Reading the Detectives discussion

I find Inspector Grant an enigma, having read a number of the novels in the wrong order. I love him in The Daughter Of Time, where he's stuck in a hospital bed so you really get to spend a lot of time with him. I feel I need to reread the rest of the novels (in the right order) to get a proper sense of him, but unfortunately I find Tey's writing style so variable (and in some books, frustrating) that most of them are in my 'do not reread' category.

It's also very interesting to look at crime writers (or any series writer) making choices in their first novel which they are then stuck with (or quietly move on from). Like Agatha Christie making Hercule Poirot past retirement age in his first novel. And James Bond, who is so disagreeable in Casino Royale, very much as though Fleming was just trying to imitate the brutal writing style of Greene and Ambler, but became steadily more humorous and sentimental in the later books. It's the same problem for TV series - I speak as an X Files fan who despairingly supported the writers' increasingly strangulated attempts to advance the plot in later series, completely hobbled by decisions that had been made in the first two seasons.

It makes you wonder how on earth writers like Dickens managed to write such great serialised novels. It seems pretty clear (she says with no authority) that he wrote as he went along rather than having the whole thing drafted before he started publishing.