Serial Offender

It's an open secret that Erasmus Hobart and the Golden Arrow is the first in a series following the titular time-traveller, but was it ever thus and should authors be aiming to canonize their work in this fashion? Are series any more than a succession of reheated souffles?

When you look back across the literary landscape of the last hundred years it is clear that series dominate. From Sherlock Holmes to Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings to The Hitch-hiker's Guide, the characters which define eras have all been those who have taken multiple outings. If you go back further, even Shakespeare wrote a series: Henry IV part 1 was followed by Henry IV part 2 and then Falstaff was given his own spin-off adventure in The Merry Wives of Windsor.

The attractions of a series to an author are obvious. Quite apart from the ease of picking up readily created characters, the brand recognition which goes with a successful world or character is frequently far more potent than the brand recognition which goes with the author. It's why Arthur Conan Doyle got so frustrated that he attempted to condemn Sherlock Holmes to death, and why fan pressure ensured the sentence was commuted. Some authors also see a guarantee of future sales in using plot-hooks - cliff-hangers and subtexts which make readers interested in continuing their adventures. Whilst it's easy to see that Harry Potter would have done well on the basis of self-contained stories, it was the overarching plot about the battle with Voldermort that ensured readers bought the whole series instead of just those with the more interesting plots.

That's not to say the benefits are all one-way: readers invest in the characters in a good novel too. Not as much as the writers, but the emotional attachments a reader forms are psychologically very similar to friendships. And much as you wouldn't ditch a friend and find another as soon as they'd run out of anecdotes about their lives, you feel an impulse to spend more time with characters you've grown to love. Sometimes that familiarity can have rewards, when an author uses a character trait or even a character sparingly, the occasional nods give the reader the feeling they are part of an in-group to which casual readers cannot belong.

For detractors, however, a series is seen as a way for an author to avoid work. By repeating the structure of plots and using the same characters, producing a novel becomes an exercise in simply joining the dots. And the second outing is never as surprising or original as the first, which is why some writers also avoid writing series - to mark themselves out from the lazy authors and declare their professionalism. This could be said to be cutting off one's nose to spite one's face, of course, but there are always those in any creative profession who think it's better to be right and unsuccessful than compromise and make money.

There are certain types of book where a serial is almost mandated. No author would write detective stories with a different detective in every book - what would be the point? Since the majority of the rest of the cast of a murder-mystery change every novel (if only to prevent their complete attrition over the course of a series) there is always much that is new. And whilst in murder as in romance there is a risk of telling the same story with a different cast, readers will quickly lose interest if that is indeed the case. Unless we are to suggest it is lazy for an author to write multiple books in the same genre, series would seem sometimes to be not just justified but necessary.

Personally, I'm a pragmatist. Whilst I can see the artistic reasons why an author shouldn't spend all their time with one set of characters, I see no reason why they should have a cast-iron rule to dispense with them entirely after each novel (except for their murder victims, of course). The ideas I generate for novels are hugely varied, rarely fitting in the same idiom, let alone with the same set of characters, so I've never sat down with a view to create the first volume in a series. Erasmus Hobart and the Golden Arrow started life as Robin Who? a one-off novel about a time-travelling schoolteacher. It was only whilst writing that ideas for further Erasmus novels came to mind. But whilst it would have been easy to simply pick a list of interesting historical periods for a long-running series, I decided to work a different way: in order to avoid too much repetition, each book had to start with the plot structure, which I would then attempt to find an appropriate historical home. That way I wouldn't simply repeat the same story: elements would recur, naturally, but they would be modulated, like movements in a classical symphony, fitted to the different underlying themes and developing in complexity as the work progressed.

Meanwhile, I have written other, distinct books. Some of these have also developed lives beyond the first volume, meaning that should I get the opportunity to become a full-time writer I will be able to interleave several unrelated canons, keeping the work fresh and interesting for me, but providing the continuity that many readers crave.

Finally, note should be made of the author who has found the best of all possible worlds - by creating his own world. Terry Pratchett's Discworld is often mistaken by outsiders for a single series - a cohesive mediaeval fantasy world with wizards and dragons, imps and elves. Fans know, however, that it is many series - from the novels surrounding the witches to those following the city watch. Sometimes they cross over, bringing characters together as if in a fantasy equivalent to The Avengers Assemble. This approach has given Pratchett all the brand recognition of a series, whilst giving him the freedom to develop different ideas and different characters within it. The series has even evolved, the world technologically advancing to become almost a Victorian parody in its later installments.

Would I do the same thing? I don't think so: if you read three of my books from any three canons you'd find that not only the characters and settings differ but the rules of the comedy itself. A novel where gods walk the Earth and superheroes ply their trade would not sit easily with the more rooted, realistic comedy of Erasmus; a universe in which robots and humans come together to create music would seem somewhat out of place alongside the tales of a group of Elizabethan pirates with a psychotic foul-mouthed parrot and none of them would sit in the same universe as one where God went in for therapy, depressed at being continually mistaken for Father Christmas.

In the end, a series can be comfortable or constraining. There will be times when any author wants to go to their comfort zone - there are other times when they should quite rightly mix it up and do something different.