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Special section: Short crime fiction

Prequels and Preludes: The Short Story and the Detective Novel Series

Suzanne Bray
p. 189-202

Résumés

Pendant le dix-neuvième siècle et le début du vingtième, la nouvelle policière était à la fois appréciée et bien rémunérée. Cependant, à partir de l’âge d’or du polar, la majorité des auteurs connus dans le genre choisirent d’écrire des romans, pensant que ce n’était pas rentable de gaspiller une bonne idée dans une nouvelle quand elle pouvait servir de base pour un roman. Cette tendance s’accrut tandis que le marché pour des récits brefs et le prix payé pour une nouvelle diminuaient fortement. Néanmoins, certains auteurs, connus pour leurs romans policiers aux personnages principaux particulièrement appréciés du public, se sont servis de la nouvelle soit pour satisfaire la curiosité de leurs lecteurs concernant leur détective, soit pour tenter de créer un nouveau détective et voir si les lecteurs l’apprécieraient. Même si ces préquelles ou préludes se concentrent sur les personnages, elles permettent à l’auteur de présenter un contexte qui sera par la suite important dans une série. « A Light on the Road to Woodstock » (1985) d’Ellis Peters, rédigée en même temps que le onzième roman dans la série du Frère Cadfael, et « Through a Glass, Darkly » (2002) de Kate Charles, publiée trois ans avant le premier roman de la série Callie Anson, sont bien intégrées dans l’ensemble qu’elles complètent. Même si elles possèdent leur cohérence propre, leur valeur est plus évidente lorsqu’on les envisage conjointement avec les autres aventures de leurs protagonistes, dont elles éclairent le contexte initial.

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1The detective short story was both popular and paid well in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. From Edgar Allan Poe’s Dupin stories onwards, crime fiction series in magazines like The Strand, Cassell’s Magazine, and the American Saturday Evening Post attracted thousands of readers, providing a comfortable income for their authors on both sides of the Atlantic, and making Sherlock Holmes, Uncle Abner and Father Brown, among others, household names.

2From the Golden Age onwards, however, most of the most widely read twentieth-century authors of the genre concentrated on novels, considering it wasteful to dissipate a good idea “on a short story when it could both inspire and form the main interest of a successful novel” (James 50). This tendency increased as the market for short stories, and the price paid for them, diminished over time. However, many authors who made their name writing series of crime novels, often featuring detectives who acquired a substantial fan base, have also written short fiction featuring their series detective. While the majority of these shorter pieces are merely light entertainment, some authors of crime fiction series have used a short story either to satisfy readers’ curiosity about their detective, giving background information that would be irrelevant in a novel, or to experiment with a new detective and see whether s/he captures the public’s imagination. These stories, often prequels or preludes, are character-based and also provide an opportunity to depict a context or a setting which is, or will be, important, even foundational, in the novel series.

The Prequel

3According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “prequel” was first coined in 1958 in an article by Anthony Boucher in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction to refer to a short story by James Blish which narrated events occurring before those in his 1955 novel Earthman Come Home. The term became popular in the 1970s and 1980s, particularly when referring to films. A literary prequel is a form of novel expansion where “the plot and characters from a finished novel are retrieved to be developed in new adventures set before . . . the narrative time of the source text” (Parey 1). These may or may not be written by the same author and nowadays are frequently not, as many prequels are written to classic works of literature whose authors have been dead for years. Lubomir Doležel relates the creation of prequels to the postmodern desire for rewriting and intertextuality, and sees prequels, and sequels, as ways of “extending the scope of the protoworld by filling its gaps” (207). Many see this phenomenon principally in marketing terms. For Deirdre Shauna Lynch, in her study of expansions of Jane Austen’s novels, the motive for writing any form of expansion “is generally to capitalize on a first or even a second success” (161). This presupposes that “prequels are there for fans of the original material” (Cackett), the authors presuming “that the audience has knowledge of the original work” (Cackett) and wants to know more about it.

4Some people use the term “prequel novella or short story” (Roy) in a different way, to refer to a shorter work written after, but published before, a novel as a marketing ploy, aiming to “create a buzz for the upcoming novel” (Roy) and thus incite readers to buy it. In order to avoid confusion, in this study, a short story published before the novel or novels it relates to will be called a prelude.

5Although a few crime fiction authors do undoubtedly use prequels or preludes as a form of advertising or to increase sales of their own longer works, others have more literary reasons for, exceptionally, using a shorter format. A short story may introduce, complement, or complete a series of crime novels with the same detective. It may repair an omission or experiment with a new setting or character, answer a specific question from readers, or explore a new theme. Using two very different writers of autographic expansions as case studies, this study focuses on the relationship between the short story and the detective novel series to examine how a short story may play an essential part in a larger corpus.

6Ellis Peters’s “A Light on the Road to Woodstock” (1985 – 46 pages in a mass market paperback), written at about the same time as the eleventh Brother Cadfael novel, and Kate Charles’s “Through a Glass, Darkly” (2002 – 19 pages in a larger format), published three years before the first novel in the Callie Anson series, are closely integrated into the series they complement. Their detective heroes are similar in that they combine a spiritual vocation with a marked, apparently God-given, talent for detection, and they both work in partnership with a member of the official forces of law and order. Although both stories can be read as one-offs, they acquire their full meaning in the context of their protagonists’ other adventures, shed light on the situations and relationships already in place at the beginning of the series, and provide an explicit, even mythical, background to the novels.

Ellis Peters’s Brother Cadfael Novels

7Although she had been earning her living as a writer from a relatively young age, Ellis Peters was relatively unknown during the first sixty-three years of her life. She had written, among other things, several historical novels and a series of modern detective fiction. However, it was not until she read the history of Shrewsbury Abbey and was intrigued by the story of the twelfth-century Prior’s efforts to obtain the relics of St. Winifred from rural Wales that Peters combined the two genres and wrote her first historical detective novel, A Morbid Taste for Bones (1977), creating the monk-detective Brother Cadfael. As Peters later admitted: “The first one was written as a one-off; I didn’t think I was beginning a series” (“Detecting” 2). However, the book was quite successful and “there was the second, obvious plot with the siege of Shrewsbury and the massacre of the garrison” (3), set shortly after the events of the first novel. So Peters continued, and found that Cadfael increasingly captured the public’s imagination. As Margaret Lewis has pointed out: “For a sixty-four-year-old writer suddenly to find new inspiration and to follow it as instinctively as Peters did is both unusual and particularly satisfying” (84). From 1980 onwards, the Cadfael books were all bestsellers.

8Peters had not originally intended to write a series and the first novel provides little background information about her detective. The author later acknowledged that Cadfael “sprang to life suddenly and unexpectedly when he was already approaching sixty, mature, experienced, fully armed and seventeen years tonsured” (Benedictine 3). This lack of background is not unusual in detective fiction. As Dorothy L. Sayers explains, paraphrasing Aristotle’s Poetics:

It is not necessary to tell us everything that ever befel the hero. . . . In writing about Sherlock Holmes . . . the author does not trouble to say where the hero was born, or whether he was educated at Oxford or Cambridge, nor does he enter into details about incidents which—though we know they occurred—are not relevant to the matter in hand. (“Aristotle” 27)

9In fact, the very nature of crime fiction means that the narrative is focussed on the plot rather than on the character of the detective, even though the series detective is often a strong focus of interest for readers, who often actively seek to know more about them. Brother Cadfael is thus no different from many other series detectives and shares with, for example, Hercule Poirot, the characteristic that the majority of his life is already over before his first appearance in a novel. As Margaret Lewis explains, “even in the first novel, there are strong suggestions that Cadfael has an unusual past . . . as the novels unfold, so does his past” (90). However, the allusions are always brief and often leave big gaps in readers’ knowledge of the sleuth’s past experiences, increasing their curiosity. This led to Peters receiving questions about her detective, “about his former roving life, and how and why he became a monk” (Benedictine 4). Another problem came from the fact that the series advanced chronologically, from 1137 onwards, against “a strong background of national and even international tensions” (Lewis 86). Like Brother Cadfael’s life, the political crisis had started well before the plot of the first novel, meaning that readers, and especially those with little knowledge of English history, were parachuted into a political context that they did not always understand.

10Faced with these questions and problems, Ellis Peters “did not wish to go back in time and write a book about [Cadfael’s] crusading days” (Benedictine 4) or spend time setting the historical scene. She explained to her readers: “The entire sequence of novels proceeds season by season, year by year, in a progressive tension which I did not want to break. But when I had the opportunity to cast a glance behind by way of a short story, to shed light on [Cadfael’s] vocation, I was glad to do it” (4).

  • 1 George Hardinge, 3rd Baron Hardinge of Penshurst (1921-97).

11The opportunity came from George Hardinge’s series of annual detective fiction anthologies for Macmillan, Winter’s Crimes. Peters had known Hardinge1 since his days working for the publisher William Collins, before they both moved to Macmillan. Inspired by Collins’s most successful crime author, Agatha Christie, who, in July each year, “used to deliver her new manuscript in order that the firm could announce a ‘Christie for Christmas’ – with almost unfailing regularity and ever-increasing profitability” (Denniston), Hardinge decided to compile an annual anthology of original, specially commissioned, crime short stories by well-known authors for the Christmas market. Ellis Peters was one of the authors persuaded by Hardinge to write a story for the inaugural volume in 1969. She contributed regularly to the series. In 1985, as she was finishing the eleventh Cadfael novel, An Excellent Mystery, Hardinge again asked Peters for a story for Winter’s Crimes 17. This was the opportunity she had been waiting for.

“A Light on the Road to Woodstock”

12As Mary Louise Pratt observes, “it is characteristic . . . for short stories to be structured around single small-scale quests or socially identifiable single incidents” (184). She identifies the “moment of truth” story as one which focusses “on a single point of crisis in the life of a central character, a crisis which provokes some basic realization that will change the character’s life forever” (182). The brevity of the narrative is ideally suited to this single focus. This precisely describes Ellis Peters’s short story “A Light on the Road to Woodstock,” which answers many readers’ questions about Cadfael’s dual vocation, as monk and detective, as well as providing the historical context to the whole series through the depiction of the key historical event which gave rise to the national crisis, the wreck of the Blanche Nef in 1120. The story respects Aristotle’s unities in that the action takes place during a short period of a few days in November 1120. Equally, the action takes place in the royal town of Woodstock or in the woods around it, while the crime, the detection, the political crisis, and Cadfael’s own crisis are woven together into a seamless whole. However, unlike most crime fiction, the story is most concerned with character and context, rather than plot.

13Even if, as Marcia J. Songer points out, “the civil war is an effective backdrop” (99) to the whole Cadfael series, nowhere in the novels is the reason for the war fully explained. It is barely mentioned at all in the first Cadfael novel. However, the second novel was written when Peters “could no longer resist the temptation” (Benedictine 3) to recreate the dramatic events around the end of the siege of Shrewsbury in 1138 and, from then on, the war is always present in the background of the detective plots. In the first novel, set in 1137, Cadfael is described as being a “veteran of fifty-seven” (Peters, Morbid Taste 9), who had been in Shrewsbury Abbey for fifteen years (5), making the date of his arrival 1122. For the short story, Peters changed the date of Cadfael’s vocation by two years to 1120, presumably in order to make it coincide with the wreck of the Blanche Nef in which Henry I’s only legitimate son died, leaving him with only “one legal daughter to inherit a barren empire” (Peters, “Light” 41). The first page and a half of the 46-page short story set the historical scene, sticking closely to proven historical facts, and situate Cadfael, Shrewsbury Abbey, and all the other characters within the bigger picture and anchor the series firmly in the context of the civil war. As a result, “A Light on the Road to Woodstock” places this key moment in Cadfael’s life only a few days after the tragedy which would change the history of England. It also makes Cadfael forty years old at this moment of transition, a symbolic age providing a parallel with Dante in the Divine Comedy.

14Although the title of the short story reminds the reader of the light on the road to Damascus which brought about the conversion of St. Paul (Acts of the Apostles, ch.9), this is not the story of a conversion, but of a vocation. While, as Judith Kollmann observes, “both the depth of his vocation and his spiritual development have been significant factors since the first novel” (32), no details were previously given about how Cadfael had become aware of his calling, apart from the remark that he had “chosen this cloistered life with his eyes open” (Morbid Taste 5). Peters had needed a monk detective who was not only a man of faith but also “a man of wide worldly experience and an inexhaustible fund of resigned tolerance for the human condition” (Benedictine 4) and therefore, of necessity, not a monk from his youth but a conversus, a man whose vocation had come late in life. However, Peters had to make credible this change of direction from dynamic crusader, seafarer, and man-at-arms to monk tending a garden of medicinal herbs. The short story seeks to show the coherence of this, very personal, choice.

15The transition in Cadfael’s life is presented not as a complete upheaval in the protagonist’s lifestyle and values, but rather as a logical next step and as a move from one life of discipline to another, equally valid. The future detective is presented as “blunt and insubordinate,” but above all “experienced and accomplished in arms, a man of his word, once given, and utterly reliable in whatever situation on land or sea” (“Light” 12). He is thus a good employee or soldier, appreciated by his superiors. This reliability comes from the fact that he “had imbibed the code of arms and wore it as a second nature” (12), respecting the ethical standards expected of him and willing to play his part in a common task. As he returns to England, he is aware of having reached the end of an era, with “no identifiable light beckoning him anywhere, along any road” (15). Yet, he is actively seeking “something new and momentous, a door opening into another room” (18-19).

16Intrigued by Alard, his fellow traveller, who is yearning to return to Evesham Abbey, from which he had fled in his youth, Cadfael realises that there “must be something desirable and lovely” in the monastic life “to cause a man to look towards it with that look on his face” (29). Yet, Cadfael is not looking for the rest, silence, and security that Alard craves. It is only when Cadfael saves Prior Heribert from the kidnappers who seek to trick the monks out of land, which is legitimately theirs, that he sees his way clear. Heribert explains that neither he nor the Abbey servants carry weapons: “We have no use for arms. We trust in God’s peace and, after it, in the King’s” (46). This faith of the Prior’s is justified as the Abbey is vindicated in the court. The altar boy in the parish church also tells Cadfael to leave his sword outside, and he accepts this as a sign for the way ahead, especially as he sees that the holt of his sword resembles a cross. Ultimately, Cadfael realises that the monastic life is “another discipline for another venture” (46), and one that can replace the code of arms he had chosen before. Telling the Prior that he is “free of one Master’s service and finished with arms” (53), he asks to be allowed to return with him to Shrewsbury Abbey. The implication is that Cadfael will submit himself to a new Master and a new discipline. God and the Abbot will replace his military commanders and the Rule of St. Benedict will replace the code of arms. Just as the acceptance of his personal responsibility to detect crime, protect the vulnerable, and bring justice brought him to this place of decision, they will continue to be part of his vocation in his new life. For Ellis Peters: “What happens to him on the road to Woodstock is simply the acceptance of a revelation from within that the life he has lived to date, active, mobile, and often violent, has reached its natural end, and he is confronted by a new need and a different challenge” (Benedictine 7).

  • 2 “The Price of Light” from Winter’s Crimes 11 and “Eye Witness” from Winter’s Crimes 13.

17“A Light on the Road to Woodstock” therefore provides readers with an entertaining crime story, but also enhances their knowledge of Cadfael’s world and Cadfael’s own past and enriches their experience of reading the novels in the series. Together with two other of her short stories from Winter’s Crimes on the theme of light,2 Headline republished it in 1988 in the composite volume A Rare Benedictine, which became part of the series with a similar cover design to the novels.

Kate Charles

  • 3 The title comes from a verse in the New Testament, 1 Corinthians 13:12: “For now we see through a g (...)

18Ever since the publication of the first novel of her Book of Psalms series, A Drink of Deadly Wine (1991), Kate Charles has been known as an ecclesiastical and clerical crime writer, including in every novel some controversial issue for the Church of England. After five novels with a male detective, David Middleton Brown, the experience of open-heart surgery in 1996 led Charles to abandon her series and write three one-off, rather darker books with female protagonists. Just after the turn of the century, Charles “discovered a great new love: Italy, and most particularly Venice” (Charles, “About Kate”) and wanted to write about “that most beautiful and seductive of cities” (“About Kate”). Around the same time, she was commissioned by American author Ralph McInerny to contribute a short story to an anthology of ecclesiastical crime short stories, Murder Most Catholic (2002). The story was “supposed to feature a member of the clergy, preferably as the detective character” (“About Kate”). For her short story, “Through a Glass Darkly,”3 Charles created a new character, “a young, newly ordained woman named Callie Anson” (“About Kate”), who uncovered a murder in a tale where, according to McInerny, “evocations of the city” are “firmly tied to an intricate and satisfying plot” (ix). The story takes place at a key moment in the protagonist’s life, immediately after her ordination and after the end of a long-term love relationship. This brief experience enables her to make sense of her new identity as a member of the clergy and also to discover a new aspect of her vocation: detection. Although there is a crime and some detection, the story focusses on the main character and her dual vocation. While the anthology sold relatively well, Charles’s story did not attract a great deal of attention.

The Callie Anson Series

  • 4 The website is no longer online.

19Women were first ordained to the priesthood in the Church of England in 1994 and, ten years later, Kate Charles “was becoming aware of what a difficult time ordained women continue[d] to have” (“About Kate”). Opposition and harassment from conservative Anglicans who did not accept their ministry made their work extremely stressful. Wanting to explore some of the issues they faced, Charles decided to take up Callie Anson, “a ready-made character, with an interesting history already in place” (“About Kate”), as her new series detective. In the first novel in the series, Evil Intent (2005), Charles deliberately creates links with the short story “Through a Glass Darkly.” She also put the story on her website to make it available to readers who wanted to know more about her detective.4 In Evil Intent, Callie settles into her new parish, remarking that she had previously “gone to Venice for three days, leaving the tea chests behind in an otherwise empty flat” (12). Marco/Mark, the policeman Callie had met on the flight back from Venice, reappears to update her on the murder case she had informed him about in the short story and becomes a potential romantic interest. His Venetian roots and Italian immigrant culture enable the link with Italy to be maintained. He affirms Callie’s detective talents, telling her that without her observation skills, the murderer and his lover “might very well have got away with it” (31). Callie and her ecclesiastical mentor, Frances, enable Charles to explore the problems faced by female clergy, but these are presented as a continuation of those evoked by Callie in the short story.

20Evil Intent was successful and, throughout five novels, Callie and Mark use their respective areas of specialised knowledge to solve crimes together. While Charles’s Book of Psalms series had no real ending and just stopped with no explanation, the Callie Anson series finishes with Callie and Mark returning to Venice on their honeymoon, with deliberate references to “Through a Glass, Darkly.” As their flight approaches the airport, Callie remarks that “the shimmering edges were hardening; the city was becoming more substantial, less ethereal, but no less magical for that” (Charles, Desolate Places 153-54). Callie is no longer a lone stranger as she had been in the short story, but she has married a Venetian and she belongs. The omniscient narrator remarks that “one of the benefits of travelling by private boat was avoiding being dumped off at the public dock, as Callie had been on her first trip” (Desolate Places 154) in “Through a Glass, Darkly.” The priest-detective has completed a full circle and returned to her starting place, while the short story is acknowledged as part of the series, a prelude to the five novels. Since 2013, the short story has been available in Charles’s short fiction anthology Through a Glass, Darkly and Other Stories.

Exceptions

21In his study of short story cycles, Lauro Zavala confronts “the persistent problem of defining literary genres: what is a short story? What is a novel? And, more recently, what is a minifiction? What are the boundaries between these genres?” (281). This examination of two short stories, a prequel and a prelude, raises the equally valid questions: what is a novel series? What is a crime fiction series? Is it possible to consider that a series, in crime fiction at least, may contain works of different lengths and types? After all, the Sherlock Holmes corpus contains 56 short stories and four novels, which are frequently treated together as a whole body of work. And yet, in the examples we have seen, while the short stories are integrated into the novel series and are necessary to the comprehension of the overall context and background of the corpus, they are structured differently from the novels and serve a different purpose. Charles May’s well-known statement that “whereas the novel is primarily a social and public form, the short story is mythic and spiritual” (328-29) is perhaps more relevant here. These two short stories are mythic, in the sense that they are “imaginal stories conveying . . . foundational accounts of the real experienced world and humans’ roles and relative statuses in it” (Doty 531). These stories, as is typical of prequels and preludes, deliberately lay the foundations of the imaginary worlds invented by Peters and Charles in which their detective protagonists play a central role. The worlds are real, in that both the twelfth century civil war in England and the cities of Venice and London in the early twenty-first century are real. In addition, both authors describe their settings accurately with respect for the known facts, but they also transform them into mythical places where their respective hero and heroine can engage in the fight between good and evil, truth and falsehood. The stories are also spiritual in that they recount the reception and acceptance of a vocation in which the sacred and the secular come together.

22However, the crimes in these short stories are only significant in that they permit the new detectives to discover their hidden talents. It is, as Charles May’s statement suggests, in their novels that Peters and Charles will explore more socially significant issues—among other topics, forced marriage, attitudes to leprosy, heresy, inheritance laws, or what makes a good parish priest for Peters; women in the church, paedophilia, homophobia, the integration of immigrants into British society, or intercultural marriages for Charles.

23And yet, we should remember that the two stories studied here are the exception rather than the rule. The other two Cadfael stories in Peters’s A Rare Benedictine, “The Price of Light” and “Eye Witness,” have no such mythical value. They are pleasant, well-written stories, but are outside the historical timeline which is usually so important in Peters’s world. The incidents narrated could have taken place at any point in Cadfael’s monastic life. This seems to be the norm. It is, for example, the case with practically all Agatha Christie’s Poirot or Miss Marple short stories or, more recently, the small number of P. D. James’s short stories featuring Adam Dagliesh. And although, in January 1954, Dorothy L. Sayers did write “A Tribute to Sherlock Holmes on the Occasion of his 100th Birthday,” a short prequel to her Lord Peter Wimsey series for the centenary of Sherlock Holmes’s birth, the story was very short, light-hearted and did not really add anything to the novels.

24On the other hand, Phil Rickman’s sole short story with his series detective Merrily Watkins, “The House of Susan Lulham” (2014), although neither a prequel nor a prelude, resembles the novels in the series by being both spiritual and social as it explores “the hornet’s nest of exorcism in a secular age” (Rickman 9). However, while the short story—later expanded into a novella of the same name (2015)—is fully integrated into the novel series and is as serious as the longer works, unlike the stories studied in this article, it does not satisfy readers’ curiosity about the protagonist or the context of the series, nor fill in any gaps. Like the novels, it is plot-driven. Peters deliberately used her short story to answer readers’ questions, but Rickman considers that, unlike novels, “short stories are expected to leave the reader asking questions” (175) and deliberately leaves “unanswered questions” (175) in “The House of Susan Lulham,” some of which are treated in the next series novel, Friends of the Dusk (2015).

25“Through a Glass, Darkly” and “A Light on the Road to Woodstock,” a prelude and a prequel, are therefore to be regarded as relatively rare exceptions, unusual examples of how short stories may enhance novel series by allowing the reader an insight into the genesis of their fictional worlds. Character-based tales in the plot-driven genre of detective fiction, they serve as a complement to the novels, introductions to rich imaginary worlds that it would be difficult to provide in any other way. Although the prequel was written when half of the novels with the same protagonist had already been published, and the prelude before any of the novels had been written, they both serve the same purpose and allow the author to provide a supplement to their novel series which enables the reader to enter more easily into the protagonist’s world.

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Bibliographie

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Notes

1 George Hardinge, 3rd Baron Hardinge of Penshurst (1921-97).

2 “The Price of Light” from Winter’s Crimes 11 and “Eye Witness” from Winter’s Crimes 13.

3 The title comes from a verse in the New Testament, 1 Corinthians 13:12: “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”

4 The website is no longer online.

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Suzanne Bray, « Prequels and Preludes: The Short Story and the Detective Novel Series »Journal of the Short Story in English, 79 | 2022, 189-202.

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Suzanne Bray, « Prequels and Preludes: The Short Story and the Detective Novel Series »Journal of the Short Story in English [En ligne], 79 | Autumn 2022, mis en ligne le 02 avril 2024, consulté le 17 juin 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/jsse/3954

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Suzanne Bray

Université Catholique de Lille

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