John Dean – Crime Writer

Authors who are writing series of novels, like myself, face all sorts of challenges but particularly how do you accommodate new readers while making sure that you do not slow down your storytelling by dumping the same information on readers who have followed your stories from the beginning and don’t require telling again?

The answer is to regard each book as a standalone, as if it is the only book of yours that they will read. However, inevitably there will be developments that spill over from one book to the next and that can create excellent opportunities for the writer, as I have discovered on starting to work on another DCI John Blizzard novel (the next one comes out in September 2026, this is the one after that).

Without giving anything away, the book due out in September sees a number of regular police officer characters promoted (they had been the same rank, and done the same jobs, for 12 novels, so they deserved promotion. Indeed, it felt false that they hadn’t been moved up a rank.

Those readers who have become series fans will appreciate the often-subtle impact of the kind of changes outlined above and as author I found that the storyline featuring the promoted David Colley has had a particularly profound effect. New responsibilities which came with his promotion allowed his character to develop, he has a more proactive role in investigations and his stature has grown. I hadn’t planned any of that, it just happened naturally as I started to write the new-look character. I just did the typing!

However, none of this is obvious to the reader coming to the series for the first time and the aim for publishers is to produce novels that also work as standalones, books which do not require new readers to refer to earlier novels in the series to enjoy the book they have selected.

How do you achieve that? Well, for example, if there is a change in a character’s role it could be explained in a single line eg ‘Detective Inspector David Colley, who had recently been promoted to oversee the day-to-day activities of Western CID, walked into the office.’ Regular readers of the series will appreciate the reminder of his promotion and enjoy watching him tackle new responsibilities and first-time readers will appreciate a useful piece of character background briefly dealt with about someone they have not met before.

If you want to see the different approach taken by new and existing readers, pick a novel, any novel in a long-running series and read the reviews on the likes of the Amazon and Goodreads websites. You’ll see that new readers will comment on the plot and how the book’s characters and sense of place made them feel, whereas series readers will also comment on how characters are developing.

For example, a review of one of my novels commented that one of my detective chief inspectors seemed to have let his past affect him more than is normal in one book. Another reviewer suggested that he was becoming more likeable from book to book (so, I make sure to keep the character challenging and have him to do the odd thing which will disappoint readers; it reminds both myself and them that we should not get too cosy – it’s good to have a slight edge to the relationship between writer and reader!).

Of course, what the author and publisher are seeking, above all, is the conversion of the first-time reader to series fan which is why it is important that the author does not take anything for granted and works as hard on book 14 as they did on book one.