Writing a series
newsletter: june 2005
For the second time in my life I find myself caught up in writing a sequence of novels featuring the same character…The first was the Frank Pagan series, and the books that began with JIG and finished with HEAT. I felt then that I shouldn’t ever begin a sequence of books featuring the same central figure - problems, he grows older, his habits remain much the same from book to book, you can predict what will cause him outrage or happiness, and eventually he becomes a figure you know so well that you keep attempting to find ways to stretch him….Pagan’s demise came when he was finally humiliated by the terrorist Carlotta, although the last pages of HEAT indicate that Carlotta, a wicked creation, all sex and brains and cunning, is headed for the electric chair…I never knew if she burned, because that’s where the book finished. I had plotted a sequel in which she escaped at the last minute (she was one hell of an escapologist), but I never wrote it, I left it in limbo ...
End of Pagan…although there may be a movie about him at some point. Or maybe not. Who can predict the whims and carousels of Hollywood? Not me.
I wanted to write a novel about my native city, Glasgow, which would involve a character called Lou Perlman…initially he was meant to be a peripheral piece of local color, a Jewish cop who perversely chooses to live in an area of Glasgow called Egypt….In this book, THE BAD FIRE, Perlman burst into action when I wasn’t looking and became more central to the story than I’d imagined….So, a second book was summonsed, THE LAST DARKNESS, wherein Perlman’s role was to occupy the center and lead an investigation that has unhappy outcomes for him (well, why should crime fiction have happy endings?). Life in Perlman’s world is solitary, his romantic yearnings bittersweet and unfulfilled. After THE LAST DARKNESS came a third, and I thought, final novel in the sequence, WHITE RAGE, a story of racism in Glasgow. (Although there was more underneath, as there usually is in complicated crime stories.)
Now I find myself committed to writing two more, the first of which is tentatively entitled BUTCHER, and Perlman is ever more prominent in this than the previous three. He has to grow, he has to develop, he has to come up with behavioral traits that are unexpected - and if these don’t seem consistent from previous books, too bad, people are often surprising….It’s this unexpectedness of behavior that appeals to me most about a series of stories: what can he do or say that he hasn’t before? What will surprise me, and hopefully the reader?
The downside of series books is when the reader can detect the author just going through the motions…the character is established already, he’s wound-up, just push him and see how he runs. I couldn’t do it this way, by rote. If there aren’t unexplored levels to Perlman, then I’d quit writing the books. I like Perlman, I probably love the guy if I’m an honest. I know he’s cantankerous at times, I know he can be crabbit (good Scots word), but I see the soft spots, the underlying romance, the essential solitary nature of his life, his occasional kindnesses and acts of mercy…and his basic goodness, which isn’t by any means self-righteous. Lou Perlman deprecates himself too much for that. If he didn’t, I’d begin to dislike him…
But five is a limit, writers need to stretch themselves the way they stretch their characters…and five books, set in my native and favorite city, Glasgow, is probably an ideal number. Unless, say, I marry Perlman off and something happens to his wife and and and...
Campbell Armstrong will be at the European Crime Writers' Festival in Paris, June 10-12, 2005
contents©2006 Campbell Armstrong
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