This is the final Tuesday of our Twenty Weeks of Buzz, and (appropriately) continues last week’s post concerning the nineteenth novel. However, I shall be putting up a bonus post next week on The God of the Hive, entitled, “Writing a god into being.” You might want to read the book first…

The first Russell and Holmes novels took place largely within the British Isles, and then mostly within England.

Beginning with O Jerusalem, however, the duo are as apt to be outside of England as within: Palestine, India, San Francisco (twice, as Holmes gets his own story-within-a-story in the otherwise Martinelli tale The Art of Detection) with hints of Japan and a future adventure. But England awaits, and I decided that after three books elsewhere, it was time to send them home again, if nothing else than to care for the bees that have been Holmes’ avocation since Conan Doyle retired him around the time of Victoria’s death.

But how to make The Language of Bees, my ninth Russell and Holmes, new and enticing—for its author if no one else? What would keep her eye on the story and her fingers on the keyboard? After more than a million words about them, what new things could I say about these two people?

Over the course of eight books, the Russell stories have developed any number of links. Knowing, for example, that I wanted to set a book in what was in 1919 called Palestine, I left unfinished the chapter in The Beekeeper’s Apprentice where the two go to that British protectorate. Instead of detail, that chapter functioned as a brief outline of their experiences, because I intended to return (in O Jerusalem) not only for a closer look at the time and place, but for an interesting shift to a previous stage in their relationship. In turn, O Jerusalem hints at the British nature of a pair of apparent Bedouins, setting the stage for those two Bedu to turn up in Sussex for Justice Hall.

If nothing else, these unfinished threads give reviewers a chance to prove how closely they have read the book: a murderous falling balcony in The Game (book seven) is not resolved until the following Locked Rooms (book eight,) which brought delight to critics of The Game who jumped on my dangling plot points.

But mostly, I write these unfinished scraps with a vague intent of providing myself with an intriguing situation to explore in the future—not that I have much idea how, just that there is something in that raw bit of place, person, or idea that holds promise.

Thus, way back in the second book in the series, I set the scene for The Language of Bees ten years later: In A Monstrous Regiment of Women, Russell makes mention of Sherlock Holmes’ son:

…something in his hands reminded me of Holmes, and of Holmes’ lovely, lost son.

And later, when Russell is trying to convince Holmes to help a troubled young Army officer:

“And if he were your son? Would you not want someone to try?”

It was a dirty blow, low and unscrupulous and quite unforgivably wicked.

Because, you see, he did have a son once, and someone had tried.

So, with this setup, I could have my characters return to Sussex but, rather than find themselves in a situation they had been in before, be suddenly confronted with a radical departure: Sherlock Holmes as a father.

It is an entirely new language for the man.

This is the nineteenth Tuesday of the Twenty Weeks of Buzz, when I post remarks about the writing process of a different book each week. This week we’re up to the 2009 title, The Language of Bees.

One of the drawbacks of writing a series, especially for those of us writers who have a low threshold for boredom, is that die-hard Fans want essentially the same book but with new trappings. After all, they fell in love with a group of characters and a situation, and they don’t really want huge changes, any more than a person desires huge changes in the person he or she married.

However, not all of us are equipped to be a Sue Grafton or Lee Child, those blessed writers who positively enjoy working within a closely confined palette of settings, characters, and times. Some of us get to book four or five and begin to eye the characters who are now riding our backs, and contemplate acts of nasty violence—there’s a good reason why Arthur Conan Doyle pushed Sherlock Holmes off a high cliff. I have no doubt he came to regret not providing the grieving Watson with a corpse, laid in a nice Victorian coffin, its lid securely nailed shut.

Over the years, I have got around the problems inherent in writing the same characters in two ways: First off, I tend to alternate my writing, shifting from the Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes historical series either into the contemporary Kate Martinelli procedurals, or into a standalone, which has me spending a year in another world entirely. Either way, I return to the continuing Russell saga with clear eyes and a genuine interest in what has been going on in their lives while I was busy elsewhere.

The other way I’ve escaped serial tedium (and remember, the reader may take pleasure in a yearly voyage in the company of familiar characters, but the writer has to take that voyage using a close-up, slow-motion, continuously-replaying camera focused on Every. Tiny. Step. Along. The. Way.) has been to throw something new into each book. The Martinelli novels tend to have a main character who doesn’t reappear in others, or if so, just briefly. The Russells tend to travel.

Russell and Holmes meet, as the first line of The Beekeeper’s Apprentice puts it, when both she and the century are fifteen: “…fifteen years old with my nose in a book as I walked the Sussex Downs, and nearly stepped on him.” Sussex, London, Wales, Dartmoor—the first books are tightly British as she grows to maturity as a person and as a detective, and they find their variety in the contrast of bustling urban streets and bleak moorland loneliness.

The Language of Bees ended with those three dread words, To Be Continued, sparking an outrage that has not been seen since Conan Doyle “killed” Sherlock Holmes at the Reichenbach Falls. It is perhaps appropriate, then, to end this post with that same notice:

This post to be continued…next Tuesday.