To Age or Not To Age: The Age-Old Question for Series Detectives

Several years ago, a graduate student wanted to write a Masters Thesis on Sue Grafton with me. I said, sure, do your thinking and your research and then come to me with a topic when you’re ready. A couple of weeks later he visited my office with a puzzled look on his face. It turned out that he’d earlier read two novels from Grafton’s Alphabet Series and became a fan. But when he looked into more titles, he got confused—and just a tiny bit irritated. He asked me: “Are all Kinsey Millhone books set in the 1980s?”

That might—or might not?—be a question that many readers ask. My class reads “E” is for Evidence, and they have absolutely no issue with the fact that it’s set in the 1980s since we also read a Sara Paretsky novel set in the 80s for an enlightening comparison. BUT, if I were to mention to them that Grafton’s first novel in the series, “A” is for Alibi, was set and published in 1982, and that the last novel in the series before Grafton’s death, “Y” is for Yesterday, was published in 2017 and set in 1989, they are a bit befuddled. So ALL the novels in the Alphabet Series are set in the 1980s?!

At that point, I ask them if they would rather that their favorite series detective was a wise-cracking and hard-boiled senior citizen. After all, if Kinsey was born in 1950 and is 32 in 1982 (for Alibi), wouldn’t that mean that she’s 67 in 2017 (for Yesterday)? Well, no, they don’t really need her to follow exact chronological time…

I remember experiencing the opposite irritation when I was a teenager reading Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe series. While I adored the antics—and the narrative style and wit—of Wolfe’s assistant Archie Goodwin, there came a point when I started questioning why Archie never aged. Given how fond he was of identifying the precise day, month, year, and which baseball game he was watching (New York Giants or later the Mets?), even a fourteen year-old catches on that the young assistant who started in 1934 didn’t age with time. As the Wikipedia page on Archie Goodwin tells us,

Regardless of what year the story takes place, Archie and the other principal characters in the corpus do not age. Archie is in his early 30s.^{[6]: 383, 565 [a][b]}

Seriously, if I remember correctly, he was in his early 30s whether he told us it was 1935 or 1946 or 1957. And this for a series of over 33 titles that spanned from 1934 to 1975!

As I recently watched Amazon Prime’s Wheel of Time and encountered the Aes Sedai who themselves aged very slowly while time passed inexorably, mercilessly aging those around them, I was reminded of the choice that needed to be made by authors of fictional series detectives. If they wish to write endless iterations of this same detective in a best-selling series (a cash cow!), do they want them frozen in time (like Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone is in the 1980s) or aging very slowly even as they keep up with contemporary periods (like Rex Stout’s Archie Goodwin as a forever 30-something—over four decades)?

Ultimately, my graduate student abandoned Sue Grafton and chose to write on Patricia Cornwell instead.