DeDe Halcyon winds up at a health resort with a thinly disguised Elizabeth Taylor. The serialisation of the early books mean they have a great sense of time and place. Indeed Michael’s letter coming out to his parents towards the end of ‘More Tales of the City’ is as close to an LGBT manifesto as Maupin gets anywhere in his work. The other key player is Michael Tolliver, who it becomes clear is based on the author. From her arrival from Cleveland to her departure to New York she is the central character around which the stories are woven. The 6 original books follow the journey of Mary Ann Singleton through San Francisco in the 70s and 80s. There were 3 further books that picked up the story 20 years later. When BBC Radio 4 dramatised all 9 books from 2013, ‘ Sure of You’ was mixed in with the previous book ‘ Significant Others’ as there were fewer of the independent scenes that made up the early stories, and which were used to frame the radio plays. The change in style of the sixth book, ‘ Sure Of You’, which was written as a novel first is obvious, with a much more linear narrative. This way of publishing new work remained popular in the USA and the first four titles in the ‘Tales of the City’ sequence appearing as regular instalments in the San Francisco Chronicle, and the fifth appeared in the San Francisco Examiner. Many of Dickens, Wilkie Collins and Conan Doyle’s novels started life as magazine serials.
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