There’s definitely an appeal to reading a long series with a continuing primary character, and heaven knows there’s a lively industry producing the associated books, particularly (but not exclusively) for (mostly) solitary action heroes in the thriller/mystery/suspense sorts of genres.

Keeping such a series fresh and lively while still satisfying the reader is, however, a challenge not all writers can meet. On my own blog, I have an irregular feature called Irritated Reviews where I nuke particularly lame bits of writing (not always identifying the author), but today I thought I’d point to a whole commercial series as an example of the yes-I-know-people-will-still-buy-it-but-did-you-have-to-do-this-again crime.

I am referring, of course, to Lee Child’s Jack Reacher series, now being continued with the help of his brother Andrew Child. The first 24 (!) books were written by Lee Child (as far as I know), and the next 3 (so far) by the pair. (After that I’ve sort of lost track as well as interest.) There’s no denying that Jack Reacher is commercially successful, so I’ll draw compare-and-contrast examples for similarly popular James Bond and Travis McGee.

Ian Fleming produced 12 books & 2 story collections featuring Bond, and John D. McDonald wrote 21 novels featuring McGee. Both Bond and McGee have support teams of a sort, but the books are mostly focused just on their primary character. Reacher has effectively no support team or continuing characters at all (ghostly indications of a brother and a commanding officer)– he’s as isolated as Conan the Barbarian.

I’m going to speak mostly as a reader, not a critic/biographer — the impressions gained while reading these corpi, especially with the idea of how I might do the same, or differently. (I don’t know what the authors thought of this, or what they may have recorded.)

Let’s grant that the sort of fiction that Mike Hammer produced spawned both a offshoot spur of literary fiction of the Ray Chandler/Dashiell Hammett variety as well as a mainstream of male-oriented pulp fiction that matures in its own way and never quite goes out of style. At the higher end, McDonald wrote more than 70 books (including the McGees), almost all in this sort of genre, representing the intelligent man’s view of the 1950s-mid-1980s, Fleming specialized in the espionage and sophisticated lifestyle world of the 1950s-1960s, and Child’s books began in the 1990s.

All three of these writers knew they were going to be writing several books featuring their character, and all seem to have taken steps to make that as straightforward for the reader as possible. Once success occurred, they had to consider what changes were possible without losing that magic, and that’s a tough problem.

First, there’s the solo hero. The more exceptional and skilled you make him, the less you can introduce recuring or occasional helpers without diluting that particular pizazz. You can recognize the changes that maturity and experience will make in the character… or not, leaving him as solitary and healthy as he started, effectively immortal instead of human.

If he or his situation changes with age, what sort of changes are compatible? Team changes (helpers, organizational support, villains (whether equally unchanging and immortal) or current headline derivatives)? Can you move him around so that at least the action or support environment changes (Reacher) or is he stuck with his old friends (McGee) and a travelling troop of opponents? (Bond has both these issues.) And let’s not even bother to shake our heads at the love/sex interest in every port — that does get really old as a motivation, when it repeats over and over.

And then there are the human changes of these characters. Will they be solitary loners forever, never growing, or will they accumulate friends, wives (gasp!) & families? Neighbors? Dogs? A sidekick? Businesses? If you change their external circumstances, will you lose the original magic that made the character effective, or will you deepen the attachment of your readers?

Personally, I find that the magic wears off bigly as these series extend with ever more desperate clutches at the original life events that made them work. A hero that doesn’t grow loses interest from me. These aren’t the heroes I want to read about or the ones I write about.

Creators used to respect this… Compare Odysseus to Jack Reacher as heroes of extended stories. The former is human in his motivations and reactions. He relies on his polytropus (lit. “many turning”, i.e., varied, clever) responses to find his way through peril to his unchanging and human goal. The latter is gifted and well meaning but ungrounded (literally — no home), and his world is changed around him, since he himself can’t change. (After a while, I would buy the latest Reacher book just to see what gimmick the author would proffer at the start to repeat the same formula, until I lost interest altogether). Puppet heroes like that aren’t really heroes in my view, just stand-ins.

If you write continuous series with recurring heroes, what challenges do you deal with? As readers, how much puppetry can you take?