What I think is true is there are only a very limited number of characters in the world, certainly only a very limited number that one man can cope with. And even [in the work of] the greatest novelists you'll find the same characters turning up again with different names, just as there are very few faces in the world, very few stories in the world… The great thing is never kill your characters. That's where someone like PG Wodehouse has been so brilliant. He has a limited number of characters and he's now, what, over eighty, and still producing work as clever and fresh as he was doing sixty years ago… Because he knows his scope and never kills them off. And there's the awful temptation that a novelist has as he gets towards the last chapter, of thinking, well, 'Finished with them, off with their heads, kill them off, throw one over a precipice, have a motor car accident, do anything, just get rid of them.' Then he finds [when] he writes his next novel he can't think of anybody else to write about so he has to produce these same people with different names and different circumstances.
Monitor [BBC TV, 1964]
Use the link below to read an article about the ninetieth anniversary of Black Mischief, a 1932 novel by British novelist EVELYN WAUGH, published online by Australian academic NAOMI MILTHORPE:
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