Mr. Cornwell: I’d be interested in learning about your feelings regarding killing a character off. From my perspective, killing off an interesting and well developed character must be a gut wrenching decision. Also, do your characters occasionally change and evolve in ways that you did not originally envision? I personally was completely surprised in the Sharpe novels, when Lord Pumphreys went from being a likable rogue to being something more loathsome that I was rooting for Sharpe to kill. Was this something you had in the back of your mind from the characters inception?

Tom Ciolli