In A Series, When Is the Story Over?

Elizabeth Zelvin

I spent last weekend at the Virginia Festival of the Book in Charlottesville, VA, where I was one of about forty mystery authors who made up the Crime Wave portion of the event. The luncheon speaker was multiple award-winning author Julia Spencer-Fleming, whose readers are champing at the bit for the seventh installment of her traditional but far from cozy series, which combines murder, serious issues such as the environment vs developers in her small-town upstate New York setting, and the star-crossed relationship between Episcopal priest Clare Fergusson and police chief Russ Van Alstyne.

In the course of her remarks, Julia touched on an aspect of mysteries that is crucial to an appreciation of the genre: the series, in which the story arc of each novel falls under the umbrella of the bigger story arc of a series. The arc of the novel is the solving of a mystery, or, if it’s a thriller, the foiling of a villain. In many cases, there’s another arc or subplot, whose resolution may involve secondary characters or some issue in the protagonist’s life and relationships. The series arc has a broader scope. Indeed, in a long-running series, the arc may be like the rainbow with a pot of gold at the end of it: you can start at the beginning and follow it...and follow it, and follow it. But you may never reach the pot of gold. Nor do you want to. When you get the pot of gold, the story will be over.

What is the pot of gold in a mystery series? Not the solution to the crime in a single book. Not the success of the quest for a MacGuffin, crime fiction’s equivalent of the Holy Grail. Happily ever after? That’s the pot of gold in a romance novel, and the reader closes the book with a sense of satisfaction. But in a series, the author must avoid the kind of closure that leaves no room for the story to continue. For several books, Spencer-Fleming’s Clare and Russ were divided by his marriage and the highly developed consciences of both characters. At the end of the last book, they are finally free to be together—just as Clare is deployed to Iraq. The unabashed romantic in me grinds her teeth in frustration. But the mystery reader is gleeful, because now there has to be another book.

To switch genres for a moment, I recently opened the new novel by Elizabeth Moon, author of the classic fantasy trilogy The Deed of Paksennarion. For the past twenty years, Moon has published a substantial number of bestselling hard science fiction novels, while I’ve been reading and rereading Paks’s story. Now she’s returned to her fantasy world with Oath of Fealty, which not only takes us back to Paks’s world but picks up exactly where she left off twenty years ago. At the end of the last book, as Moon puts it in her foreword, our heroine “rode off into the fictional sunset.” But all the other familiar characters have returned. (Even Paks makes a brief appearance, since we return to the same moment of crisis that ended the trilogy.) Moon makes the same point Spencer-Fleming did: that even if one character’s story ends, the world of the series may include other characters whose stories still need to be told.

My Favorite Reads in Other Genres, Part II

Elizabeth Zelvin

My last post on this topic covered some beloved authors: Lois McMaster Bujold, Sharon Shinn, and, and Kate Elliott, especially their genre-bending series, respectively, the Vorkosigan saga, the Samaria novels, and the Jaran series. Here are some others that I love.

Diana Gabaldon’s wildly popular Outlander series is the gold standard for time travel romance, but it’s also a remarkable set of historical novels (sticklers may question the accuracy of the history, but it’s close enough for me) and precisely the kind of character-driven novel that makes readers fall in love with the protagonists and want to take them home. In this case, it’s 20th-century Claire, the World War II nurse, and 18th-century Jamie, the Scottish Highlander, who fall in love two years before Culloden, have a child, and go to extraordinary lengths to be together. Gabaldon herself has some entertaining forwards, and she admits that her husband claims she knows nothing about men. That’s to women readers’ advantage (and some men’s too—Jamie is also attractive to 18th-century gay guys), since Jamie is complex and charismatic and utterly romantic.

Elizabeth Moon has been sticking to hard science fiction lately, but I periodically reread the Sheepfarmer’s Daughter trilogy, aka The Deed of Paksennarion. It’s a fantasy: pre-technological world, elegant elves in the Tolkien tradition (and their cousins who have gone over to the dark side), paladins with mysterious powers. But Moon puts Paks, her protagonist, into a mercenary army where she learns to fight as a foot soldier in the rank and file. I believe Moon has a military background, and she’s great at the details: for example, how a group of soldiers would fight in formation with twelve-foot spears without knocking each other over. The coed army is presented in a satisfyingly matter-of-fact way, as is the fact that Paks is not interested in sex. She’s just a peasant girl with a low libido and a winning personality who wants to be a fighter.

The late Dorothy Dunnett wrote perhaps the most brilliant historical novels I’ve ever read, the Francis Crawford of Lymond series. Her intelligent characters are demonstrably brilliant. Her mastery of a huge historical and geographical canvas is amazing: 16th–century, Scotland, England, France, and as far as Russia and Turkey. Lymond himself is a “man of destiny,” one of those save-the-world superheroes that the reader can’t help falling in love with. And the heroine, Philippa, is a worthy partner—like Mary Russell to Laurie King’s Sherlock Holmes. This is the world whose princes spoke several languages at the age of five or six, and could write a poem, win a game of tennis, and ride a horse with equal skill. There’s just a little woo-woo to spice it up, including a very funny scene with Nostradamus and an oracle that can’t spell. Dunnett’s later House of Niccolo series, in the mercantile world of Europe and such exotic locations as Timbuctoo at the height of its glory as a center of learning, may be even more brilliant. But it’s the Lymond characters who are truly lovable.