Behind the Scenes: Building a Series (with a proposal for a new reading group)

BookScapes 16, November 2024

Readers and friends: Last month, I promised another “backstory” post—this one about creating a mystery series. In the meantime, though, the election happened. Many of us are still deeply engaged with its outcome and the aftermath. We’re looking for ways to manage our feelings and find a course of informed action: action that fits who we are, where we are, what we hope for. I’ll share some thoughts about this—and a proposal for you to consider—at the end of this post.

But for a few moments, let’s think about fiction. It’s calmer. More entertaining. More . . . well, cozy.

I’m thinking here about mysteries, of course. About a subgenre called cozy mysteries: domestic mysteries featuring amateur sleuths, usually set in a small, close-knit community and told with a minimum of violence, profanity, and sex. Specifically, I’m thinking here about a series you and I are familiar with: the China Bayles mysteries.

Characters

In a mystery series, perhaps the most important key to the long-term survival is a strong, likeable character ensemble with lots of potential for collaboration and conflict. In cozies, the ensemble is likely to be made up chiefly of women, since that’s the audience for these domestic mysteries (unlike thrillers or espionage mysteries). Ninety percent of cozy readers are women, most over 40. The ensemble may also include male Significant Others and male mentors.

The Protagonist

One of the women—in this case, China Bayles—will dominate this ensemble because of her strength, resourcefulness, and determination. She will be the prime plot mover, direct the detective work to a solution (ideally, with some tricky investigative moves), and serve as the point-of-view character. Since she isn’t a licensed PI (that’s a different subgenre, with a different template), she needs a reason to get involved in murders and other kinds of illegal monkey business.

This brings us to professional affiliations and experience, which ideally give our protagonist an excuse for getting involved in other people’s private business. China Bayles is a lawyer, and as we all know, lawyers (even ex-lawyers) are involved in every legal corner of the community; they work with the law, the police, with the entire justice system. In other words, China’s training, experience, and former affiliations give her a legitimate, believable franchise for investigating crime. (That’s a term I first heard from Bill McCay, editor of the Hardy Boys Case Files that Bill and I wrote.)

China is also a lawyer because I wanted to add some serious topical-issue weight to the typically thin character-driven Miss Marple who-dunnit plot. The problems that come up in China’s books generally involve legal questions that intersect with current events: property rights and land development, inheritance, liability, drug smuggling, Medicare fraud, and more. China also finds herself thinking beyond the solution of the crime to its prosecution. I’m not a lawyer, so this has involved some interesting and tricky research. Thank heavens for the internet—and for lawyer-friends who are willing to help!

But China Bayles is a former lawyer, so how is she making a living now? She left the law to build a business because I wanted a protagonist who had the skills and self-confidence to survive financially on her own, outside the male-dominated career culture. (This was a topic I explored in an earlier nonfiction, Work of Her Own. The research for that book introduced me to a number of women who had given up legal careers for other work.) There’s nothing unusual about a woman-owned business these days, but back in 1990, it was a Nearly New Thing, at least in cozy mystery. In almost every book, there’s some sort of challenge to the health and/or serenity of China’s business, with plenty of interesting plot possibilities, of course.

But what kind of business? I gave China an herb shop because the study of herbs (academic and hands-on) had been a personal interest of mine since graduate school. Also because herbs were just beginning to be trendy (witness two recently-launched magazines: The Herb Companion and The Herb Quarterly). And because (full disclosure here) plants have intriguing names that translate to murderously provocative titles. Bloodroot, for instance. Bleeding Hearts, Bittersweet, Nightshade, Wormwood. I figured there were at least enough herbal themes to take me as far as Sue Grafton’s alphabet PI series was likely to go. (Sadly, Sue died after finishing #25.)

Of course, being strong doesn’t mean our series protagonist has to be perfectly strong. Her weaknesses and personality flaws give the writer more material to work with and the reader more reasons to be interested. China is impatient, super-rational, inclined to over-think, and usually able to convince herself that she’s right—flaws that sometimes make her seem unempathetic. (One of her early readers, in an article for the Herb Companion, wrote that “China is always trying to teach us something.” I had to laugh at that—it’s very true.) She is also super-independent and (at least in the early books) uneasy with romantic invasions of her personal life and not very comfortable with friendships.

The Sidekick

And that’s where the sidekick—China’s business associate, bestie, and partner in crime—comes in. In this series, the ensemble is built around the two shops and their two owners—China’s Thyme and Seasons and Ruby Wilcox’s Crystal Cave.

Ruby is a strong, lively, likeable sidekick, basically collaborative but different enough from China to provide some interesting contrasts and even conflicts. Where China prefers jeans and her shop T-shirt, red-haired Ruby is . . . well, flamboyant. She has a contradictory yen for sexy Texas cowboys and all things witchy, and a firm belief that the Universe will solve the problem, whatever it is. Ruby is super-intuitive to China’s hyper-rationality, and her shop is a perfect setting for her often paranormal demonstrations of alternative ways to solve a mystery: through imagination, clairvoyance and telepathy, and a deep empathy with others. China always has to know the facts, factually. Ruby shows us a different kind of knowing, which comes in handy when the Universe throws them a supernatural curve ball, like Annie the shop ghost, in Queen Anne’s Lace.

The Ensemble

In this small-town domestic setting, the other characters are what we might expect. There’s Mike McQuaid, China’s sometime-lover, later-husband, a former Houston homicide cop who teaches in the Criminal Justice department at the local university and later in the series establishes his own PI firm. McQuaid is strong enough to push back against China’s tendency to take the lead and tender enough to make China love it when he does. Commitment is a question for China, finally resolved in Book 8, Lavender Lies, when their wedding is nearly rained out. McQuaid comes with a built-in boy (Brian), a flaky ex-wife (Sally), and a close friend, Blackie, the county sheriff and later, McQuaid’s PI partner.

There’s also Sheila Dawson, an essential character who puts in her first appearance in Book 4 as China’s potential rival: “She looks like a homecoming queen and thinks like the regional director of the FBI.” Sheila becomes the Pecan Springs chief of police and—eventually—a close friend and ally. (Every amateur sleuth needs a cop buddy to let her in on what’s going on in the criminal case.) Sheila and Blackie spend several books debating the marriage question (they’re uncomfortable with a sheriff and a police chief in the same family), and finally settle it with a coin toss.

These three characters—Ruby, McQuaid, and Sheila—are strong enough to support books of their own, as they do later in the series. McQuaid stars in Holly Blues, Sheila in Cat’s Claw, and Ruby gets a whole mini-series to herself: The Crystal Cave Trilogy.

In some cozies, family issues can be a continuing subplot. China’s revolve around her relationship with an alcoholic mother (Leatha) and a workaholic, now deceased, father. The mother-daughter problems are mostly resolved by what they learn in Bloodroot, which explores their Southern family’s complex background, and Nightshade. The father issues dominate the central plot of that book, producing an unknown half-brother (Miles) and a niece (Caitlin) whom China and McQuaid will later adopt. But by Bittersweet, China and Leatha have learned to accept one another and have made their peace with China’s father’s betrayals.

As the series continues, other characters mature from support to lead roles. Jessica Nelson, reporter, escapes a kidnapper in Mourning Gloria to become a star crime reporter, true-crime author, and the protagonist of her own novella mini-series, The Enterprise. Hark Hibler, editor of the Enterprise and not-quite-cowboy enough for Ruby, grows from a small-town print newspaper editor to (in the novella series The Enterprise) the co-owner of a burgeoning multi-media news outlet.

Bottom line: While each individual book contains its own free-standing who-dunnit plot, it is the continuing interactions, conflicts, and collaborations of this ensemble that creates the series arc: the plots that carry over from one book to another, sometimes disappearing for a book or two, then reemerging as the characters grow, change, get themselves into trouble, and show us who they are (or want to be). Readers have told me that they enjoy this kind of rich interplay within the books and from book to book. And it’s certainly what I’ve enjoyed most about this series. It is a long-running Friends saga that never ceases to interest me.

Pecan Springs as a Character

This is going on too long and I’ll have to come back to setting in more detail another time. But I want to say briefly here that the setting in series mysteries often figures like another character, with its own internal conflicts and collaborations and its own arc of growth, development, and change, for better or worse.

In the first half-dozen books, Pecan Springs (loosely based on San Marcos TX, home of Southwest Texas State University, where I used to teach) is heavily reminiscent of Old Texas. But the evidence of commercial change and threatening urbanization that begins in Book 1—the expansion of the airport—continues as a secondary plot feature in almost every Pecan Springs book.

This fictional change parallels the real-life situation in that part of Central Texas. The busy, 80-mile I-35 Austin-San Antonio Corridor has become one of the fastest growing regions in the country, home to burgeoning research and info-tech industries. Stuck in the middle between the two expanding cities, Pecan Springs is trying to pretend it still has an Old Texas heart (rodeos, chile festivals, bluebonnet celebrations, tubing on the Pecan River), while it’s dressing up as New Texas, with the hope of more jobs. Perhaps that those conflicts are familiar in your area.

Another time, I’ll dig into the Dahlias series, using the same template that we have here, and you can compare the two series. Anytime you want to drop in on either town, you can find all the books here. Now, on to other business.

Photo by César Viteri on Unsplash

Time, place, and story

I said I’d have a proposal for you, related to our previous week’s discussions. So here we go.

I have read and considered your passionate and frustrated comments on my post-election LifeScapes rant, asking myself how we can continue to explore these political issues in a thoughtful, focused way. As you know, I’m by nature and education a book person, as are many of you, and I’m cheered by the growing number of excellent books that can give us something to think about together.

So today I am announcing the January 20 launch of a Substack reading group called the Guerrilla Readers. Throughout the coming year, we will read and discuss a dozen timely, issue-oriented, idea-driven books (mostly nonfiction, but who knows) that challenge us to reflect from a variety of perspectives on current events in this country: where we are and what it looks like, how we got here and where we’re going, what people are doing about it. Crucially, we will also discuss how these national and global events are shaping our personal stories. Time, place, & story. Big questions, challenging, immediate, and fundamental. We may not have answers, but we will better understand the questions.

Here’s how this will work. I’ve chosen the first two books and will compile the rest of the reading list from your suggestions. Our January book—Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America—is by a writer many of us know and trust, Heather Cox Richardson. Our February book will be Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, by another Substack author, Kristin Kobes Du Mez.  

Guerrilla Readers’ first post will be Monday, January 20, in my usual BookScapes slot. I’ll introduce Richardson’s book, with a commentary, some context, and a few starter questions that you can take in any direction that seems productive. My posts and commentaries on the books will be free, but we will continue to meet in our usual comment space, paywalled to make it safer. On each of the following two Fridays, I’ll send a few thoughts and several more questions. The comment space will remain open (and paywalled) so you can return to it at any time.

Supporting subscribers: I invite you to leave title suggestions in the comments on this post and going forward—hefty, provocative books with meat on their bones, please. I’d like to choose the remaining 10 books in February, so we can see where where we’re going.