I’ve been alternating my reading recently, between stuff like gardening with native plants in Texas, essays by Thomas Sowell, and mystery series. I’m prone to rummaging through Amazon looking for series to binge when I’m in the mood. Other times are, well, that’s a topic for somewhen else.
I’d found a new-to-me series, by Gladys Mitchell, and was seriously annoyed that whoever republished it on Amazon hadn’t bothered to link the books as a series. I think I’ve vented about that before, but the reason I can only take a couple of her books in a row is that the main character, Mrs. Bradley, has pronounced characterization tics which get annoying if you’re reading the stories back-to-back-to-back. I realize that when they were being written and released perhaps a year apart (there are 47 of them!) it made more sense to quickly remind the reader of who the character was, and it set her apart from the other female detectives of the time like Miss Marple and Miss Silver and likely others I’m less familiar with. All of a part, they are. Extremely popular with the same set of women who still read mysteries (raises hand) and follow true crime sensations. (I prefer male detectives, being slightly sexist but will happily read a well-done female as well).
On the other hand, I stumbled over Charlotte McLeod’s Madoc series, set in Canada, and have been delighted with her deft touch in developing the characters through a series, where we see Madoc and Janet meet, fall very gently in love, marry, and develop a strong relationship while they grow together. Unlike Mrs. Bradley who seems not to change physically or mentally throughout the years as portrayed in the series, these two have a real character arc that is satisfying and pulls me from one book to another to watch. The mysteries are a big part of what I’m reading for, sure, but this is another layer. There are connections. And you need to read the series in order, to make sense of it. Other mysteries you needn’t read in order because the Great Detective virtually never changes and there’s not enough meat around the bone to matter if it was book five or book fifty. Which is fine for a quick read… not fun at all when you are binge-reading!
I’m not actually saying you should write one, or the other, or perhaps something in the middle. I am saying to be aware of what you are writing, and if you’re writing the neverending series with quirks of character as a shortcut to re-introduce readers, you might want to be aware that will be annoying on a rapid publication schedule. Maybe read the manuscript and tone it back a little. On the other hand, if you are writing a very long series, doing what Pam Uphoff has been and breaking the timelines up to give new readers an easy intro without having to read seventy back-volumes to catch up is a wise idea.
It’s all a matter of taste, and you should like what you are writing. If a tic in another author’s writing annoys you, don’t imitate it. Write what you enjoy, and blend it all up into something new and interesting.
Mad Genius Club 
4 responses to “Quirks and Tics”
During the writing process, I try to put in my notes several things that create distinctive “voices” in how they’re written. From the fact that Charles is probably every single David Tennant character in a ginger David Tenant package to Sayuri’s honne/tatemae personality shifts, how the Morai tend to do the whole “finish each other sentences” thing, or Marcus’s love of something between his fingers (usually sharp or pointy or both) to fidget with.
And I try to organically insert those things into the story as time goes on, so each character develops a little more depth.
The main problem I had with Mrs. Bradley in the one novel I read in the series was not so much that she had a fixed persona as that she seemed to be Always Right and Always Sane. Holmes is similarly bombastic, larger than life and unchanging, but he has traits that are portrayed as somewhat absurd (VR bullet holes, attitude towards women) or that the narrator-sidekick judges negatively, like the cocaine use. Mrs. Bradley feels too much like an author mouthpiece by comparison.
The other thing an unchanging, larger-than-life personality at the center of a series can do is focus more attention on the guest characters: most of the novel-length Holmes stories either have extended flashbacks to the events which triggered the crime or extended Watson-minus-Holmes scenes. The short stories often have an extended account of what led up to the detective’s intervention before we see very much of Holmes and Watson in action.
That being said, I’ve generally ignored advice about giving characters specific “tics” to make them memorable. Either they’re important enough to the plot for me to have some idea of their personality and probably mentally “cast” someone in the role, in which case I know what they look and sound like, or they’re so minor they basically only need names if there are two or more of them in a conversation. Very late in my last novel, I had the heroine present for a conversation that involved the on-duty navigator for the airship and the off-duty navigator. The latter was in his pyjamas and had brought his personal charts. They had different names, and were squeamish about the chief engineer wanting to jettison a dangerous thingie while the airship was passing over a village. That was all anyone needed to know about them.
Similarly, the three teenaged boys the hero rescued at the same, very advanced stage in the book needed separate names, but they were basically The Brave Proto-Leader, The Less Brave One, and The One With The String.
I love Charlotte MacLeos’s characters. I have yet to read any of the Miss Silver books, and haven’t heard of Gladys Mitchell, will have to seek those out one of these days.
Charlotte McLeod also writes as Alica Craig . . . and I think one other pen name, but the Madoc ones are my favorite.