The Art of the Series

What is it about crime fiction in series that is so appealing?

All twelve books of Anthony Powell’s “A Dance to the Music of Time” series.

For years I’ve been waiting for someone to write a really good book on “The Art of the Series,” focused on crime fiction but occasionally looking elsewhere (Proust, Anthony Powell, Tolkien, William Gibson, and Len Deighton + John le Carré for instance) to shed more light on the principal subject. Such a book would take up Arthur Conan Doyle, of course, along with Raymond Chandler, Agatha Christie, E.X. Ferrars, Karin Fossum, Erle Stanley Gardner, Chester Himes, P.D. James, Andrew Klavan, Ross Macdonald, Henning Mankell, Walter Mosley, Patricia Moyes, Sara Paretsky, Spencer Quinn, Ian Rankin, Ruth Rendell, Georges Simenon, Maj Sjöwall & Per Wahlöö, Alexander McCall Smith, Donald Westlake, and more, including some current ones I haven’t even read. And it would have to devote an entire substantial chapter to Michael Connelly, whose thirty-eighth novel, Resurrection Walk, has just been published.

As the dizzying variety of the list above suggests, there is no single template for writing a series of crime novels. Certain pitfalls show up often, of course, and recurring charms, but there is no generic recipe for success. Connelly is among those writers whose protagonists evolve significantly over time, as tends to be the rule these days. With his first novel, The Black Echo (1992), he introduced one of the most memorable characters in contemporary fiction, LAPD detective and Vietnam vet Harry Bosch. Then came Bosch’s half-brother, Mickey Haller, a flamboyant defense attorney (“The Lincoln Lawyer”), on the opposite side of the fence from the driven Bosch. There have been other recurring principal characters too—most recently Renée Ballard, who is introduced as a LAPD detective in the 2017 novel The Late Show and who shares aspects of Bosch’s experience, including youthful trauma that’s fueled a desire (not at all naïve) to right wrongs on a personal scale at least, to bring a measure of justice.