used at all.
What you don’t want to do as a writer is play King Solomon. Say your baby magnum opus is a novel of 150,000 words. You decide, and rightly so, that that’s too long for one book. Consequently, like King Solomon, you decide to cut your baby in half. You tack on some quirky cliffhanger to the first half and some equally quirky prolog to the second half. Like the two women in the biblical story, don’t do this! This is bad writing—and your baby is bound to suffer the consequences. This is the worst kind of cliffhanger, a hard (and obviously contrived) cliffhanger.
Somewhere between soft and hard is the deus ex machina cliffhanger: you write something like “our protagonist will soon find out that he is seriously mistaken about….” This is a swindle for your readers. Clearly the only one that really knows what the protagonist is going to find out is the author (a criticism of deus ex machina in general) and to have to wait until the next book to find out about it is putting salt in the wound. Ugh!
My recommendation to writers: don’t jump on the series bandwagon just because you like X or Y series. In fact, don’t set out to write a series at all. That will help you make the book a stand-alone. When you get to that second book, you can run into the roadblocks I’ve already mentioned. It’s also not easy keeping everything consistent. You can also end up parodying your own characters. There are probably even more pitfalls—if you can think of any, please send them in comments to this blog post. Beware of the familiar—it can become prosaic. Your writing must always strive to be fresh and entertaining.
All of this goes to illustrate my distaste for series in general, even though I count myself among those readers addicted to them. Legacy publishers love series and often will pay well-established authors for a series package. Writers love them in many ways and they often become as obsessed with their characters as their readers are. I know readers often find them comfortably entertaining, comfortable like old shoes. Series will be with us for a long time. The consumers, the readers of the series, will have to decide whether they want them shaken, not stirred.
