A companion to the thread about non-aging characters. What happens when a character is so popular they have to bring him or her back, but they’ve very definitely been killed?
Doyle killed off Sherlock Holmes, to his great satisfaction, but the public still wanted him. So he brought out the novel The Hound of the Baskervilles, which took place before his precipitation into the Reichenbach Falls. But they wanted more, so Doyle , stating that fortunately “no one had pronounced on the remains”, brought him back by having him not actually be dead.
The same can’t hold true for the other participant i that wrestling match at the Falls. Professor Moriarty was “really most sincerely dead.” That didn’t stop him from showing up alive in The Valley of Fear. There’s no time for the events of TVoF to take place during the course of The Final Problem, so either Moriarty, too, escaped, or else Watson wasn’t accurate in his recounting of events.
The first character in literature I am aware of who undeniably was killed and reduced to ashes, yet came back again, was Ayesha from H. Rider Haggard’s She. Eighteen years after the events of She he resurrected her by mystical means. She went on to appear in two more novels, but they were both flashbacks, which didn’t require her resurrection.
I’m told that Dr. Fu Manchu got killed off in one of Sax Rohmer’s books, but was resurrected, as well. Well, he had that Elixir of Life, after all.
Ygor, the twisted-necked almost-hanged shepherd from the Universal horror movies, played by Bela Lugosi, was clearly killed at the end of Son of Frankenstein. But he showed up alive, without explanation, in The Ghost of Frankenstein. I could buy the Monster being resurrected after falling into a sulfur pit – he’s a monster, after all. But Ygor, while he could survive a hanging, seemed less likely to withstand be shot at close range. Especially a shooting that would convince the monster that Ygor was dead. It’s possible that Ygor was made of sterner stuff.
The Wolfman definitely died at the end of The Wolfman, bbut got revived when a couple of graverobbers had the bad luck to open the tomb during a full moon. The Wolfman revived, bringing poor Larry Talbot with him.
House of Frankenstein brought back Dracula by having the stake pulled out of his skeleton – a trick used in Columbia’s Return of the Vampire about the same time. Dracula dissolves under sunlight at the end of HoF, but is inexplicably back for House of Dracula, only to get sunlit again. At the end of the movie, Tsalbot is cured of his Lycanthropy (and of death, one assumes).
But in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein Talbot has lycanthropy again, and the twice-sunlight-immolated Dracula is back, too. All of the monsters apparently meet their ends at the movie’s conclusion, since they never re-appeared in any of the Universaal films in their old guises. Two comedians succeeded where others had failed.