Serial Issues

 Every writer who begins writing about characters who will appear in a series of stories eventually has to make some decisions. Among them are: Will my characters age in the course of their adventures? Will the world around them change or are they permanently in the period in which they began? Every author--no matter what the genre--answers those questions differently.

Arthur Conan Doyle--although he wrote the tales of Sherlock Holmes and John Watson over a period of some 40 years, from 1887 to 1927, he largely kept their activities in the period before World War One...and, except for the idea of Holmes' retirement in His Last Bow, they remain essentially ageless. 

Another famed detective team, Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin (created by Rex Stout), are treated somewhat differently. Their adventures span about the same amount of time, from 1934 to 1975, and like Holmes and Watson, they remain the same ages throughout. (There are minor hints that they have aged somewhat, perhaps five years or so, in that span.) But Wolfe and Goodwin's world advances just as the real world did in those four decades. Cars become sportier and faster, New York's skyline changes, television replaces radio, the Mets replaces the Giants as Archie's favorite team.

Erle Stanley Gardner took the same tack with Perry Mason. Mason remains a man in his prime through pretty much the same period as Wolfe and Goodwin, and his world is always contemporary with the period in which the stories were published.

Yet another team, Modesty Blaise and Willie Garvin, began their adventures in a comic strip in 1963 and continued there and in a series of novel and short stories from 1965 to 1996 (the comic strip continued until 2000). Peter O'Donnell keeps them essentially the same age throughout and the world around them reflects the period the stories were written.

This creates interesting problems for two of these series--the Wolfe and Blaise stories. Perry Mason's "origins" are not specifically tied to any one era or event (despite what the current TV series says). Thus nothing prevents him from having been born at the turn of the 20th Century (as he must have been in his earliest stories) or around World War 2, as the last of his stories would imply.

But Wolfe is established as having been a "freedom fighter" in his native Montenegro--at first in the period before the first World War, when the Balkans were a hot bed of various failed revolutions. Wolfe is said to be in his late teens and early 20s at that time and, as he is generally assumed to be about 50 during his career in New York, those events must have occurred around 1900. But if he is still about 50 years old in 1970, and he was 20 when he was a "freedom fighter," those events would have happened during World War 2.

And now, we have a paradox--Wolfe and Goodwin were both working for the US government during WW2, Wolfe as a special adviser, Goodwin as a major in the Army. Those events are frequently referenced in stories that take place after the war, even up to the 1970s.

A similar situation faces us when tracing the origins and career of Modesty Blaise. We're told she was a "displaced person" in the Middle East when she was, perhaps 10-12 years old. As she is in her early 20s in 1963, that would put her "origin" at about 1950, and her circumstances a result of either WW2 or the creation of Israel in 1948--possibly a little of both. But she is still in her early 20s in the 1990s...so what caused her to be a "displaced person" about 15 years before that? Well, the Yom Kippur War was in 1973, perhaps that is the catalyst. And any of the number of other conflicts between Arabs and Israelis between 1948 and the present could explain her beginnings now.

In another posting, I'll deal with problems facing characters such as Superman and Batman.

Bothered by Geography

 As I mentioned more than a few posts ago, I had been binge-reading the works of Rex Stout--the cases of master detective Nero Wolfe and his aide-de-camp, Archie Goodwin. Having finished the 46 titles Stout completed before his death, I began reading the novels by Robert Goldsborough, the writer authorized by Stout's family to continue the series.

In general, I have enjoyed Goldsborough's work; he manages to maintain Archie's "voice" as the narrator, come up with interesting plots in Stout's vein, and simultaneously keep the stories rooted in the time and place in which they were written, just as Stout did. (Although Stout never allowed Wolfe or Archie or any of their close associates to age, the world did change around them: The Dodgers and Giants moved west, the Mets became Archie's favored team, etc.)

But near the beginning of the sixth novel in the series, The Silver Spire, I was temporarily knocked out of the narrative by some clearly invented geography. As most of you know, I was born and raised on Staten Island in New York City. This novel revolves around a mega-church supposedly located on the Island. No such church has ever existed, but neither does Wolfe's brownstone (the address generally given for it would place in the middle of the Hudson River). No, the problem is where on the Island Goldsborough put it--a 20-minute walk from the ferry terminal, in the hills of St. George and New Brighton.

Here's a slightly edited version of Archie's description of his trip from the ferry to the church:

After consulting the directions, I got myself squared away, heading south up Schuyler Street—and I do mean up. 

If I ever knew how hilly the island was, I’d long since forgotten. In ten minutes, I was out of—and above—the small business district and into tree-shaded residential blocks….I followed winding streets, all of which ran uphill, until, breathing hard, I reached a large open area that was level. In the center of this clearing, at least a block away, stood the Tabernacle of the Silver Spire…. 

….The clearing turned out to a parking lot—acres of blacktop, crisscrossed with yellow lines…

 And here's a map of the area, with Archie's presumed path marked. Unsure of which direction he would have turned on reaching the end of Schuyler Street, I indicated two different paths, one in red, the other in blue.

If you want a better look, here's a link to the map on line. There's no appropriate large flat area anywhere around, except for the grounds of Curtis High School--which, I assure you, have never been replaced by anything else.

Now, if Goldborough had put his mega-church somewhere on what the natives call the "South Shore"--that is somewhere south of the Staten Island Expressway, I-278--that would have worked. There's lots of flat open space down there...and there was even more in the time when the book was written, some 30 years ago. But I guess he didn't want to have Archie have to bother with Staten Island's bus routes, or trying to get a cab or the like. Of course, Archie could have driven over the Verrazzano Bridge...but that would have removed the quaint charm of the ferry ride and the hilly walk through the oldest part of the Island. (Later in the book, when Archie has to get Wolfe to the church, they do take the car.)

Anyway, I got past the problem by simply ignoring for the rest of the story where the church was supposed to be...as it doesn't seem to matter much to the resolution of the mystery.

Binge-Reading

Lots of people binge-watch...choose a TV series (old or new) and watch it in order, often several episodes in one sitting, until you've seen everything.

I am currently "binge-reading". Have you ever done that? Chosen a series of books, preferably a long series that is still all in print, and read every title in the order they were written and published? I'm going through all of Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe series...he wrote 42 books (some novels, some short-story/novella collections). I'm about to finish number 35, The Final Deduction.

When I finish the last one, I have to decide whether to continue with the handful of Wolfe novels written by others with the consent of the Stout estate.

Are you binge-reading in the pandemic? And what have you chosen?

Edited to correct an earlier error--Stout wrote 42 Wolfe books, not 86.