Characters that Don't Age (and how they explain it, if at all)

Cafe Society
77

Almost twenty years ago I started a somewhat related thread when I realized that P.G. Wodehouse had written about Jeeves and Wooster from 1916 to 1974, a “lifespan” for the characters of 58 years.

I revived it 11 years later, to add Ross Poldark (57 years), and by the end of that thread we had determined, thanks to @bibliophage, that Wodehouse’s Lord Emsworth had an even longer span, 60 years.

(@Exapno_Mapcase went above and beyond and found more than a dozen other mystery writers’ characters with spans above 40 years.)

My criteria were characters in works written by the (single) original author, with the cutoff date being the author’s death, not publication date. I excluded comic book and comic strip characters, which seem to have made up the bulk of of the discussion in the present thread.

In preparing this post, I found that John Norman’s Tarl Cabot is still going strong, moving him up from “only” 47 years to 56. Larry Niven, while still alive, seems not to have written about Louis Wu since 2015. (Please correct me if I’m wrong about these two authors.)

Here’s the final list, as of the summer of 2015:

  • 60 years: Lord Emsworth (Wodehouse)
  • 58 years: Jeeves and Wooster (Wodehouse)
  • 57 years: Ross Poldark (Graham)
  • 56 years: Tarl Cabot (Norman)*
  • 55 years: Hercule Poirot (Christie)
  • 55 years: The Saint (Charteris)
  • 53 years: Eliots (Bradbury)
  • 53 years: Billy Bunter (Richards)
  • 51 years: Tommy and Tuppence (Christie)
  • 51 years: Eddie Wilson (Haywood)
  • 51 years: Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom (Updike)
  • 49 years: Ramona Quimby (Cleary)
  • 49 years: Stainless Steel Rat (Harrison)
  • 49 years: Det. Steve Carella, et al – 87th Precinct (McBain)
  • 49 years: Reginald Wexford (Rendell)
  • 49 years: Mike Hammer (Spillane)
  • 49 years: Parker (Westlake)
  • 49 years: Giles Habibula (Williamson)
  • 47 years: Elric of Melnibone (Moorcock)
  • 46 years: Woodrow Wilson Smith (Heinlein)
  • 46 years: Fu Manchu (Rohmer)
  • 44 years: Louis Wu (Niven)**
  • 43 years: Nero Wolfe (Stout)
  • 41 years: Hari Seldon (Asimov)
  • 41 years: Adam Dalgleish (James)
  • 41 years: Inspector Jules Maigret (Simenon)
  • 40 years: Sherlock Holmes (Conan Doyle)
  • 40 years: Perry Mason (Gardner)
  • 40 years: Gandalf (Tolkein)

*Author still alive, updated from original post.
**Author still alive, but no new works since 2015.