As part of my Sisters In Crime membership, I take part in a book club once per month. This month we were to read a novel which is about the 20th in the series. I am not going to name the novel, as I don’t have good things to say about it, and why start a flame war with a published author when my novel still waits for the right editor to say “yes”?
This novel, which takes place in the early 1800s, is about an English Aristocrat investigating the death of his mother. His wife is there to assist him.
Very disappointing. The author felt it her duty to describe in detail everything everyone was wearing, down to the socks and shoes. When I say “everyone,” I mean everyone, including a doorman whose main function in the novel was to say “They’re here to see you, M’Lord.” Then disappear. Yet we know exactly what this guy looks like and what clothes he was wearing.
Every building had to have its history reported, even if the characters only stopped in for a moment for coffee and a baguette.
The main character was flat as a pancake without syrup. His wife was the same old female love interest thrown in without much of a character herself. The rest of the book was populated by names and historical figures but you never really identified with them.
The plot plodded like a tired old horse. There were no clues to tell you who the killer turned out to be and the killer’s henchman, important to the plot, showed up on page 300 of a 350 page book.
This is ridiculous, I said. There’s no way this series started like this.
So I bought the first book, published in 2000.
Lo and behold, the first book was fast paced, the main character was dashing, funny, interesting. His love interest–not the cardboard wife of the later book–was saucy and sexy and smart. I’m on page 100 but I can tell you that so far I don’t have an encyclopedic knowledge of what clothes everyone was wearing and I don’t care because the book is very good.
So what happened between book one and book twenty?
You would have to ask the author. But I am a firm believer that once you get past the sixth or seventh book in a series, you’re either repeating yourself or you’re going through the motions to get the next book out.
I call it the Travis McGee syndrome. The first three Travis books are fun and sexy and exciting. But along about the fourth or fifth book, you get tired of the inevitable sex interest for ol’ Trav, a woman who will start the book telling him that they will never, ever go to bed together, but who by page 85 is rolling around with ol’ Trav and telling him he’s the best lover she ever had.
And ol’ Trav is not a dog. He is desperately in love with every one of these girls. Except some of them end up conveniently dead; or they decide to join a convent because the sex with ol’ Trav is too damned good and it shakes them to their very souls; or they go off to do something else which does not involve ol’ Trav because, you know, it would get complicated.
I think the author created Travis and then, after the success of the first three books, realized he could never marry ol’ Trav off because his male fans were having too good a time vicariously living on that damned houseboat. So every one of the Travis McGee novels has the same plot, the same characters, the same ol’ Trav.
They’re fun to read. Just don’t read them too close in time.
Anyway, I think that when a mystery author gets to book seven or eight in the series, he or she knows their readers are going to expect certain things to happen, and it gets tedious.
That’s why I have planned out the Minerva novels. There will be seven, each advancing a part of Minerva’s story. The ultimate Minerva novel, “Minerva James and the Goddess of Vengeance,” will explain how she brought home her daughter as a “souvenir” of the war and the tragedy behind it. And the man responsible will be the murder victim…and Minerva will be on trial for his murder!
Pretty good way to end the series, don’t you think? Now if only I could get some New York editor to love Minerva as much as I do…
Mark Bruce, Writer 