Although it may be a well-written award winner, a one-off book, a stand-alone novel, has little chance of commercial success in today’s reading market. The mass of readers want recurring heroes, protagonists who return to deliver the goods in more adventures. It is something a reader can look forward to and feel comfortable with. Serial novels are the thing. And looking back, reading about the army of fans who followed Arthur Conan-Doyle and eagerly awaited his last Sherlock Holmes gift, I feel like it’s always been that way. Now is the big time.
Serial novels are invariably thrillers in the crime, mystery, and espionage genres. Some arise by accident. They start with a single book, which is then followed by another, perhaps a sequel, and then a third and so on. Others are thought out from the start. My new novel, ‘The Sum of Things’ recently released on the Amazon Kindle, is one of them. It is the first of what I intend and that it be a long and successful series.
While writing my novel, I got to thinking about how long a series should be. Given that it is successful, how far should a writer continue to produce his series before leaving? And what criteria should you use to govern the continuity of the series? Intrigued, I began to peruse some recent thriller novels.
Probably the most popular thriller series today are the Jack Reacher novels by Lee Child. Two of the novels: ‘One Shot’ and ‘Never Go Back’ have been made into successful and lucrative movies starring Tom Cruise.
Beginning in 1997 with ‘Killing Floor’, this writer has consistently produced a novel a year, for twenty years, many of which have won awards. His latest one, ‘Midnight Line’, number 22 in the series, will be released in November. His previous novel ‘Night School’, (#21) has garnered 5,464 reviews on Amazon and counting. I’m impressed. Since only a small minority of readers bother to write a review, that gives an idea of the sales figures that children’s books enjoy. And sales have to be one of the main indices a writer will use to decide whether to continue or not. But reading through some of the Jack Reacher reviews, I can see cracks appearing.
Many readers, some die-hard fans of the series, complain that the plots are becoming hackneyed and see Child struggling to come up with new situations and fresh story ideas, his style becoming more formulaic and his villains becoming ” slapstick cartoons”. ‘ It sounds like Child’s creative well might be running low. However, based on the current popularity, I’m sure we’ll be seeing more of Jack Reacher.
Among other works, that excellent British writer, Stephen Leather, has published fourteen novels in his Dan ‘Spider’ Shepard thriller series and continues to receive good reviews.
Another successful series has been Andy McNab’s suspenseful Nick Stone Series. Book #19 ‘Line of Fire’ will be out in October 2017. But get this: it can be pre-ordered on Amazon Kindle for a whopping $26.78! wow. How about that for the cheek? It is not a hard cover mind, an electronic book. I’d have a long, cold day in hell before paying $27 for a gift-wrapped, signed hardcover edition, let alone a Kindle e-book. His previous book, ‘Cold Blood’ #18 in the series, is priced at $14.24, still too expensive for a Kindle novel I think. And the reviews of this series are no longer useful. 2 and 3 star reviews outperform 4 and 5 star reviews; It is not a good sign. It’s time for me to quit, but I feel like Andy will move on. It may be that he has seen the writing on the wall and has decided to do everything he can before he collapses.
A standout series in recent years was British writer Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse Series. Made into a TV drama with that fine actor, John Thaw, in the role of Morse, it was excellent, well produced and I enjoyed it immensely. And halfway through the TV series, I turned my attention to the books and enjoyed them even more.
Dexter wrote thirteen Morse novels, beginning with ‘The Last Bus to Woodstock’ and ending with ‘A Day of Regret’, in which Morse dies. Yes, he ended his series by killing his leading lady. Dexter didn’t apologize or explain. It was the writer’s decision and his alone and therefore he had to be. But his fans were disappointed, myself included.
By making Morse a heavy drinker with poor eating habits and indifferent to his health, could it be that Dexter was setting up his hero for an ending where he could deliver the series-ending fatal heart attack whenever he wanted? It seems that way to me. It’s worth noting that he successfully killed Morse and closed his series on a high note, with his latest novel receiving splendid reviews. Not for Colin Dexter disappointing reviews from frustrated fans.
And it was death that put an end to another great series; the James Bond saga. Not Bond’s death, but that of Bond’s creator, Ian Fleming.
When Fleming died beside that English golf course on August 12, 1964 at the age of fifty-six, he brought a fascinating series to a close. He is not a great writer; he didn’t have to be. But he was good. And while it may be true that he wrote fantasies for adult children, his prose was light and sober, and every word counted. His novels were truly past pages, and he was eminently readable.
His last novel, ‘The Man with the Golden Gun’, unfinished at the time of his death, was cobbled together by his publisher, Jonathan Cape, and published eight months later. A meager work that lacked everything fans had come to expect from a Bond novel, it received poor but respectful reviews. I didn’t enjoy it very much. It seems that heavy smoking and lifestyle-induced ill health had taken their toll on the writer. But unsurprisingly, it was an instant bestseller in both print and paperback formats.
Fleming left behind a corpus of twelve Bond novels and a few collections of short stories, and that was it. Or should have been. However, publisher Jonathan Cape refused to go along with it and, with the agreement of the author’s estate, began looking for writers capable of writing Fleming-esque Bond stories in what became known as the “sequel” Bond novels. .
The first to come out was Kingsley Friends. Using the pseudonym Robert Markham, Amis produced the novel ‘Colonel Sun’. As a Bond fan that he was, I didn’t enjoy it. And I read no more of the sequel series that continues to this day. Although it’s a separate thing, the Bond movie franchise seems endless with a fan base that has never even heard of Ian Fleming. For me, Ian Fleming’s alter ego, James Bond, died along with his creator that morning in August 1964. RIP
Should a writer “age” their protagonist as the series progresses or should they make them ageless, impervious to time, and therefore able to hold the ring forever and a day? I believe in the first option; he is closer to reality and makes it more believable. And also Lee Child. Born in 1960, Jack Reacher will be fifty-seven years old on October 29. Retirement at sixty? It would seem logical. The clock is ticking.
And if we were to give James Bond the age of thirty-nine when he faced Le Chiffre at the baccarat table at that casino en Royale in 1952, he would be 104 years old today. However, it doesn’t seem that way in the movies, and the sequel writers also seem to have ignored this reality.
My boy, James Fallon, who steps forward and shows his credentials in ‘The Sum of Things,’ is thirty-five years old in 2017, so he’s got a lot to do, a lot of villains to destroy, and a lot of time to spend. do it. in. It depends on me.
Several factors can determine when to lower the curtain on a series.
The advanced age or deterioration of the author’s health.
The author’s desire to write other things in other genres (it was Arthur Conan-Doyle’s desire to write more historical fiction that resulted in the ‘death’ of Sherlock Holmes at the Reichenbach Falls).
The increasingly bad reviews telling the author that his ability to produce good stories are faltering and dwindling and the series has run its course.
But if the series is very successful, sells well and makes a lot of money, the author would be very tempted to go ahead despite the bad reviews. Shutting it down would be like killing a golden goose.
I have to conclude that there can be no hard and fast rule about this. At the low end, you have writers who put out schlock, fast-written series aimed at low-key readers with the sole intention of making money. Such trash should never see the light of day. At the high end, we have a good example in Lee Child’s Jack Reacher series, going strong for twenty years and twenty-two novels. I hope my James Fallon series takes the same path. And I’ll be more than happy if you’re half as successful.
