Hildegarde

Which is what it is today.  I’ve got a rather odd week-end planned, assuming that the status of everthing and everybody stays as it is–that is, that nobody dies.  I’ve got some stuff to do tomorrow, and then I’m going to reread a couple of Harry Potter novels that I have hanging around–the first, and the seventh.  Actually, I’m not rereading the seventh.  When we first got it, my sons took it and spirited it away, and I’ve only just come across it again.

Just as an aside–the book of Shadia Drury’s that has me held in a state of morbid fascination is called something like Aquinas and Modernity.  I looked it up, too, and it’s cheaper than the one you guys found, but it’s still expensive for a paperback.  I assume the price tags are the result of the books being classified as “scholarly.”  And, yeah, I know.  If the articles in  Free Inquiry are any indication, her pretentions to scholarship, especially in the Middle Ages, are, well, what can we say?   Weak.

And as to a book in the library saying that angels are pushing the planets around:  I see nothing wrong with the book being there, but something wrong with announcements about it made in science classes in such a way as to imply that that theory is equally scientific.

Which is what was being done in Dover–in spite of the fact that there is no (none.  zero.  zilch) actual scientific work in Intelligent Desin, no refereed papers, no experiments, nothing, in spite of the fact that none of the people pushing ID is trained in the field (the only biologist is not an evolutinary biologist, and his claims have already been refuted, he’s just not listening), what the school board in Dover wanted to do was to present the situation as “evolution is a theory that not all scientiests agree about and there’s equally convicning scientific evidence for Intelligent Design.”

Which is not true.  

But today I want to get to a smaller and much more practical issue, because right now I’m in the midst of mapping out two new Gregor Demarkian mysteries in my head.  

I’ve said that I nearly always start books with a character and let the character take the lead, and that’s ninety nine percent.  It’s even half true in this case. 

But for the last couple of months,  I’ve been considering a situation that intrigues me both with its logistical possibilities and with the nature of the character that would have to be at the center of it.

And it’s a very interesting situation, even though the main “fair play” clue would be a literary reference not everybody would get.

But what’s become very clear to me is that this particular idea would not work with  Gregor Demarkian as the detective.  He’s got the wrong kind of mind for it, and the wrong set of references to really understand it. 

I wonder about that sometimes, the fact that all of us come equipped with sets of references we don’t even realize are references, that we think of as just “normal.”  And those references determine not only a lot of what we think about the world, but a lot of what we notice.  Father Tibor sees God everywhere.  Bennis tends to see class.

One of the things you can do with an idea that is outside your detective’s ken is to start a new series, which has occured to me.  I don’t want to give up writing Gregor, but the idea of another series, with a different set of characters, is intriquing, and when  I suggest it people sometimes actually seem interested. By people here, I mean, people in a position to know whether somebody would pay me for it.

This particular idea, however, would fit very well into Gregor’s universe, it just couldn’t be satisfyingly investigated by Gregor himself. 

And that leaves me with a set of possibilities, none of which I know much about. 

Why do people read series, for isntance?   It’s obvious that lots of people read them in order to follow the lives of the main core of characters from one book to the next.   It’s also obvious that a lot of people have a lot of trouble reading third person multiple viewpoint, and my guess is would have even more with first person multiple viewpoint.

Would a series be just as satisfying to a reader if the main character changed from one person to the next in a small set of continuing characters?  Would it be possible–after twenty-two Gregor Demarkian novels–to produce one where Bennis was the detective, or Tibor was?  Or one written in first person rather than in third?  What about one from the point of view of one of the more minor continuing characters–say, Russ Donahue or Hannah Krekorian?

Or, take it in another direction–how about a series in which each book was written in the first person point of view of a different character in the main core set? 

Or maybe I’m just getting more literary here than I ought to.

But here we come to one of my other problems with genre.  Genre determines not only narrative arc, or at least underlying narrative arc, but also reader expectations about muc m ore than that arc.  Mickey Spillane was once quoted as saying that if a book got boring, the best thing to do was shoot somebody–but he’d have said something different if the books he’d been writing were romances.

In a world of people who read for entertainment and escape, I don’t know the answers to questions like these.  To me, any of these experiments would be inherently interesting, but the fact is that they all represent much more work on the reader’s part than just doing the normal thing with a series. 

But then, I also tend to think that a book that makes me work is a good thing. I get the impression, more and more, that I’m in a minority there.

Okay, this is not the kind of problem any of you could be expected to solve,and I’m not going to solve it either.

But I’m thinking.