when i was writing the pillars of the earth, i've got this character, william hamleigh, and he's thed there are several villains in that story, but he's the worst of them all. and i thought, you know, should i try and give him some saving grace? and... and then i thought, the heck with it — he's going to be absolutely out—and—out as black as coal. and interestingly enough, of all my characters, he's the one most mentioned in conversations with readers, and they say, "that william hamleigh, i wanted you to kill him off earlier." of course, with a character that good, i wasn't going to kill him off until the end of the book. but isn't it interesting that the readers, they didn't say to me, "surely he should have had some saving grace, there ought to have been something nice about him." they just totally responded to him. you deal with big questions and big actions, and big, often brave, bold characters, and i imagine that's no coincidence, that in a novel you need... a sort of mousy wallflower is just not going to be very interesting, who doesn't make big decisions. absolutely, yeah. c