I hate to say it, because I love Roger Zelazny, but his first five Amber books would have been better as one long novel, and his second five Amber books should never have been written. The problem was that, ironically, nobody wanted long fantasy books in the 70s, or at least nobody would publish them.
Lots of series mystery characters become stiff and cliched after the first few books. Almost nobody can write 30 or 40 or 50 books about one character. This starts with Sherlock Holmes (at short story length even) and proceeds through the entire history since.
Our family has read the series. When any of us have to do something distasteful and we want to do anything but that (like a long slow root canal), we say you have to “Song of Susannah” it - meaning just do it and get it over with.
I obviously disagree. But as examples of why, I’ll offer Stirling novels like The Peshawar Lancers (2001) or Conquistador (2003). These are excellent novels. And Stirling was able to present a setting, develop the characters, and tell a story from beginning to end in a single book.
I’m still pissed about that series - it’s started as an interesting “raises zombies for a living and also solves crime” angle and then turned into bad fan-fic porn. I even recall when it happened. Obsidian Butterfly was the last decent book in that series and everything since has turned to shit.
90s Tom Clancy was the worst when he was writing 1,000 page books that could easily be cut down to 300 pages. So many sub-plots that literally go nowhere or are made obsolete because the the character in the subplot randomly dies.
Also President Jack Ryan basically became “Tom Clancy tells people how HE would run the country” which literally nobody cares about and then becomes retconned anyway when he realized that solving all of the Middle Easts conflict problems as President Jack Ryan meant he basically had no future book plots once 9/11 rolled around.
Post-death Clancy is only marginally better. There is a new “Tom Clancy” book out every six months now, carrying on the stories of Jack Ryan, Jack Ryan Jr and The Campus. But I could not tell you one book from the other because they are all basically the same. Good guys find out about some nefarious thing going on. Good guys investigate but get nowhere. Allies get killed. Good guys mope about it for a while but defeat the bad guys in the end. There’s a bit more humor in the books but no consequences. They’re never going to kill off John Clark even though he should be about 100 years old by now. Jack Ryan is President forever because we’re just not going to talk about it. Et cetera. I wish they would break from the formula a bit here. The Hunt for Red October is a very different book from Clear and Present Danger and neither of those is anything like Without Remorse but they are all very good stories while still having everything that made Clancy famous. But the new stuff reminds me of Young Dirty Bastard trying to sound like Ol’ Dirty Bastard. The words are the same but the magic just isn’t there.
Definitely Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum books. (Jesus, I just looked and she is putting out the 28th one!). I read the first 10 or so. They were funny in a slapstick kind of way. But that can get old fast. Eventually, the Joe, Ranger, Joe, Ranger love interests back and forth became very tedious and she just kept recycling plots. By the last one I read I came to believe that she was sharing writing duties with someone else. Whole chapters would not make sense in the story. A character would learn some information and in the next chapter, would learn this information again. Timelines wouldn’t add up. Characters would, well, act out of character. It was bizarre. If she alone is writing them, she desperately needs a good editor. I can’t believe she is still at it. (I just checked the Amazon reviews for the 27th book and apparently people are questioning whether Evanovich is even writing these anymore. And Stephanie still hasn’t decided if it’s Joe or Ranger! )
Orson Scott Card. In addition to being a dick, he never has any idea what to do with a story after he’s set it up. He does best in very limited settings, where not much can happen so he has to focus on the characters working within a small world. Open up the world, it goes to shit. Enders Game and Speaker for the Dead were both very local stories, and great. Open up the world, they go to shit. Young Alvin Maker was interesting. When he actually goes out to save the world or whatever (I honestly don’t remember), it gets boring. Go back to Battle School, Enders Shadow was great. Open the world back up, boring. Even those weird Mormon metaphor books about Space Travel were okay for the first book, and super weird and boring later.
Philip Jose’ Farmer is another example. The Riverworld series started strong, but the later books kept explaining that what was apparently settled by a previous book was actually part of a deeper more secret plot.
It’s been years since I read any of them, but I think Tony Hillerman’s Navajo reservation mysteries fit here. It wasn’t that he couldn’t keep up with the writing, in fact it was just the opposite, it seemed like he was really cranking them out towards the end, but the quality was just crap.
Writers are frequently more interested in backstory than in story. They’ll spend years working out the backstory, then type up the story is a few months. Those rarely get traditionally published, but once you’ve got a few trad-pub credits to your name, you’re more able to indulge yourself.
First one I thought of; I read the “War Against the Chtorr” books back in college… in the mid-90s. And I’ve been waiting for the next book ever since.
Seems to me that the most important thing is to have the narrative arc pre-written, rather than have an idea, some early story arcs, and not much else. It seems like what ends up happening is that the series’ start out strong, go through a bunch of novels, and then either go crazy and get wound up in a hurry, or they just sort of peter out if there’s not a clear narrative arc to stick to. I’m pretty sure Wingrove and Stirling succumbed to the “crazy then wound up in a hurry” situation- especially Wingrove in the eighth and final novel.
I suspect Butcher hasn’t ever really had a story arc- just a series of events with continuity that Harry has to deal with, so at some point, he’ll just get tired and have Harry retire into the sunset, or die heroically.
I agree that Rex Stout did about the best job of keeping the series fresh. The Doorbell Rang was his 40th Wolfe book (including collections of novellas) in 30 years and it was one of his best. The few later ones trailed off, though. And let’s face it, all the books were the same story retold.
Ellery Queen changed his character to be a totally different person from 1929 to 1957 and changed the style of the books as well. That makes him fascinating, but almost impossible to go back and sample. Unless you read them in chronological order, you’ll believe they were totally different writers. (They weren’t except for a few after 1957, and then in the late 60s and 70s went back to the originals grinding out pap.)
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