Angel of Death

24. How willing are you to kill your characters if the plot so demands it? What’s the most interesting way you’ve killed someone?

I’m perfectly willing to kill a character whose purpose in the story is to die – that’s what he’s there for. To a certain extent I think of my characters as actors who are playing the different parts in the story, and like most actors, my characters like a nice death scene. It’s a chance for them to get lots of attention and to have the spotlight firmly on them for a while. As long as I manage to get it across how terrible and tragic it is that this character is no longer with us, as long as the other characters mourn enough, my characters don’t mind being killed. They’d hate to have a good death be wasted (as it so often is on TV, where next week all the other characters act as though the person they’d been working with for years never existed at all.) But I try and make sure that doesn’t happen, and the repercussions of the death take a good long time to work out – as they would in real life, of course.