Falling in Love Again

What am I to do? Always wanted to. Can't help it.

Do you remember your first time? How giddy you were, how you couldn’t get enough, how preoccupied you were, 24-7?

I’m talking about finding series books you loved, you filthy animals.

Three of the seven Mick Herron titles in my Libro.fm app

The Happy Hollisters were my first. I tried Nancy Drew, too, but never really warmed to her. Instead, I gravitated to the wonderfully imperfect Trixie Belden. While Edward Eager never wrote a series per se, his most ardent readers know the secret thread that connects Half Magic, Magic by the Lake, Knight’s Castle and The Time Garden. About the time I turned 10, my annual Christmas haul always included one of the books in L. Frank Baum’s Oz series. (I also read most of the Ruth Plumly Thompson Oz books.) To this day, I re-read Betsy-Tacy, the Beany Malone books, and the interconnected high school stories of Rosamund DuJardin and Anne Emery.

Martha in Magic by the Lake, one of literature’s greatest characters

At Northwestern, I began to read the Toby Peter series, written by film faculty professor Stuart M. Kaminsky.¹ I also discovered James M. Cain, who never wrote a series, but if you read Double Indemnity closely, you’ll notice Walter Neff’s scoffing disapproval of people who try to stage accidents in bathtubs, which is how Frank and Cora first tried to snuff out her husband in The Postman Always Rings Twice.

Then one day, in 1990 or so, I found myself mooning around the mystery section at the Enoch Pratt and picked up Sara Paretsky’s Indemnity Only, the first in the VI series, wistful for Chicago. About the same time, I grabbed I is for Innocent from my grandmother’s pile of books. Hooked again. It was a great time for PI series, which had been moribund for much of the 1970s but was reinvigorated by women writers in the 1980s.²

When I sold my first novel in the mid-1990s, the conventional wisdom was that aspiring crime novelists needed to write series, so I did.³ By 2001, when Harlan Coben and Dennis Lehane broke out with very different books, stand-alones became the rule of the day. I resisted for a year or two, then published my first stand-alone in 2003. Through 2015, I went back and forth between stand-alones and series, but I added few series to my own reading. It was hard just keeping up with my friends/peers.

Flash forward to December 2024. I had been watching Slow Horses on Apple+ TV, then reading the books afterwards, a curious choice, I admit. At some point late last year, I asked myself: Why wait? In less than eight weeks, I read (or listened to, sometimes a combination of both): London Rules, Joe Country, Slough House, Bad Actors and the trilogy of connected novellas, The List, The Marylebone Drop, and The Catch.

Look, the world doesn’t need me to sing the praises of Mick Herron, who has just been named this year’s Diamond Dagger recipient. But perhaps I can remind you how lovely it is to abandon yourself to the closed world of a series. Something can be escapist without being lightweight. I’ve spent so much time over the last two months thinking about the Slow Horses. I’d find myself wondering: How is Luisa doing? What’s going on with River and his grandfather? Oh my god, am I rooting for Diane Taverner? Did I actually cry a bit when a milquetoast bureaucrat briefly found his inner action hero? I did. And — alas — the books are strangely prescient, especially Bad Actors in which the PM has an egomaniacal adviser who believes he should be in charge of everything.

It remains to be seen if I’m going to return to series-writing, although if the world loves Mrs. Blossom as much as I do — well, I’ve got a few ideas.

Read/Reading: A whole lot of Mick Herron, as mentioned above. The Fourth Girl, Wendy Corsi Staub. Shattered, Hanif Kureishi (audio).

Rereading: Fiona Range, Mary McGarry Morris.

Me, me, me: I’ll be at the Tennessee Williams Festival in New Orleans at the end of the month, talking memoir and mystery. I’m a Grandmaster in case you missed the news. Also, Murder Takes a Vacation has received a starred review in Library Journal, but I’m not sure I’m allowed to quote from it yet. Preorder here. Please?

Finally, these are the runner-up looks for the Edgar ceremony on May 1. You’ll have to wait to see the winner. Who knows, maybe I’ll change halfway through the ceremony, like a bridezilla or one of those kids on My Super Sweet 16.⁴

1. Kaminsky and I were both short-listed for the Edgar in 1998, for best paperback original, and he was later named a Grandmaster. He died in 2006. I’m not very rah-rah about my alma mater because I think the Medill School of Journalism was unnecessarily sadistic, but I’m very proud of this old-school tie.

2. I also read a lot of Robert B. Parker, in part because my first husband said I needed to read one book we already owned before I could buy any new books.

3. The conventional wisdom was also that there were too many smart-ass female PI’s according to some of my rejection letters.

4. I won’t. UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE: Both outfits are actually jumpsuits. With pockets! And they are fabulous. But the chosen one is better still. And, yes, it has pants. And pockets.