Series in which not all books have been translated to English

[Abi]

I just checked back on an author which I did a lot of work on last year, Arnaldur Indriðason. Most of his books are part of a crime series with the same detective, many of which have been translated to English. However, the first two books in the series have not (although they are available in languages other than Icelandic, e.g. German). Also the more recent ones, although I'm sure they will eventually be translated.

The ones in English have been sorted into a new series ("A Reykjavik Murder Mystery" rather than "Erlendur Sveinsson", the name of the detective).

I'm not really sure why this has happened - should there be a separate series just because of this language issue? In my opinion Jar City / Mýrin doesn't stop being the third book in the series, just because it is the first book that you can get in English.

Annoyingly, the act of changing this has made it so that all non-English editions are now linked as this special "English only" series. That will not be a problem to fix, though.

But should this "English only" series even exist?

[Abi]

P.S. This is the description I wrote when I created the original series: "A series of murder mystery books starring the Icelandic detective Erlendur Sveinsson and his colleagues Elínborg and Sigurður Óli. The third book, Mýrin, was the first to be translated into English. The ninth and tenth novels in the series do not feature Erlendur - Myrká centres around Elínborg and Svörtuloft around Sigurður Óli."

Which makes it clear that Mýrin is the first available to an English-speaking audience. Is this not enough? Although I admit that "Erlendur Sveinsson" isn't the best name for the series, considering not all books feature Erlendur.

[Moloch]

I agree with you, there's only one series, with just one Book 1, one Book 2, etc.

[Cait]

If the series were officially renumbered in the translation, it would be fine to have the translated series in addition to the original series in order to show the new numbering as long as the original series was primary on all of the books (so that the series designation which shows up at the top of the page is for the original series' numbering). However, in this case it doesn't look like there is any official numbering on the "A Reykjavik Murder Mystery" books -- I checked a few and I didn't see any numbers on the cover or in the book descriptions. Just changing the name of a series in translation is not enough for creating a new series, as a general rule. It would be enough to note all of the various translated series names in the description of the series.

[Abi]

I don't believe the series has an official name in any language. "A Reykjavik Murder Mystery" is sometimes a subtitle on the English editions I think.