By Hillel Italie
Associated Press Writer
Friday, Oct. 29, 1999; 2:43 p.m. EDT

NEW YORK –– As publishers wonder what will sell in the 21st century, some popular writers are reviving a sensation from the 1800s: the serialized novel.

Caleb Carr, author of the historical thriller "The Alienist," is serializing a futuristic novella in Time magazine. John Grisham's new novel will come out next year in installments in The Oxford American, a Mississippi-based journal he helps publish.

"I was shocked, and very pleasantly shocked, when Time asked me to do it. It's a great tradition that's been lost," Carr said Thursday. His work will appear in five special editions of Time, all centered on the future. The first part is planned for Monday's issue.

"All writers, after writing a number of books in a certain genre, think about doing something different just to see if you can do it," added Grisham, who plans to write a coming-of-age story, with no lawyers or courtrooms.

Serials are a part of both publishing and cultural history. In the 1830s, when new technology allowed for rapid mass distribution of printed materials, a magazine publisher convinced a young Charles Dickens to write a book in monthly installments. "The Pickwick Papers" was an unprecedented success, with readers following the progress of his novel the way soap opera viewers now await the next day's episode.

Some of the greatest literature has first been serialized, including Tolstoy's "War and Peace," Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment" and Henry James' "The Portrait of a Lady." Mark Twain and Herman Melville are among the many other writers whose novels originally appeared in magazines.

"This is what people wanted to read," said Lewis Lapham, editor of Harper's magazine, which serialized Dickens, Anthony Trollope, Thomas Hardy and others.

"Dickens was a rock star, comparable to Mick Jagger. Enormous crowds came out to see him speak. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky would publish their fiction in magazines and crowds would surround the kiosks to read it."

Thanks in part to the rise of the short story, and to the rise of movies and other media, the format faded. But it never really disappeared. Norman Mailer's "An American Dream" was issued in installments by Esquire in the 1960s and Tom Wolfe's "The Bonfire of the Vanities" first came out in Rolling Stone in the 1980s.

Ideally, serials help both periodicals and publishers. The Oxford American, which has an average print run of 50,000 copies, plans to quadruple that number for the six issues next year featuring Grisham's novel. "Bonfire of the Vanities" received enormous advance publicity through its appearance in Rolling Stone.

"It was tremendously successful both for Rolling Stone and for Wolfe," said Laurie Brown, vice president of marketing for Wolfe's publisher, Farrar, Straus & Giroux. "There's a long wait between his novels and it gave audiences something to sustain their appetite."

In the '90s, a new kind of serial emerged: a continuing story published entirely in book form. Stephen King's "The Green Mile" consisted of six short novels, each released a month apart. Romance writer Jackie Collins and horror writer John Saul both used a similar approach.

But with magazines giving far less space to fiction than they did a century ago, old-fashioned serializing has become increasingly rare. Both Lapham and Brown doubt whether even writers with the appeal of Grisham and Carr can fully bring it back.

"It's a nostalgia thing, a stunt," Lapham said. "Look at Grisham: They call his books page-turners because they're something you want to get through in one evening. You don't want to wait four months."

"There's a novelty value," Brown said, "and it makes for an intriguing press release, but it's a gimmick.

"And I wonder about subscribers. Magazines have a much more hit or miss readership than they used to. Even if people get a magazine regularly, they don't always finish them. It's more like a cable TV show, where people try to catch two or three episodes but they can't get all 10."

As for Grisham, he said the response to his serial novel will determine if he drops the legal element from future works.

"If it's well-received and people enjoy it, I can think of other stories that might come from the past," Grisham said. "If it's not, I just might go back and kill some more lawyers. That seems to be working real well."

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EDITOR'S NOTE – Associated Press writer Stephen Hawkins in Jackson, Miss., contributed to this story.