Authors sometimes tire of popular characters
A successful franchise is a boon for lucky writers, but what do they do when they fall out of love with the character that made them famous?
After 24 years, thriller writer Lee Child has had it with Jack Reacher.
At 65, he’s weary of chronicling the adventures of his invincible loner hero.
“I couldn’t do it anymore,” Child admitted in a recent interview, confirming that his brother Andrew Grant, also an author, would be taking over. And Child had another interesting revelation: “I don’t like Reacher that much,” he told The Irish Times. But he enjoyed having total control over him — “I’m the only person in the world he’s scared of.”
Child isn’t the only crime writer to fall out of love with a fictional creation.
Arthur Conan Doyle unsuccessfully tried to kill off Sherlock Holmes. Agatha Christie once labelled her moustachioed Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot, “a detestable, bombastic, tiresome, egocentric little creep.”
A compelling series character can lead to huge sales. But it can also leave authors in a bind. Should a Poirot or a Reacher or an Inspector Morse be allowed to get old? Can they be put out to pasture? Can you get away with bumping them off?
Author Michael Connelly likes maverick Los Angeles cop Harry Bosch too much to get rid of him. But he created a problem for himself when he made Bosch 42 years old at his first fictional appearance. “If I’d had any inkling that’s I’d be writing about this guy for 25 years or more, I’d have made him younger,” Connelly told the Guardian newspaper recently.
Connelly still manages to find things for Bosch to do as a civilian, but Harry is definitely becoming a senior citizen. “It’s not believable that some 70-year-old guy would still have a badge and gun and work for the LAPD.”
By contrast, Patricia Cornwell, who has been writing about pathologist Kay Scarpetta for three decades, made the prudent decision years ago to keep her creation stuck in a 40-something age bracket.
The late P.D. James wrote 14 much-loved novels featuring Scotland Yard policeman Adam Dalgliesh, and she was 88 when she simply decided to let him take his leave in The Private Patient, a novel carrying the promise of a happier existence for her often-troubled hero.
“There’s something almost valedictory about this one, isn’t there?” James told Postmedia in a 2008 interview. She would continue writing, but couldn’t see a further Dalgliesh case beckoning. “I think this new one has set quite a high standard,” she said. “I won’t want to go on if I can’t maintain that standard.”
By contrast, Christie kept Poirot going through a final writing phase that saw her narrative powers faltering. “Why did I ever invent this detestable, bombastic little creature?” she once fretted. Poirot and his little grey brain cells remained a defiant, infuriating presence in her creative life — even though she had secretly killed him off in the mid-1940s.
That’s when Christie wrote Curtain, an ingenious thriller that brought an ailing Poirot’s life to a decisive end when he refused to take his medication. It was then locked away in a vault on the understanding that it would not be released until after she was dead. More than 30 years later, Christie relented and allowed it to be published a few months before her death in 1976.
As for Conan Doyle, he thought he had brought Sherlock Holmes to an end in 1893 at the hands of the villainous Professor Moriarty. But public anger was so unrelenting that the Great Detective was back in the bookshops eight years later.
Poirot and Holmes would remain profitable “brands,” with other authors later restoring them to life, but Reacher occupies his own niche as a lucrative commodity, having now sold more than a million books worldwide. Child did consider killing him off at one point but figured this would be “gratuitously cruel” to Reacher’s legion of readers. Hence the decision to keep Reacher going by farming him out to his brother, on the condition that he now write as Andrew Child.
Lee Child is at least keeping the franchise in the family, unlike James Patterson, who employs a host of collaborators to keep his name and presence in the bookshops regardless of how much or how little he actually writes. But some fellow writers show a distinct lack of enthusiasm for Child’s decision.
Norway’s Jo Nesbo, creator of detective Harry Hole, says there’s no way he would ever allow the
(Private eye
V.I. Warshawski) is a commodity alive in my imagination, not a commodity to be bought and sold by other people.
franchise to continue with another author. Indeed, to prevent it, he might have to take decisive action. “Harry probably won’t die of old age,” Nesbo says ominously.
Veteran crime writer Sara Paretsky says she was “startled” by Child’s move and pledges that V.I. Warshawski, a favourite female private eye for many readers, will not survive her creator. “She is a commodity alive in my imagination,” Partetsky has said, “not a commodity to be bought and sold by other people.”
Two of Britain’s most distinguished crime writers, Graham Hurley and the late Colin Dexter, were ruthless in dispensing with their fictional creations.
Dexter created the formidable Inspector Morse, and took pleasure in that fact. But he considered the books themselves to be rubbish, telling Postmedia in 1996 that the only way he could stop writing them was to get rid of Morse.
Three years later, in The Remorseful Day, he silenced Morse permanently — felling him with uncontrolled diabetes and excessive alcohol consumption.
Hurley’s superb series of crime thrillers set in the historic seaport city of Portsmouth featured perhaps the most despairing cop in British crime fiction. Joe Faraday is a policeman constantly seeking personal redemption. And his growing sense of personal failure, coupled with disgust with the culture of which he is a part, leads to suicide at the very beginning of the final Faraday novel, brutally titled Happy Days.
The great John Harvey went a different route with his jazz-loving Nottingham cop, Charlie Resnick. Harvey concluded his gritty, compulsively readable Resnick saga by allowing Charlie a peaceful leave-taking in the 2014 novel Darkness, Darkness.
Harvey admitted he did consider killing off Resnick. “But then I thought: No, that would be very unfair — unfair to him, unfair to readers and unfair to me,” he said in a television interview.
So Harvey left Charlie in contented retirement, sitting in a downtown square with a cup of takeout coffee in his hand before wandering off to the Music King store to purchase a coveted Thelonious Monk album. “He’ll take it home, finish the coffee, put it on the stereo, feed the cats. Goodbye, Charlie — have a happy life.”