A writer/reader’s take on mystery series

Elizabeth Zelvin

Most mystery readers of a certain age first discovered the genre through series, whether they cut their eyeteeth on Sherlock Holmes or Agatha Christie, Nancy Drew or Erle Stanley Gardner. In these early series, the protagonist never changed: Holmes always smoked his pipe and played his violin, Poirot applied his little gray cells to every problem, Miss Marple found a parallel to every evil in the world in the village life of St. Mary Mead. When Nancy got into trouble, she always had the perfect tools for the emergency about her person. Perry Mason always stood up in court to object and grandstanded a confession out of the true villain. (I’ve heard that counsel used to say, “I object!” during a trial, and that “Objection!” originated with Perry Mason. Anyone know if it’s true?)

Then, in the Golden Age of mysteries, when the airtight, fair play puzzle was at its height, Dorothy L. Sayers changed the rules by developing Lord Peter Wimsey from a Bertie Wooster-like flat character into a complex and very human being over the course of the series. And mystery reading got a lot more interesting to readers like me, who want to fall in love with their characters, root for them in adversity, and cheer when they triumph, not only by solving the murder but by resolving some genuine personal dilemma. My favorite characters feel real to me. I’ve said before that I’d like to play my guitar and sing with Judge Deborah Knott’s family and have dinner with the Vorkosigans.

What we read has changed precisely because the fashion in what we write has changed. For example, Patricia Wentworth’s Miss Silver, who appeared in dozens of mysteries in the 1940s and 1950s, was always described in exactly the same words, as was her home. Encountering the familiar phrases was part of the pleasure of reading the series, which is still on my list of comfort reads. Now, we wouldn’t dare repeat even the most clever way of describing a protagonist that we’ve already used. Today’s writers are exhorted to kill our darlings, not repeat them in book after book.

No longer does every mystery series, even a successful and popular one, go on ad infinitum. Part of this is due to the changing face—and economics—of publishing. In the paperback cozy world, an author may get a three-book contract. She brings her protagonist and setting to life, thousands of readers eagerly anticipate Book Four—and the publisher decides they’re not satisfied with sales and drops the series, perhaps inviting the author to start a new series under a pseudonym. In the world of hardcover mysteries, a debut author is typically offered a contract for one book or two—and the publisher’s decision not to let the series go on may be based on sales before publication of the first or second book or as little as a month after it comes out. It is notoriously hard to get another publisher to pick up a dropped series—again, for business reasons—so readers who have become attached to a series protagonist and his or her world are left disappointed and dissatisfied.

Perhaps as a result of the precarious nature of series today, many mystery writers have adopted a pattern in which, once the series gets going, they try their hand at a standalone. Until recently, I would have said that I never liked an author’s standalones as much as her series, because my love of and loyalty to the series was based on the development of the series protagonist and the family, friends, and colleagues who had sprung to life around her. Writers with successful series have written some fine standalones—and maybe I’m also getting used to the new fashion. Some standalones by accomplished series writers that I’ve loved in the past few years include Nancy Pickard’s The Virgin of Small Plains and The Scent of Rain and Lightning, Earlene Fowler’s The Saddlemaker’s Wife, the late Ariana Franklin’s City of Shadows, and Laurie R. King's Touchstone.

Another consequence of how things have changed is that writers may now conceive their series as having a limited story arc, rather than going on indefinitely. Charlaine Harris’s Harper Connelly series comes to mind. When the unresolved personal dilemma that underlies all Harper’s professional dilemmas gets resolved in Book Five, the series comes to a satisfying conclusion. With two other series behind her and the Sookie Stackhouse series going on and on, thanks to the success of the TV adaptation, True Blood, it makes sense for Charlaine to move on. And now it seems that Harper Connelly is coming to TV, so her story may continue after all.

Nancy Drew, Where Art Thou?

by Julia Buckley
The Nancy Drew books of my childhood were lovely, yellow-spined hardbacks with gorgeous full color covers and alluring titles like Password to Larkspur Lane and The Mystery of the Moss-Covered Mansion. To my child's eyes, these were sophisticated books, because they replaced the kiddy paperbacks and the tall thin children's books I'd read before I "grew up" and embraced Nancy Drew.

For a while, she was an addiction. I asked for those books for every Christmas and birthday until, between my sister and myself, we'd accumulated quite a collection. And then, suddenly, we were done with them. We were reading older stuff--Mary Stewart and Victoria Holt, and Nancy seemed immature now. We donated the entire collection to our tiny town library.

Nowadays, Nancy Drew is an advertising brand. Put her name on a product, and it will sell, because Nancy's mystique has been passed down through generations of women--little girls who grew up and encouraged their own little girls to read Nancy. So there are Nancy Drew journals and stationery and pajamas. And, inevitably, there are Nancy Drew video games.

Check out Her Interactive, where you can preview some of the games and play some of them for free, allowing you to solve along with Nancy in a way we never could when I was a child.

My concern, though, is that these games do the imagining for the child who plays them. And this Nancy doesn't have titian hair, but a dark bob that makes her look more like George than like the Nancy of my imagination (and Keene's descriptions).

Sure, even in the old days "Carolyn Keene" was a fiction, and Nancy Drew was a successful conglomerate. Nancy Drew and The Hardy Boys were always about sales, but little girls and boys made them about more than that. They became a part of our memories, our nostalgia, and therefore, a part of our imaginations.

It's not horrible that Nancy has morphed into new forms--it's just not Nancy--not as we knew her once.

Is that bad or good? Are these games entertaining or not? They are visually pretty, and probably please the little girls of today the way that the old covers pleased me.

But I wonder . . . is change always necessary? Must Nancy become a video to stay alive?

The books that enchanted the children of this generation, especially the Harry Potter saga, were all immediately made into video games. I know, because I was instructed to buy them for my boys even AFTER I read those seven books--ALL SEVEN--out loud to them.

The boys tell me that the books and the videos are utterly different things; that one experience doesn't really inform the other. So what of the children who don't read the books at all, and go straight to the videos? Are they missing out on the magic of Nancy? Or is the magic of Nancy that she can please children in various forms?