Before And After

When we have read about a character in the active phase of his career, we want to know about his younger days and also what happened to him later. We do not always find out but are beautifully provided for by Poul Anderson with a Captain Flandry series, a Young Flandry Trilogy and two novels featuring Flandry as an Admiral. In the second of these two later novels, Admiral Flandry starts to hand over to his daughter although only in this one volume.

Anderson's The Trouble Twisters is a single-volume Young Falkayn Trilogy. David Falkayn begins as a apprentice just as Dominic Flandry begins as an Ensign. Falkayn's career, and aging process, continue in two novels and The Earth Book Of Stormgate. Ideally, a series about a character becomes a fictional biography.

It is not always so. Ian Fleming's James Bond novels were always set when they were written with some inconsistent background details about Bond's earlier life. John Grisham's Theodore Boone remains aged thirteen for at least the first five of his (so far) seven novels but Grisham is in complete control of the chronology. Everything so far has happened within a twelve month period. Whether Theo will ever make it into adulthood remains to be seen. We would like to read this much detail about Flandry's early life but you can't have everything.