MYSTERY AUTHOR SKYE ALEXANDER ON SAYING GOODBYE TO WELL-LOVED CHARACTERS

Skye Alexander is the author of nearly 50 fiction and nonfiction books. Her stories have appeared in anthologies internationally, and her work has been translated into fifteen languages. In 2003, she cofounded Level Best Books with fellow crime writers Kate Flora and Susan Oleksiw. So far her Lizzie Crane mystery series includes four traditional historical novels set in the Jazz Age with a forth scheduled for a 2025 release. Learn more about Skye and her books at her website.

Saying Goodbye

Characters in books, like aspiring actors, often push for bigger parts in a story––and they may graduate from cameos to starring roles. Sometimes, though, they’re ready to retire or the author decides they’ve fulfilled their purposes and it’s time to say goodbye. 

 

‘Til Death Do Us Part

Mystery writers specialize in killing people. Though usually we bump off the bad guys, occasionally it’s necessary to eliminate a character we––or our readers––genuinely like. Writing about the same people, from the same point of view, can grow tedious for an author over time. Bestselling author Sue Grafton admitted she wished she’d chosen something shorter than her twenty-six-book alphabet series. Of course, you can’t kill the protagonist unless you’ve decided to end the series and write something else. 

 

In one of the most famous protagonist dumps, Agatha Christie got rid of her popular sleuth Hercule Poirot who starred in thirty of her novels. Christie had tired of the man she called a "detestable, bombastic, tiresome, ego-centric little creep" and wanted to “exorcise herself of him.” Except her publishers and fans wouldn’t let her. Finally, more than fifty years after his first appearance, Christie ended her literary relationship with Poirot. He became the only fictional character to get his obituary in the New York Times. 

 

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle didn’t intend for his famous detective Sherlock Holmes to be a major player in his novels. Worried that the popular pipe-smoking character was preventing him from penning more serious literature, the author decided to kill his cash cow. But his readers weren’t having it. Under pressure, Doyle wrote The Adventure of the Empty House in which he pointed out inadequate eyewitness accounts of the investigator’s supposed death in a previous book and resurrected the much-loved Holmes.

 

Leaving the Door Open

What if an author chooses to take a series in a different direction, rather than ending it? That’s what Anne Hillerman, daughter of the popular novelist Tony Hillerman, did after her famous father died in 2008. Anne opted to let Tony’s protagonist, Navajo Nation Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn, retire from the force––but he still serves as mentor to his partner Sergeant Jim Chee and Chee’s wife Officer Bernadette Manuelito. 

 

When I started writing Running in the Shadows, the fourth novel in my Lizzie Crane Jazz Age mystery series, one of the primary characters in my books asked me to relieve her of her duties. Melody Fitzgerald, a talented young flutist and violinist in my protagonist’s band, wanted to marry her sweetheart and start a family. I had to let her go. But even though her priorities have changed and she’ll no longer travel the country with her fellow musicians, Melody promises to make guest appearances from time to time. 

 

This halfway method allows the author to move into fresh territory, introducing new characters or elevating minor ones to major roles, without casting off the folks who begat the series. It’s also a more acceptable transition for readers who’ve become attached to fictitious friends and don’t want to say goodbye.

 

A Fitting End 

Cutting a character can be hard for writers––it’s like losing a friend you’ve been hanging out with for years. Mystery writer Tess Gerritsen agreed that eliminating a major character in her series was painful to write and she hesitated to do it. “But without that death, the tale would lose its power.” Sometimes it’s better to let characters die with dignity than to force them to continue after they’ve served their purpose or the author is itching to move on. 

Writing a character out of your series needs to be done carefully. Killing off a key character can be powerful, but the death needs to have meaning. In Gone with the Wind, for example, Melanie’s death awakens Scarlett to the fact that she loves Rhett, not Ashley. Maybe a character sacrifices his life to save a friend or a mother dies protecting her child. Thus, the writer makes it easier for readers to accept the loss by conferring hero/ine status on the deceased. After a respectful burial or “fare thee well” the author can open new doors and invite readers to step inside.

Running in the Shadows

A Lizzie Crane Mystery, Book 4

 

March 1926: Salem, Massachusetts

 

A spring equinox party at the mansion of a rich, flamboyant, and controversial art collector promises New York jazz singer Lizzie Crane and her band a fat paycheck, lucrative connections, and plenty of fun. She’ll also have an opportunity to reconnect with a handsome Boston Brahmin she fancies.

 

But the excitement she hopes for doesn’t turn out the way she expected. On the night of the musicians’ first performance, a naked young woman trots into the ballroom on horseback, sweeps up a talented artist named Sebastian, and rides off with him into the night. The next morning, Lizzie discovers the artist’s body tied to a tree, shot full of arrows like the martyred Saint Sebastian in Botticelli’s painting.

 

Soon Lizzie learns that her business partner, pianist Sidney Somerset, once had a close relationship with the dead man––and police suspect Sidney may have murdered him. As she tries to protect her friend and discover the killer, Lizzie gets swept up in the treacherous underworld of art theft and forgery, a world where fantastic sums of money change hands and where lives are cheap.  

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KILLING YOUR DARLINGS WITH GUEST AUTHOR TONI V. SWEENEY

Did Shakespeare angst over killing off Romeo and Juliet?

Since the publication of her first novel in 1989, Toni V. Sweeney divides her time between writing SF/Fantasy under her own name and romances under her pseudonym Icy Snow Blackstone. She also works as publicity manager for Class Act Books and is on the review staff of the New York Journal of Books and the paranormal Romance Guild. In 2016, she was named a Professional Reader by netgalley.com. Find out more about Toni and her books at here. 

Death and the Main Character

Never let it be said authors aren’t emotionally tied to their characters, no matter how important or how minor to the plot those characters may be.

It seemed simple enough.

One of my characters ran away from home as a child...led an adventurous but dissolute life...contracted a terminal disease. I'd decided he would return home, be welcomed back into the family fold, a cure would be found...and he'd live happily ever after.

It didn't work out that way.

The minute he staggered through the door, it hit me. He's going to die! "But I don't want it this way!" I shouted aloud, pushed away from the computer, and did a terribly embarrassing and stupid thing.

I put my hands to my face and burst into tears.

A little dramatic perhaps, but that's the way it happened. I had just killed off one of my main characters—and I didn't even intend to.

As I typed, I realized it had to be, because his death would influence the other characters from then on.

The character who died? Cash, my hero’s stepson, one of the second-string main characters.

Acashi Day-lin makes his first appearance in Sinbad's Last Voyage. At that time, he’s fourteen, the son of Andrea Talltrees and Tran Day, a handsome man-child with his father's startling semi-Asian looks. In that book, Cash doesn't take up many pages. When we meet him, he's sitting on the front porch of his mother's farmhouse, trying to absorb the fact that his world has just collapsed because his father is a fugitive, accused of being a spy and a smuggler named Sinbad sh'en Singh has taken his mother off-planet to search for him. His only other appearance is in the last chapter when he’s instrumental in reuniting Sin and Andi minutes before she gives birth to Sin’s son, but in those pages, he gives Sinbad a glimpse of future troubles to come.

In Sinbad's Wife, Cash has further adjustments. He now has a stepfather who is dying and a stepbrother, Adam Lawless, his partner in crime. While Sin is hospitalized, Cash and Adam raid the cookie jar and take themselves to Old Town to lose their virginity in an evening of teenage lust. When Andi is kidnapped by slavers, they enlist in the Space Guard to help bring her back. Confronted by his father, Cash has to make a choice between killing Tran or being called a coward by the man who sired him.

Fortunately, he’s saved from becoming a murderer by his stepfather.

Sinbad's Pride finds Cash a randy sixteen-year-old with hormones in overdrive, just beginning to emerge into the potential of a full-grown Serapian male. He runs away with Sin's concubine, only to find himself a single parent of twins, abandoned by his lover and forced to become an adult overnight as he is faced with the most difficult decision of all—how to provide for his children. Desperately, he sends them to Sinbad, begging him not to make them suffer for his sins.

Eighteen years have passed in Sinbad's Triumph. No longer the brash, ready-for-a-fight youngster, Cash is now thirty-seven, a weary but well-known mercenary dying of a terminal disease contracted during an unprotected back-alley encounter with a prostitute. He wants to go home, wants to see the sun come up over the mountains, wants to sit with his little sister N'Sagar as he used to when he would tell her he was making the sun come up just for her. With the help of N'Sagar and a doctor-monk from the Brotherhood of St Luke, he makes the journey back to Felida. Cash meets his children, Drea and Tran, discovering they have made him into a hero. He makes his peace with Sin, and everyone waits for the inevitable.

That was Cash’s history, and the reason I was so shocked by the way his story unfolded, albeit unwilling under my typing fingers. I had heard of characters taking over a story, of the story going off on tangents the author didn’t expect, but I’d never had it happen to me…until now.

Don’t think it didn’t hurt to write those lines. It wasn’t simply a matter of coldly finishing off a character, then pressing “Save” and going on to something else.

It hurt…and there was real emotional pain involved. What I had done lingered with me for days. I moped around as if a real person had died, someone I’d known and cared for. I delayed writing the rest of the novel. For a long time, I wavered in trying to decide if I should change the ending and give an eleventh hour rescue. At last, after much thought, I rationalized that Cash was, after all, just a fictional character, and I was being silly acting this way. I decided to leave the story as it was. It was more lifelike…

…after all, there aren’t many last-minute rescues in life, are there?

I've killed off other characters since (and some of them truly deserved it), but none affected me like Cash's death. Perhaps it's the fact that he was the first, or that I wrote into his passing my own first-hand, heart-wrenching experience of witnessing the death of someone I loved. Whatever the reason, killing off a character you've created from childhood to adulthood is a traumatic experience. I wouldn’t advise it as a matter of course; it's like losing a friend—and it stays with you.

Sinbad's Triumph will be released March 15. The other novels in the Adventures of Sinbad series are available as ebooks at Amazon and other major e-tailers. The paperback version is sold exclusively on the publisher’s website.

Sinbad’s Pride

The Adventures of Sinbad, Book 4

Being a family man doesn’t mean life’s over.

Sinbad sh’en Singh returns to his former occupation, with help from a loophole in Felida’s treaty…which means the Federation can’t do a thing about it.

The Fed may not be a threat, but wife Andi is. She doesn’t want a smuggler for a husband. Domestic bliss is a thing of the past.

Things get even rockier when two of the pride chiefs offer their daughters as concubines to the pride chief’s heir. It’ll take a great deal of sweet talk to make Andi agree to that!

Then there’s that smuggler who received Sin’s territories, and won’t give them up without a fight…

…and a new leaf is discovered on Sin’s empty family tree.

Overconfident as always, Sin’s sure he can handle it all…except for Andi. Bringing her around will be his biggest challenge.

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