Barbara Fradkin’s excellent blog on relatable characters
prompted me to submit this. Can you
recall all the plots of all the books in all the mystery series that you’ve read? Of course not. There’re simply too many. But what you remember are the protagonists.
What is it about a mystery series that makes us want to keep
coming back, eager to devour the next installment? Is it the way the story is told, the
plotting, the pacing? It’s all those
things, of course, but most importantly, it’s the characters.
We become invested in them and can relate to them. Sometimes we are so invested that, if they do
something that we think is stupid or make a bad decision, we get frustrated or
angry at them.
Isn’t that how we feel about our friends and members of our
family?
The characters are so important to us, that often we’ll
forget the plot to the earlier books, but the protagonists live on in our
minds. So, let’s talk about why we love certain characters.
Starting with the late Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone, who doesn’t
like a female protagonist that is so relatable?
She’s a bit of a frump, although it my head, she’s an attractive
frump. Kinsey is about 5’6”, 118 pounds,
has short dark hair that she trims with a nail scissors. She usually wears jeans and turtleneck sweaters. For times that she needs to “dress-up”, she
owns a wrinkle-resistant little black dress.
I visualize Kinsey looking very much like Sue Grafton does
on the back of the book jacket of her mysteries.
Kinsey Millhone jogs three miles every day but enjoys junk
food. She’s been in and out of various
relationships and was married twice.
We can relate to her.
She’s just a regular person with a self-effacing sense of humor who
solves mysteries. From letter to letter
in her series of “Alphabet” books, we watch her grow her friendships, romantic relationships,
and her jobs.
However, she’s one of the few characters who doesn’t really
age. She’s been in the ‘eighties’ since,
well, the eighties. She doesn’t have a
cellphone and has never streamed a movie on Netflix. Keeping her stories in that decade makes her
novels as comfortable as a bowl of tomato soup and a grilled cheese sandwich on
a rainy day.
After 25 volumes of Sue Grafton mysteries, it’s nearly
impossible to recall the plots of all of them…or any of them. But that’s not important, is it? As long as when you finish one, you’re
looking forward to your next letter of the alphabet.
A favorite character that I grew up reading was Travis Magee
written by John D. McDonald. The books
started with The Deep Blue Good-by in 1964 and ended with The Lonely
Silver Rain in 1984.
Like Kinsey, Travis is relatable. There’s no sense of
ostentation at all. He’s a beach bum who
lives on a houseboat called the “Busted Flush” that he won in a poker game. He’s a self-described “Salvage Consultant”
and “Knight Errant”. He makes his living
by finding items that have been lost or stolen and taking a cut (usually half
of what the item is worth).
Travis was another hero that didn’t seem to age although at
the beginning of the series, he intimated that he was a Korean War veteran and
somewhere along the way that subtly changed to being a veteran of the War in
Viet Nam.
I was impressed that, even in the ‘60’s, he was a
prototypical environmentalist, waxing poetic on how damaging encroaching human
development was on the Everglades.
It wasn’t until about 1979 in The Green Ripper that Travis
starts to slow down. In the last book of
the series, The Lonely Silver Rain, Travis learns he has a teenage daughter
and takes all the cash he has on hand and puts it into a trust fund for her.
Who can’t love that?
But as memorable as the recurring characters in McDonald’s books,
unless I go back and reread them, I can’t recall any of the plotlines.
What can be written about Michael Connelly’s Detective
Hieronymus “Harry” Bosch that hasn’t already been said? Twenty-one novels have given Harry Bosch a
very full life of his own. Bosch is so
firmly in the minds of mystery readers and writers as well, that he’s appeared as
a cameo in other writers’ books.
Bosch has a long history with multiple partners, both
professional and romantic. He has a
colorful, exotic back story. With each
book that Connelly writes, his protagonist evolves.
But he’s also getting older.
It’s no secret that Bosch is a Viet Nam veteran, a tunnel rat. That’s going to make him close to
seventy-years-old. In his last book, Dark Sacred Night, Bosch is slowing
down. He’s joined forces with one of
Connelly’s newest creations, L.A. Detective Renee Ballard.
By his own admission, Connelly said that Ballard debut
appearance in The Late Show was going
to be a single appearance. But she was
“too fierce” so he brought he back.
I have a feeling we’ll be seeing a lot more of her. They are both forces to be reckoned with on
the likability scale. They’re both loners, they both have haunted histories,
they’re both relentless in the search for justice, willing to break the rules
to get it.
So, with so many books in the series I’ve talked about, how
on earth can you recall all the plots?
Most of us simply can’t. Nor are
we supposed to. We respond the
characters. The reason we keep buying
these writers’ books is because we enjoy being with the protagonists.
We don’t necessarily have to recall how the last book ended.
We only need to look forward to the next.
1 comment:
How right you are. I am faithful to a couple of series authors because I enjoy their characters, even to the point of enduring the occasional clunky plot (not perpetrated by anyone here, or anyone mentioned here) just to spend a little more time with the people. It's interesting to think, even as I write this, that I can't think of any plot defects that have kept those characters from being themselves.
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