With stories as in love, three is a crowd. One exception which proves this rule is Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall series. Those three books are good to the last drop - of blood - right up to the 1932nd page.
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Mantel's is a rare and remarkable feat, exhilarating but exhausting author and reader alike.
Assembling a trilogy is as daunting as finishing a triathlon.
Instead of running, cycling and swimming, the writer needs to synchronise twists in the plot, reserve enough but not too much, orchestrate a climax for each volume, reveal character trait by trait, and maintain a narrative without flagging or repeating herself.
Perhaps putting three things together is just too hard to manage in any form.
Two kids will play happily with each other, but three will invariably quarrel.
Although triangles might look geometrically neat, you cannot build much out of them.
The triumvirates which ruled the Roman Republic all ended in tears. Christians possess one pre-eminent example of a trilogy, the Holy Trinity.
Leaving them aside, other trios lurch from the sublime to the ridiculous.
Consider how the legacy of luminous medieval triptychs was debased when Francis Bacon adopted the technique. Think of famous but entirely ridiculous trios, ones like Donald Duck's nephews (Huey, Dewey and Louie) or the Three Stooges (Larry, Moe and Curly Joe, although others gate-crashed).
The Three Tenors survived better together. Remember the Three Musketeers, even though a fourth (d'Artagnan) always joined the set and their trilogy of adventures was published in four or five volumes as well as three.
Some authors muck about with their trilogies.
Thomas Harris wrote two more tales around his shocking horror story, The Silence of the Lambs, but the pre-quel (Red Dragon) was composed years after popular acclaim for the book in the middle.
Douglas Adams called his hitch-hiker's guide to the galaxy a trilogy, despite the fact that the series included six books, the last one written by someone else.
Margaret Atwood's dystopian MaddAddam trilogy could have been trimmed by at least one of the thirds, as could that venerable trilogy, John dos Passos' USA.
Oddly, four books run along more smoothly than three. Take the examples of two quartets (Paul Scott's on the Raj and Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria) in addition to Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels.
Awkwardly, like older folk, too many trilogies sag in the middle. Fans were liberated when the second "Star Wars" film (The Empire Strikes Back) was shuffled out of sight, along with its ludicrous planets of Bespi and Dagobah, a tiresome capture by a wampa and a stilted attack by AT-AT walkers.
After that nonsense came Return of the Jedi, reviving any viewer with a gripping fight and flight sequence over the Sarlacc pit.
A more earnest illustration of the point is Patrick Leigh Fermor's trilogy about his walk across Europe in the 1930s, where the insights and incisiveness of the first volume wither away as he trudges doggedly on through the second.
What a peculiar series that was, with the first book published 44 years after the walk itself (1977 and 1933), then the last issued posthumously a full 80 years after Fermor laced up his walking boots.
Evidence for the contrary is to be found in the second episode of the Godfather trilogy. Superb ensemble acting and a compelling plot are put entirely at the service of the dark side.
Nonetheless, writers persist. Pat Barker produced a harrowing trilogy on the First World War, one which captures a sense of waste, loss and every other component of tragedy as eloquently as any Wilfred Owen poem.
English readers especially are still enticed by Olivia Manning's Balkan trilogy or Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honour. Amitav Ghosh wrote two excellent accounts of the Opium Wars, before his trilogy subsided in an overblown rendition of the British seizure of Hong Kong (Flood of Fire).
Those six books are high art, if you like.
Two contemporary thriller trilogies will also live on. One is Stieg Larsson's ever more gruesome tales about the girl with the dragon tattoo, the other Philip Kerr's first three stories about his German detective, Bernie Gunther (published as Berlin Noir).
Those novels, set in 1936, 1938 and 1947, open a series which then ranges back and forth in time (14 in all).
The other 11 are artful, but only the first trilogy is really tight, taut and tense.
Turning to Australia, Frank Moorhouse's Edith trilogy remains vivid and poignant.
That brings us back to Hilary Mantel, who has somehow established more proficiently than most politicians how power might be garnered, nurtured, protected and used.
Her third volume might have been edited a little more rigorously, to remove a few arabesques and whiffs of the baroque.
To be fair, such carping sounds a little like claiming Mozart used too many notes.
The novels do not display hesitation at the start, sag in the middle or padding at the end.
As a trilogy, the only fitting comparison in my lifetime is Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. Both trilogies are so compelling that they easily survive adaptation, whether into theatre, television, animation or film.
In a sense, Tolkien is a mirror image of Wolf Hall, a parable about how power might be resisted, ordinary people given their due and decency prevail.
It takes three whole books to prove points as optimistic as those.
