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Still, I can understand what prompted Marlowe to make the change. It's difficult to sustain the criminality of a series character. Over a period of time, such characters tend to mellow, to work increasingly on the side of the law. It is as if their creators are uncomfortable with them as criminals and yearn to reform them. Perhaps, at the risk of plumbing psychoanalytical depths, we might suggest that they're uncomfortable with themselves writing repeatedly from a criminal perspective.

Voltaire, it is said, made a visit to a highly specialized bordello and enjoyed himself. He declined an opportunity to return for a second visit. Once, a philosopher, he said. Twice, a pervert.

So it is, perhaps, with writers. To explore the mind of the criminal by writing from his viewpoint is one thing. To establish him in an extended series of books as one's literary alter ego is something else.

Harrumph. Bernie Rhodenbarr is unquestionably a criminal, and very much a professional at that. He, too, is unquestionably an unintentional series character. Bernie's prototype was born in a never-finished Scudder novel as a burglar who found himself framed for murder and enlisted Scudder's help. When I scuttled that particular book I held over the basic situation while remaking the character entirely, making Bernie flip and urbane and making him solve the murder himself.

He became a series character because I found I liked writing about him. I wrote a second book and a third, and by the time you read this I hope and pray I shall have written a fourth. I don't know that I can go on writing about Bernie indefinitely, given my propensity for outlasting my series characters, but he certainly would seem to have another book or two in him, and as long as I feel that way I suppose I'll carry on. I sincerely hope, though, that I don't let the clown turn respectable. The image of a Bernie-turned-straight using his talents for illegal entry on behalf of the forces of law and order is one I find more than a little sick-making.

Same thing goes for Martin Ehrengraf, of whom I suspect I may already have finished writing. Ehrengraf was another unintentional series character; one story led to another, and each time it became a little more difficult to hatch a new plot that would lend itself to his particular character. Fred Dannay has pointed out that Randolph Mason, a similarly corrupt fictional attorney, ultimately reformed and used his talents to uphold the law. I have no intention of allowing Ehrengraf to come to such a bad end.

Matt Scudder was my one series character who was so conceived before a word was written about him. I had an opportunity to develop a series for Dell and went into a huddle with myself to dream up a character. Leonard Shecter's book On the Pad got my mind working, and as we observed in the chapter on Character Building, I shaped and molded my impression to fit my own perspective. I have long felt that every series character is very much a projection of self, and in Scudder's case the parallels were clear enough.

Before I began work on The Sins of the Fathers, the first Scudder novel, I had written a handful of pages about Scudder's character and lifestyle, first as a sort of letter to myself to clarify my grasp of the character, then as a series proposal for Bill Grose at Dell. By the time I began writing the book, I accordingly knew a great deal about my lead. But I didn't really know him until he began to develop on the page, speaking in his own voice and showing me how he was inclined to act and react, how he perceived the world and related to it. Writing, however well I prepare for it, is never a simple matter of filling in the blanks. The magic that happens at the actual moment of creation is an indispensable part of the whole.

For all my prior planning, Scudder grew and ripened from one book to the next. Infuriatingly, one reviewer groused that the third book seemed a bit weaker than the second; as it happened, Dell reversed the second and third books when publishing them.

For several years it looked as though Scudder and I were through with one another. Then, as I've mentioned earlier, I wrote a fourth book about the character, and it was like embracing an old friend. Perhaps an actor feels something similar when he plays a role with which he had a success years earlier. I was particularly pleased to find that Scudder was a better character for his time at leisure; the book, A Stab in the Dark, is to my mind the best to date.

While I would hardly set myself up as an expert on series novels, I do seem to have fulfilled my youthful dream with a vengeance. Perhaps some thoughts on series in general might be of value to those of you out there dreaming a similar dream.

1. CONCENTRATE ON THE BOOK AT HAND. I've occasionally had letters from neophyte writers who describe themselves as working on the first volume of a series, and I know that first novels thus described frequently turn up in the hands of agents and publishers. The agents and publishers are not much impressed. Their interest in