I have commented that each installment of the Yamamura series hints at the supernatural and that the novels also display the perspective of an sf writer but neither of these directions would have been the way to continue the series much though I like multi-genre experimentation. A novel set in the here and now can be about any aspect of the character's life or about other characters that he meets. Ian Fleming managed to do this with three James Bond short stories and with two thirds of one of the novels. I did not expect to reference Fleming when I began this post but he fits.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Not directly on tangent, but your comments reminded me of how some of the mysteries of John Dickson Carr were also hilariously funny! Comedy and humor in an otherwise rather grim mystery is another way of developing or continuing a series.
Poul Anderson was a fan of "The Saint" mysteries. I really should try to find some of those books. The fact PA liked them is a good enough recommendation!
Sean
Paul:
Elleston Trevor (a.k.a. Adam Hall and Simon Rattray) wrote some mysteries in the mid-to-late '50s with a character named Hugo Bishop. Bishop wasn't a policeman or private investigator, but, as the back-cover blurb on one reprinting put it, "he just shows up to help." It was often mentioned that Bishop wrote a series of books collectively titled *Personality Under Stress*, which suggests a psychologist ... but he was accustomed to such things as finding someone had planted a bomb in the plane he was aboard.
What brought the Hugo Bishop stories to my mind was that *Pawn in Jeopardy*, although a murder mystery, slipped into science fiction territory because the victims were being killed over a secret they'd discovered while exploring the Antarctic. And *Rook's Gambit* was even more explicitly science fiction, since the key to it was the invention of a no-fooling DEATH RAY pistol.
(*Pawn* is a particular favorite of mine, as I managed to deduce what the Antarctic secret was before it was revealed. It wasn't, so far as I know, true in the real world.)
Kaor, DAVID!
Cool, what you said about the works of Elleston Trevor. Yet another writer who seems interesting that I never read. Darn!
Sean
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