How to Start a Long-Running Mystery Series From Scratch

Say you want to write a novel. Excellent idea, have at it! Either outline before you start, start without an outline, then come up with one after you’ve made some headway, or ignore outlining completely and “go on until you come to the end: then stop,” to quote the always admirable advice of the King of Hearts.

You now have a stand-alone novel with [one hopes] a beginning, a middle and an end. All conflicts have been resolved, all obstacles overcome. Or not, as the case may be. An ending is an ending, whether happy or sad, and the readers will have passed their time happily either way.

But what if the ending is not an ending? What if you have decided that you are writing not merely a novel, but a series? How would that change your approach to writing that first book?

Right off the bat, you need to make a decision: Will this be an unending series [assuming your own immortality], or is it one that will come to an end after a number of books?

If the latter, what you are truly doing is writing an extended novel with some idea of what the overarching plot will be, and how you can pace the action of each individual book so that it will have a momentary ending to temporarily satisfy the reader while whetting their appetite for the next one. I still vividly remember reading The Lord of the Rings for the first time as a child, coming to the end of The Two Towers absolutely enraged that Tolkien ended it with Sam pounding on the barred door after Frodo had been carried off into Mordor. Fortunately, I was able to plunge into the final book of the trilogy straight away. I could only marvel at the patient hysteria of this younger generation of Harry Potter readers as the gaps between the publish dates of the last few books stretched on.

But let’s address the unending series. I am specifically going to discuss mystery series, because that is where my own experience lies. A mystery book needs to have a solution. The immediate story is the crime and the investigation thereof, and at the end, the perpetrator is revealed and generally brought to justice, whether through the criminal justice system or at the hands [or fists, or weapon] of the protagonist. Each story must be complete. So what must you do to keep it going after the handcuffs have snapped into place?

The constant in any series is the characters who drive the narratives. They are who the readers want to see, to share in their setbacks, their rises from the depths, their triumphs. They become surrogate friends and avatars of our wishful selves, the selves who would certainly have those very same adventures if only we had the luck to be living in the right places and the right times where mysteries and adventures constantly land on our doorsteps. Every new book becomes a reunion.

You have to make choices about your characters that will carry them through many books. Give them goals to strive for beyond the solutions to the murders they’ve stumbled over along the way. You don’t need to know their entire journeys when you start. Future goals are rooted in the past, and if you construct enough of a back-story so that it becomes the engine for their personal narratives, you should be able to keep it going forever.

Here’s a lesson I learned from Shakespeare: A good play never starts when the curtain rises. All the best plays have had an entire history long before Act One, Scene 1 [and there is almost always a character like Horatio arriving who someone else welcomes and essentially says, “My friend, let me tell what has been going on.”] The world of the play is like a giant ball poised upon a mountaintop, awaiting the nudge that will send it rolling down whatever course it has to take, but it is those past events that pushed it up to that unstable point in the first place. The ones revealed early are exposition; the ones revealed late are revelation.

And if it is the outside world that comes bounding up to our characters, a dead body clutched in its jaws, then it must be the inside world that keeps them moving. Traumas, misfortunes, lost opportunities, lost loves, lost lives. Maybe solving the murder will help resolve their inner crises. Maybe it will prove a useful distraction to avoid dealing with these matters. Or maybe it will be a personal setback, even as justice is done.

Many series depend on romance to keep them going, but the balance of keeping the tease at bay until the crashing together is difficult to maintain. Dorothy L. Sayers did it as well as anyone ever has, but it still took Wimsey only three books to win Harriet Vane, with a honeymoon thrown in for the fourth. Anything longer would have become the exasperating “Will those two get together already?”

This brings me to the other engine that can drive a series—history. Some series ignore the outside world and keep their characters forever unchanging. Miss Marple and Poirot never aged and as a result never changed, and that worked for them. But if you delve into the specifics of an era, you will find change over time, and your characters must, if they are observant enough to be detectives, also be cognizant of and affected by those changes.

When you build your historical world, you must be as meticulous in your reconstruction as any good fantasy or science fiction author. While you don’t have to put everything you know on paper [Caleb Carr could not have a character walk by a building in The Alienist without giving you the provenance of that building], you should still know everything. One never knows what details will jump out. If the era you choose is recent enough, I would strongly suggest you find a yearly almanac of world events, such as the The Brittanica Book of the Year. Be specific as to dates. Don’t set your book in 1955; set it on September 14, 1955. Then track down the local newspaper for your setting and read every issue for the months preceding and the months to come. Let your mind be open to events that jump out, whether they’re local trials, movie premieres, county fairs, sporting events. Look at the ads—see what was being sold, the language they used to sell it.

Once you have established the time, place, and moving historical forces, you only need to think at the end of each book, “What comes next?” The immediate answer might be October, 1955. And back to the library you go.

Let the macro world inform your characters and how they react to it. They shouldn’t live in a bubble, unless you are so confident in your construction of that bubble that you’ve created a permanent comfort zone that you think readers can live in for a long time. There are those who like bubbles. I am not one of them.

Life is messy, chaotic and full of struggles. And that’s what makes it interesting. Let your characters make mistakes, gain new skills, new ways of coping. It won’t happen all at once, nor should it. They will learn from the past, from each other, and from the challenges, not only criminal, that the ever-changing world presents to them.

Where will they end up? I don’t know. These things take time. I am as curious to see what happens to them as I hope you are.

And that’s how you write a series.

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