The Series Character and the Stone Spines of Timelessness

I am the kind of dude who covets other people's series characters.

I love series characters. I love to see characters who are already familiar to me appear in another, different work. There is something very comforting about the series character, or even the secondary character, who appears in more than one novel by the same, or even another, writer.

For the last ten years, easily, I've been obsessed with finding my own "series character." My own Travis McGee. My own Tarzan. My own Hap Collins and Leonard Pine.

Some say the writer is limited who conceives of a series character and milks them until the stories are trite and formuliac. Some argue this happened with nearly all the great series characters, and their writers.

For me, the recognition of continuity within a writer's work began with Stephen King, and Castle Rock, his fictional Maine town. This town itself became the first series character I knew about. The secondary players in books like CUJO, IT, and THE DEAD ZONE began to overlap. The first name I recognized from one King book to another was Sheriff Walt Bannerman, who helps capture a serial killer in DEAD ZONE and meets his violent death by rabid dog in CUJO. Being a kid, I didn't make the connection at first, but when I did, it created a cool kind of legitimacy to King as a chronicler of Sheriff Bannerman's adventures. As if, in a way, Bannerman actually lived and his life, like many, was too big for just one novel. He didn't just stop living after DEAD ZONE. He didn't just become another lost character, but something more memorable.

Other characters filled in King's continuity from one book to the next. You knew them when you saw them. You appreciated King's loyalty to Castle Rock, and in letting go of that fictional town (in the unfortunate NEEDFUL THINGS), King lost part of himself I believe. The town was King, King was the town.

Obviously King influenced my reading choices, and John D. MacDonald soon brought the series character to its apex in his "Travis McGee" novels, about a "salvage consultant" musclebound beach bum type who helps friends and acquaintences in trouble. McGee is a knight errant, and his unshakable ethics remain untainted for the whole of the series, some 21 novels begun in 1964 and ending in 1984. MacDonald died in 1986.

These books taught me, at the tender young age of fifteen/sixteen, everything I needed to know about becoming a man. That I failed to become Travis McGee is incidental, as I had the blueprint before me. The point was that everything McGee believed in was everything a man of worth needed to believe in: help the helpless, adore women in their beautiful mystery, assert justice, be civil, be independent, be masculine and free of guile.

Travis McGee didn't change much over the course of the books. The circumstances of his adventures wasn't expansive. McGee didn't look inside himself and question his motives or his actions. He questioned only the provacation of evil in the world, and he sought mostly to pull his friends and others out of evil's path. It's only in THE GREEN RIPPER, when McGee seeks revenge for the murder of a woman close to his heart, does he determine to destroy the evil.

Compare that to Richard Stark (Don Westlake) and his "Parker" novels, which interestingly run parallel to the Travis McGee series. Professional heist man Parker stars in 24 novels, begun in 1963 and ending in 2008. Unlike McGee, Parker is a cold robotic engine of efficiency, uncompromising and unromantic. Parker has a code, but it is designed around a strict system of plan, job, escape and score. Whatever deviates from Parker's code is a deadly threat to Parker's survival and freedom, and he quickly removes inconstants, by strangulation or a bullet.

Richard Stark's series completed a circuit for me, the series character as villain instead of hero. Suddenly the "bad guy" is the only guy to root for. Whether you like Parker or want to be Parker is immaterial: Parker bludgeons his way from page one of book one and never stops. He still hasn't stopped. He is never settled, never fulfilled, never changing. You know as little about Parker in the first book as the last, but he is compelling nonetheless. Every human Parker encounters is changed forever, while Parker remains the anvil, the constant.

The series character, in my studies, seems almost incidental to the novel in which he/she stars. Noting most of the best of the series characters over the last 100 years or so, you can find that most of them are totemic stone spines holding up the novels'/stories' plots. While the plots might exist without these stone spines is nothing new, which nothing grows from stone. The series character doesn't "grow" or "change", but are as ancient and stern as time.

The secondary players, generally, end up absorbing the emotional context of the series novels. They are the Sheriff Bannermans of the fictional world, who play out their lives, and the drama of their existences, upon the craggy surface of the stone spines. These secondary players do not depend on the series' main protagonist, but rather live their lives around them, or die beneath or behind them. Occassionally the series character encounters some human drama/tragedy nearly collossal enough to shatter their immutable presence, but in the end the timelessness of the series character is intact. It must be. Even for the writer themselves, this is a constant unshakable truth.

After all, who is to say only the writer truly exists? Perhaps even the writer is just another dollop of human blood and bone upon the thrusting spires of stone. Maybe even the writer must bend and break before and beneath something immeasurable and without end.