End of the Line

Shameless Commerce Division:

Closing Time, the last Elder Darrow mystery, will publish on October 2. Please join me for the official launch at Longfellow Books in Portland at 6 PM on that evening. You can preorder copies of Closing Time from Kelly’s Books To Go if you’d like them signed or inscribed and you can’t make the launch. Thank you for your support.

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I’ve been thinking about how two different crime writers whose work I respect have ended long-running and successful series this year and wondering if my decision to close off the Elder Darrow series means there is something in the air about endings. Thinking about what their decisions might have been like made me inspect my own motives.

Elder Darrow is a character close to my heart. We share a city, an employment history, and a belief that humans are basically OK, tempered with a cynical resignation that most of the time, Sturgeon’s Law applies. But I started to wonder if I’d said everything about him I needed to say, or could say. I decided I would rather shelve Elder too soon than trot him out again if there was a possibility I had exhausted his potential.

Not that anything writers do is easy, but I also wanted to make sure I wasn’t tempted to an easier path, where I didn’t have to invent new characters or locations. There’s a temptation to continue to do what you’ve done, presumably as well as you could, and you can get too comfortable repeating your self.

Having so much of the action take place in the bar also started to feel too close, as if the fictional geography were hemming me in. I think I have more to say about Boston and started to feel like I needed to expand the fictional field, maybe put a new character in a new situation that would let him or her see more of the city.

I also have a horror of repeating myself, which is always a danger in a series. For example, in Closing Time, I realize I was listening to Grant Green quite a bit, and telling the reader that at every opportunity. Slippery slopes.

Solo Act, the first published Elder Darrow (though the second in the series) was my first published novel. I have the idea that, the early books in particular, were apprentice work, that the character and location fatigue I’ve been feeling is a result of decisions I made about the series when I knew less about what I was doing. I can’t articulate them clearly, but they’re there and they feel like limits.

I do believe that series need to end eventually. I’ve seen too many writers (and estates of writers) continue series characters long past the point of interest or development. I’d rather have quit a series too soon than too late. One of my deep peeves with a series is when the protagonist and/or other principal characters become predictable. The plots usually suffer.

I have thought about spinning off a character as a way of keeping a series alive. James Lee Burke just spun off the Clete Purcel character from the Dave Robicheaux novels into an eponymous book and very successfully. Assuming I haven’t already killed off all the interesting characters in Elder’s world, I might consider that.

I did wind up making certain decisions this time, knowing this was the end. Though I’ve always said you can read the first six in the series in any order, you will need to have read at least one other Elder Darrow to get the full flavor of Closing Time. The emotions of the last book won’t make sense without understanding some of the preceding relationships, especially since I killed off a major character. And I decided to create some romantic hope for Elder, who has had bad luck and trouble on that score right along.

Of course, you never really close the door on a series unless you kill off your protagonist. And maybe not even then—vide Sherlock’s fate after dying in the Final Problem. So I didn’t kill Elder off, though (no spoiler), things have changed fundamentally. I hope you have a chance to find out how.