By Tracy Clark

Why do I love book series? Simple. I like to see how the worm turns. I like to follow characters and see how they get on. I’m curious that way.
When I picked up my first Sue Grafton novel, A is for Alibi, and chuckled at the fiercely independent Kinsey Millhone as she went about her PI business solving crime in Santa Teresa, snipping her own hair with nail scissors, stepping into the one little black dress she owned, which she pulled from the back of her closet and shook out every time she had to go somewhere looking nice, I knew she was a book person I needed to know more about. One book wasn’t going to cut it. Kinsey was evolving. Thankfully, the great Grafton gifted readers with many, many more books. Readers got to know quite a lot about Kinsey.
Same holds for Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins, Valerie Wilson Wesley’s Tamara Hayle, Sara Paretsky’s VI Warshawski, Karen Kijewski’s Kat Colorado, Margaret Maron’s Sigrid Harald, Marcia Muller’s Sharon McCone and many, many, many more favorites.
Lives. Interesting lives. Characters who leapt off the page fully formed, fully recognizable as human, flaws and all. Heroes, reluctant often, some even with a tinge of antihero lurking beneath the skin, but all of them infinitely engaging, and more than worthy of a follow.

I’m a sucker for a good character arc, in short. I like to see how characters struggle with the things their writers give them. Somewhere in that struggle is humanity writ large. It’s that humanity that hooks me. Series give readers a chance to go along on the ride, and then check back in for the next adventure to see how everybody’s doing now. Every new series installment is like a high school reunion or a family get-together over a picnic table on the Fourth of July. How’ve you been, Aunt Agnes? Well, I had that bad bout of rheumatism back around Easter.
Series give us the characters we love and want to return to, and then just enough new momentum to keep those characters growing, changing, advancing.
I don’t think Easy or Tamara ever had rheumatism, but they had other things that weighed on their minds, things they had to deal with that spanned more than one book. A troublesome ex-husband, childcare issues, an inability to commit, skeletons in the closet. Juicy stuff. Hard stuff.
In fiction, as in the fight for justice, all trouble is good trouble.
Maybe it’s just that I’m a bit nosey, too, but most writers are, aren’t we? We find the human condition infinitely compelling. Series give us the chance to hang in there to get to the bottom of what’s eating our favorite book people. Kinsey had two ex-husbands, the first one we didn’t learn too much about, but the second, the jazz musician with the drug habit, boy, he was a pistol, wasn’t he? Easy Rawlins’ girlfriend, Bonnie Shay, was an A-class mess, but he couldn’t seem to quit her. Oh, the drama. Good for readers, not so good for Easy.
Series are soap operas rolled out page by page. You like the character, so you come back to visit. You want to see them get what they want, what they need. You need to see how it all turns out with that crazy nemesis who got away last time, but now is back, or that ex-husband who your character hates but will always love, who just can’t stop himself from returning to re-offend … and ask for money.
Life. Aped on the page. Of course, these are people who exist only in a book, but they have to be written as though you could walk out of your house and find them on any city street or barstool as real as anything.
When I jumped into the writing biz, then, writing a series seemed natural. I wanted to create characters readers would want to come back for — complicated people, people who said something, stood for something, were about something.

I’ve written two series so far, one featuring PI Cass Raines, and my current one, featuring homicide detective Harriet Foster. A lot goes on for both women — good stuff, bad stuff, life stuff, real stuff.
Writing series is like dropping breadcrumbs along a forest path, leading readers along. My fingers are crossed the crumbs will entice, but there’s no guarantee. I’m like that scary Child Catcher, (but not so scary, really) from “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang,” who enticed Jeremy and Jemina out of the basement with the promise of treacle tarts. I’m doing my best to reel in the nosey Rosies who want to see what happens to their favorite characters in book two and three and beyond. The Rosies are out there, I know it, because I’m one of them.
Rosie’s are in it for the long haul, for the growth, for the ebb and flow of a book person’s day to day. Because we care.
If you like series, why? If not, why not? And has anyone actually had a treacle tart?

Tracy Clark, a native Chicagoan, is the author of the Cass Raines Chicago Mystery series and the Det. Harriet Foster series. A multi-nominated Anthony, Lefty, Edgar, Macavity, and Shamus Award finalist, Tracy is also the 2020 and 2022 winner of the G.P. Putnam’s Sons Sue Grafton Memorial Award. She is a member of Crime Writers of Color, Mystery Writers of America and Sisters in Crime.
Yes, I love series too which is why I wrote my thrillers, “Checkmate” and “Gambit” with the same hero and heroine, then a different set of characters in the next three, “Final Finesse,” “Castle Bravo,” and “Trust but Verify.” But, of course, super successful authors have become international bestselling types such as Lee Child with his series about Jack Reacher, and Janet Evanovich’s stories featuring Stephanie Plum.
I love series, though my reading lately has been so scattershot—either for research or to review, and then more for research—that I haven’t been able to be truly faithful to a series since Martha Grimes!
Started with Trixie and still love Jack! Belden and Reacher, of course. And yours, Tracy, Tana French’s, so many more. Start off a reader on your gift list with a series this year!
I’m ready to reread Martha Grimes. I’m looking now at a replica of the pub sign for I Am the Only Running Footman I bought at the pub in 1987 while on a Martha Grimes pub pilgrimage. There are so many good series, and yes, those characters do feel like friends.
I loved your analysis of why series resonate with readers. My birdwatcher mysteries had a cast of characters and I explored them through the different viewpoints. Rae in A Rant of Ravens, Lark in Death of a Songbird… I ended up sticking with Angela Dimato, US Fish and Wildlife, for the last couple. Her pov allowed me to explore the themes that interested me, and the readers loved her. I wish I’d found her out the gate. My thrillers I started out with Raisa Jordan, and I’ve loved watching her evolve. Your absolutely right that we writers are a little nosy!