I really only intended to write one novel. I’d come across Sir Anthony Standen in George Malcolm Thomson’s biography of Sir Francis Drake. As my mother’s maiden name was Standen, I researched him, and wow! What a story he had. When I discovered on Ancestry that he was my 10th great-grand uncle, I was hooked. I wrote The Spy who Sank the Armada. Spoiler alert, look away now if you haven’t read it yet. Among the last things we know about Standen are that he was imprisoned in the Tower of London and later released. He then breached the permission of his license to travel by going to Rome. Why Rome? He was Catholic, but he’d received money from Spain. Why not Spain? I found it easier to believe that love drew him to Rome, rather than religion. He’d spent a lot of time in Florence, perhaps he’d fallen in love there. Perhaps there was unfinished business.
So I wrote what I thought had happened, and before I knew it, he had a growing family. I thought I’d quite like to keep in touch with how my distant relatives were getting on. Now my wife Claire is going over the edits of the manuscript of the fourth book in the series, Called to Account. There are benefits to writing a series. You invest so much in getting to know your characters, so why would you ditch them and invent new ones? If readers have enjoyed one story, they might want to read others in the same series. It worked for Ian Fleming, amongst many others.
I’ve read a writer’s blog in which she said that once she had written seven books, her following kept growing organically, without having to work at it. I don’t think she was writing a series, and I’m interested to know if that organic growth comes earlier with a series.
I think we just all love a series, don’t we? Downtown Abbey, Upstairs Downstairs, Coronation Street, James Bond, Hornblower, Shardlake. We just can’t get enough of them. I hope you’re enjoying The Sir Anthony Standen Adventures. I’m not intending to stop anytime soon.