A Series of Extraordinary Crimes
The Red Hand of Fury is the fourth book in my series featuring DCI Silas Quinn, of the Special Crimes Department of New Scotland Yard. The first thing I’d like to say is you don’t need to have read the other books in the series to enjoy it. In fact, it’s four years since the last book came out, and even my memory of what happened last time was a little hazy when I started writing!
Writing a series does present unique challenges. In the first place, there’s this tension between maintaining an overall story arc and creating a cracking good story for the current book. For me, it’s fairly obvious that the priority has to be the cracking good story that the reader is reading at that moment.
The way I see it, it shouldn’t actually be a problem for either the reader or the writer. The best, most fully rounded characters always have backstories. These come out in the course of the story. It’s just that in a series, a character’s backstory may actually be documented in previous books, which the reader has the option of going back to, if they haven’t already read them.
In my previous series, which featured Porfiry Petrovich, the investigating magistrate from Dostoevsky’s great novel Crime and Punishment (yes, cheeky, I know), each book in the series was set in the year after the previous one. So I had to keep in mind that a year had passed since the reader had last been acquainted with Porfiry and his colleagues. That meant that I could include some surprising jumps or switches in the lives of the characters, which attentive readers might pick up on. Needless to say, it never mattered to the story if these things passed the reader by.
In long-running series, such as Ian Rankin’s Rebus novels, the main character ages significantly over the course of the whole series. This creates interesting possibilities for the writer. Inevitably, a character is going to change as the series progresses. That’s the whole point, I would have thought, and part of the fun. Regular readers would feel disappointed if it didn’t happen.
In the Silas Quinn series so far, the stories come in a very concentrated period of time, which means that there hasn’t been much scope for this ageing, though I would hope that Silas has changed and developed, as he is affected by events. It’s just that the character progression is accelerated.
Also, I have deliberately set the books in a very intense period in the world’s history – the months before the outbreak of the First World War. That historical juxtaposition was part of my idea for the books. The extraordinary crimes that Quinn investigates somehow foreshadow the terrible events that are about to be unleashed on an unsuspecting world. However horrific the murders that Quinn confronts, they are nothing compared to the industrial slaughter of the war.
This latest book actually brings the series up to outbreak of war, an event which largely passes Quinn by, because he is… maybe I should stop myself there! I don’t want to give any spoilers away.
I’m currently working on the fifth book in the series, which takes the story forward into the war years. That represents a whole new set of challenges, both for Silas Quinn and me. I think it will change the emotional atmosphere of the books. In some ways, it will be a new phase for the Silas Quinn character. I think, I hope, that a certain amount of flexibility – the opportunity to change things around and experiment, while maintaining a consistent thread – is one of the strengths of a good series.
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