Like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Simenon tried to wrap up the Maigret saga with a farewell early in his career. And like Doyle, he was pestered by fans to resurrect his avatar of justice.
What draws readers back to a mystery series? Is it
the comeuppance of crime? Vicarious violence?
The occasional primrose path of dalliance tread with a femme (or fellow) fatale? (I am looking at you rocking the boat, Travis McGee.) Armchair tourism spiced with locally sourced mayhem adds that extra zing when you add The Turquoise Lament to Fodor’s Florida.
Serial fiction has been around since Homer started entertaining the troops in the shenanigans at upstart Troy. More likely longer, but writing was a relatively recent invention. Alexandre Dumas and Charles Dickens had followers worldwide waiting on docks for the newest adventures of D’artagnan and David Copperfield to arrive.
As George Simenon says, his truly big novel is the mosaic of his small novels, creating a larger zeitgeist than our own. “I would like to make a man so that everybody, looking at him, would find his own problems in this man.”
Travis McGee, Spencer, Sherlock, Joe Ide, Adam Dalgleish,
all mosaics far larger than the sum of their novels.
Familiar characters tackling dangerous problems create a paradox, a comfortable pocket realm insulated from a world that grows more chaotic, unpredictable, incalculable. The magic of a great mystery series is to hold up the keys of character and action to solve the insoluble, to calculate the incalculable. The outré becomes familiar, understandable, even relatable. The ‘other’ becomes 'us' as foreign settings grow more familiar with each tale, and the iconic hero becomes more dear with each telling.
The trappings of xenophobia can be stripped away as we visit Dr. Siri Paiboun in war-torn Laos, or Arkady Renko in the Russian Federation, Shan Tao Yun in Tibet, or Inspector Gamache in Montreal.
All fight corruption and crime on their own exotic turf, while we watch and learn about humans being human, for good and ill. To see justice served, even in fiction, is to see our own problems, and perceive beyond the probable to the possible...
...to honor just choices in everyday life, even against dark odds.
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