Thursday 3 June 2010

In Praise of Series Fiction Anne Cassidy

In the 1990s I wrote a series called the EAST END MURDERS. Eight books which featured the feisty heroine Patsy Kelly. She worked in her uncle’s detective agency and solved cases which involved teen murders. I enjoyed this enormously and it definitely honed my narrative skills running the story on from book to book.

Series fiction and crime fiction fit beautifully together. As a reader of crime fiction there is nothing I enjoy more than finding a new series. Just after last Christmas I discovered Shardlake, the hunch back detective of CJ Sansom’s series set in Tudor England. It was after reading the Mantel book, Wolf Hall that a friend suggested I read these to get another perspective on Cromwell. I loved them. Shardlake is a classic detective with his own struggles and heartaches. The machinations of the Tudor court drive his investigations but his real motive is a sense of justice. The real joy, for me, was finding that there were four books in the series that I hadn’t read. I was able to buy them all and read them one after another. Now I await the fifth.

I love a great one off book. Ann Tyler, Ian McEwan, Margaret Atwood, Sarah Walters. The joy of fantastic storytelling, engrossing characters and complex themes.

A series offers something different but equally engrossing. Characters developing from book to book, places you revisit, situations that recur and puzzle you again and again, crimes that horrify and enthral. John Harvey, Mo Hayder, Lawrence Block, Ruth Rendell, James Lee Burke, Alexander McCall Smith, Ian Rankin and the wonderful Kate Atkinson. The list could go on and on and on…………

In the last ten years I have written many stand alone books.

Maybe it’s time I wrote a series………….

4 comments:

karen ball said...

Well, as someone who has a day job working on series fiction at Working Partners, I heartily agree! The development of a series arc - what's going to happen across, say, six books - can be fantastic fuel for the individual titles. There's a wonderful collaboration between author and reader across a series and, ooh, the ways a main character can develop and surprise...

Miriam Halahmy said...

This is a very interesting connection between series fiction and crime fiction. Made me think again about both. Thanks Anne.

Rosalind Adam said...

I love reading crime fiction and, like you, I am delighted if I come across a whole series that I can work through. Looking forward to reading your series!

Katherine Roberts said...

If you like crime fiction, have you come across Kate Ellis? She writes an entertaining adult series about a black detective, each one with a spooky time-slip twist, set in the west country around Dartmouth. Good fun!