The only constant

ACTORS are often typecast. The comedic fat guy who follows the lead character around in a long-running sitcom won’t get to play a brutal mob boss in an R-rated film. The audience just won’t buy it. He’s too well-known as the funny sidekick. Even as he hits someone in the head with a baseball bat, the audience is waiting for the punch line.

Writers can get typecast too. Authors as diverse as Anne Rice and John Banville have used pseudonyms to write in different genres. Many mystery writers have a hard time letting go of favorite series characters. Readers get attached and want more. Novels have even been written about the fan who refuses to let an author’s creation die.

Barbara Seranella’s character Munch Mancini is well loved for good reason. She’s little and tough, an ex-heroin addict and a smart, funny auto mechanic. That she was based on the author’s experience as a junkie and prostitute-turned-ace grease monkey didn’t hurt. Munch (short for Munchkin) speaks with equal authority on turning tricks and changing sparkplugs. She’s unforgettable in Seranella’s eight Munch Mancini murder mysteries.

But an author gets tired of writing the same thing, just as that actor gets tired of playing the second banana. After years with Munch, it is no surprise that Seranella wanted to spend time with someone new.

Enter Charlotte Lyon, star of Seranella’s new novel, “Deadman’s Switch.” She lives in a big house by the ocean, wears designer clothing and expensive, understated jewelry and is a sometime caregiver for her alcoholic mother. Her husband has just died in an accident. Charlotte has her own business in crisis management, spinning public opinion after tragic mistakes at big corporations (think bad hamburgers at Jack in the Box). The book opens with a train derailment that kills two people and provides her next assignment.

Most interesting, Charlotte suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder. She makes clients wear hospital booties when they ride in her immaculate Mercedes. A ding in a living room wall can give her palpitations. She tries to avoid shaking anyone’s hand; when forced to, she immediately squirts on disinfecting hand cleaner. But her compulsions seem to come and go. She climbs through the filthy train, yet doesn’t wash her hands; she drinks iced tea with home-grown lemons at a woman’s house, then refuses fresh tomatoes, fearing E. coli contamination. She kisses a man on the second date, which seems out of character for someone so concerned about germs. And where Munch’s thoughts of carburetors and exhaust systems help cops solve a murder and are integral to her character, Charlotte’s ruminations on train brakes and switching gear seem forced, as does her determination to solve the case.

Seranella’s plots are often simple; still, they transcend the basic whodunit because of her fine writing and multifaceted characters. But in this book, Munch is missing. Compared with that plucky biker chick with grease under her fingernails, Charlotte is pale and disappointing; it’s as if Seranella were still trying to find the crisis manager’s voice.

On Jan. 21, at age 50, Barbara Seranella died of liver disease. Charlotte Lyon had not yet become a character that readers would kill to keep around. It is a crime that we will never get the chance.