When you write a series, you have one major problem that has to be dealt with—filling in the blanks for people who may not have read the earlier books. Authors who have long-running series are usually pretty straight-forward about this. Ed McBain always used to begin his 87^th Precinct books with a quick run-down of any character traits you needed to know about in order to understand what was going on. After a while, I knew enough to skip over the descriptions of Meyer Meyer (who, we learned in every book, was bald as a cue ball) and the information about Teddy Carella being both gorgeous and deaf. Similarly, Linda Fairstein always includes a quick recap about Mike Chapman’s dead fiancée and the fact that Alex Cooper is a wealthy woman courtesy of her father’s surgical invention. That way if you pick up an Alexandra Cooper mystery for the first time, you’re oriented without having to read any of the other books to catch up.

I haven’t had quite as much to summarize in my Konigsburg books, but I’ve done a bit. Long Time Gone has perhaps a bit more than my other books because I needed to make sure readers understood Erik’s background and what he was trying to overcome. Some of that background had been mentioned in earlier books, but this was the first time I’d gone into it in depth.

The thing is, all of my books are self-contained: the story begins and ends within the book itself, although there may be passing references to occurrences in the other books. That’s why I can quite honestly say that I don’t think it matters which book you start off with, although there’s obviously an order in which the books take place. You don’t need to read Venus In Blue Jeans to understand Wedding Bell Blues, although you may want to go back later to find out exactly how Cal and Docia met and fell in love. I think of this as similar to the way Stephanie Laurens runs her Cynster books. No matter where you start in the series, you’ll be okay. But you may eventually want to go back to the beginning.

I was thinking about this the other day as I read Carla Neggers’s newest book, The Whisper. I love Neggers’s stuff, and I think I’ve actually read almost everything she’s written. But the task she has is a lot tougher than the task I have. Neggers has a continuing story that’s carried forward in The Whisper. It relates most immediately to the book that preceded it, The Mist, but there are also lots of references to the book that preceded The Mist, The Angel. And some of the characters date back to the first book in the series, The Widow. Now I’ve read all of these books, and I read them in order. But The Widow came out in 2006, and by now I don’t remember all the details or all the character names. In fact, truth be known, I don’t really remember the details from The Mist, and it came out last year. Thus Neggers needs to remind me of the necessary plot points along with setting up new readers who’ve never encountered these people before. She does it successfully, I think, but you have to hold on and keep going through a lot of characters doing a lot of somewhat mysterious things before the story begins to pull together. Neggers isn’t the only one who has to deal with this. Kay Hooper is up against the same problem in her paranormal thriller series, and Laurell Hamilton’s Merry Gentry books depend on some understanding of what’s gone before in order to understand what’s happening now.

Besides being tough to do, this kind of series also has a danger that I don’t have to deal with. According to one book buyer I talked to, some readers won’t buy a continuing series until all the books have been published. They don’t want to commit themselves until all the books are available. Then they’ll read the series straight through, assuming they remember that the series exists!

So even though the sort of “epic sweep” of a continuing series has its appeal, I think I’ll stick with what I’m doing now. After all, it’s hard enough to keep track of the characters and events in my limited Konigsburg world. I’d hate to think what it would be like if I had to figure out what was going to happen three books from now!