A Scary Question

I was asked kind of a scary question the other day: Are you getting tired of Betsy and Godwin and the other characters who inhabit your needlework mysteries? Thank heavens I was able to answer honestly: No. Unspoken was: Not yet.

I don’t know if I’ll ever tire of Betsy Devonshire. More likely what will happen is what happened to the first sleuth I invented: when sales fell off, my publisher grew tired of buying more stories.

It also sometimes happens that the author dies, which is what happened to Donald E. Westlake. He had just finished working on a Dortmunder caper novel and was vacationing in Mexico, where he suffered a fatal heart attack. Curiously, the novel feels like a wrap-up, so perhaps he had decided not to write any more of that series.

John D. MacDonald died in 1986 after his final Travis McGee thriller, The Lonely Silver Rain, was published in 1985.

Dorothy L. Sayers left notes for a Lord Peter Wimsey novel, Thrones Dominations, when she died. Jill Paton Marsh used the notes and fragments to write the novel, which was published in 1996. (An aside: the title comes from the Fifth Century list of the nine “choirs” of angels: angels, archangels, principalities, powers, virtues, dominions, thrones, cherubim, and seraphim,)

Dame Agatha Christie wrote into her dotage, as anyone reading her last-published books can tell. Interestingly, she wrote a “final adventure” for each of her two most famous sleuths, Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, while she was at the height of her powers. She directed that they were not to be published until after her death.

Now and again I think I’d like to do that, but I’m too busy trying to keep up with my contracted mysteries to think of more than the title, which, of course, would be Goodbye, Crewel World.

Possibly the most well-known attempt to escape writing any more adventures was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s story in which his hero, Sherlock Holmes, was thrown into the Reichenbach waterfall in Switzerland in a fight with his nemesis, Professor Moriarity. The uproar from the reading public this created caused Doyle to rethink his decision and resurrect the famous sleuth for more adventures.

Is there a series you were sorry ended - or a series you think continued after its author wore out his/her welcome?

Lots of famous mystery authors have had, after their deaths, other authors try to continue the series, some to great success. Others are failures. Is there one of these you particularly like? Why, do you suppose, no one has tried to write a new Agatha Christie?