When is it time to say goodbye?

Kate Flora: How does a writer know when to say goodbye to a series? It’s a question I’ve been pondering on a lot lately. When I read a recent Michael Connelly, Harry Bosch was being treated for a serious cancer. He’s a Vietnam vet, so likely in his 70’s. How long can he go on being the tough guy? And then last week, there was an article in the Maine papers saying that Gerry Boyle, a writer I’ve been a long time fan of, is about to publish his last Jack McMorrow mystery. And Barbara Ross is ending her clambake series.

These are interesting questions for me. When I started the Joe Burgess police procedural series, I had planned to write a quartet, with each of the four books taking place in a different season. Playing God takes place in February, beginning on a bitterly cold night in Portland. By contrast, the second Burgess, The Angel of Knowlton Park, begins on a miserably hot summer day. Redemption begins on a beautiful October day and And Grant You Peace, supposed to be the final book in the series, takes place in the spring. I was happy with the plan but a few months after I finished the fourth book, I found that I was missing my characters.

Readers evidently were missing them, too, because I started getting messages asking when the next Burgess would come out. Readers assured me that Maine has lots of other seasons: mud season, hunting season, black fly season, tourist season, etc. Now that I’m working on book nine, I’ve abandoned seasons. Now I try not to have my murders too close together so I can give my characters a break from the action. After the horrific events in A Child Shall Lead Them, Burgess, Kyle, and Perry badly needed a break.

Like many authors with a first book, I didn’t plan to write a series featuring my Thea Kozak character. I had a story, inspired by an Ann Landers column, about a girl who goes searching for her birth parents and ends up dead. In order to tell that story, I needed someone with a strong enough connection to the victim to be willing to risk danger to find her killer, and Thea appeared in Chosen for Death. It was only when a beta reader said how much he liked the character and would like to see more of her that the series began.

That series almost ended at book six, Liberty or Death, when my publisher dropped the series. This may be why many series that seem so promising abruptly end, leaving readers (and writers, of course) disappointed. I was lucky. Jim Huang of the Mystery Company liked Thea, and rescued the series. Now that Thea is married and has finally had the baby she and Andre have longed for, I’ve been thinking it should be a good stopping point. But readers are writing and asking for the next book, so probably, when this Burgess is finished, I’ll see how she can get back into trouble once her maternity leave is over. But here’s the thing: it is as hard to find childcare in a book as it is in real life, so if the series is to go on, Thea’s going to have to find a good nanny.

I do often wonder how other writers approach the issue of ending a series. Do they run out of ideas for the next plot? Do they get tired of their characters or find themselves repeating plots? Are they tired of writing mystery fiction and long to write something new and different? I have certainly found that taking a break from a series helps to bring me back to it refreshed. At first, it was just the experience of moving from a first person amateur female PI in my Thea Kozak series, to a third person trio of cops in the Burgess series. The series were different enough that I would return to each one eager to see what my characters were up to and to hear their voices.

Now that interval often involves writing an entirely different book. True crime? Domestic suspense? Romantic suspense or straight romance? I always come back to one of my series, though. I’m not tired of my characters. I’m still curious about where their stories will go next.

I’m not even ready to kill off any of my major characters. Readers used to encourage me to kill off Thea’s mother. I thought, and still think, it’s better for her to learn to live with her mother, difficult as she is. And I know how readers feel when characters they love are killed off. Some years ago, a number of series mystery writers were killing off their protagonist’s significant others. I got plenty of mail from readers stating that if I killed off Andre, they wouldn’t read me anymore.

So what about you, dear readers? How do you feel when a beloved character or series ends?