Have you got the guts for killing your main character?
I’ve been watching ‘Death in Paradise’ on Netflix.
For those of you who don’t know the show, it’s light-hearted crime series set on a fictional Caribbean island. It started in 2011 but I don’t watch a lot of TV, so I’ve only just got round to it and I’ve been enjoying trying to solve the crimes before the ‘reveal’ at the end.
In the first two seasons Ben Miller stars as the stereotypically British lead detective but then, without any warning (because I was years behind), at the beginning of Season 3 he gets stabbed.
In my ‘writer’s head,’ I came up with possible scenarios. He’d faked his death to flush out some criminal? Or to test out one of his complicated the
ories? But no, they had really killed off their main character!
His replacement, Kris Marshall, took over immediately. But this wasn’t a Dr Who type replacement where it’s the same person in a different body. Nor was it the kind of replacement where they put in a new actor who looks vaguely like the original but pretend they hadn’t. (Gary Sparrow replaced both his wives throughout the series of Goodnight Sweetheart! – Yes, he was a bigamist – can you spot the difference?)
Of course, this was television. The actors/actresses playing these parts probably wanted to move on and the writers had to deal with their departure which probably never featured in their initial writing plan. But it got me thinking. It takes guts to kill off your main character and keep on with the series.
There was an outcry when Veronica Roth killed off Tris at the end of the Divergent Trilogy? And that was at the end of the story, not in the middle. (I admit I was a bit annoyed about this myself. I like an ending that, if not completely happy, at least hints at better times ahead.)
Can you imagine if Katniss had died in the first Hunger Games and Prim had taken over kicking the Capitol’s butt in the next two books? Would we have carried on reading?
What kind of character arc would we create for a story if the hero changes halfway through?
Would it keep people hooked if the hero/heroine who took over was already a popular character? Like murdering Harry Potter in The Half Blood Prince and making the last book “Hermoine Grainger and the Deathly Hallows”? Or would that make it a spin-off book rather than the original series in the same way that “Angel” was a spin-off from “Buffy the Vampire Slayer?”
Curiously, the new detective in Death in Paradise slotted into the story and it just carried on as if nothing had happened. Maybe I’m making more out of this than I should.
So, writers, have you got the guts for killing your main character? And readers, would it make you abandon the book? Let me know in the comments.
