Minor nitpcik, but Asimov’s Hari Seldon first appears in a short story published in 1942, and last in Forward the Foundation in 1993, which puts him in the top 10.
Technically his first appearance is as a speaking holographic image, but that should count, imho.
Albert Campion, by Margery Allingham 1929-1966
Peter Clancy, by Lee Thayer 1919-1966
Dalziel & Pascoe, by Reginald Hill 1970-2009
Father Dowling, by Ralph McInery 1977-2009
Gervase Fen, Edmund Crispin 1944-1977
In a complete inverse of this there’s Rumpole of the Bailey (1978-2009) where Rumpole is always just about 70, but the stories are set in the present day, whenever that is. This means that in the first set of stories it’s said that Rumpole was a veteran of World War II, but in later ones he wasn’t.
George Gently by Alan Hunter 1955-1999
Ganesh Ghote by H. R. F. Keating 1964-2009
Ebenezer Gryce by Anna Katherine Green 1878-1917
Matt Helm by Donald Hamilton 1960-1993
Exapno: Wow. Thanks.
But save yourself some trouble and don’t bother with anyone under 45 or so.
I found it interesting that in my list, there was quite a clump at 49 years.
45 is a high bar. I’m tossing in a couple of other 40+ because you’d never hear of them otherwise.
Inspector Schmidt, by George Bagby 1935-1983
Colin Thane, by Bill Knox 1957-1999
Ludovic Travers, by Christopher Bush 1926-1968
A couple of comments on earlier names.
Trying to pin down what was Leslie Charteris’ role in the Saint books after 1970 is frustrating. Everybody agrees that he wrote nothing after 1970 (or 1971, depending on who you believe). He did something to the tv show novelizations written by others, but whether that was rewriting, touching up, editorial commentary, or merely reading them is impossible to say. If it were my list I’d put him at 40 years.
Trying to define posthumous publication is also foggy. I’d have no problem including works in the pipeline at an author’s death. But Agatha Christie wrote *Curtain *during WWII and intended it to be posthumous. It happened to come out when she was still alive, but it violates the spirit of the rule, to my mind. The last true Poirot novel is Elephants Can Remember in 1972, giving him a still respectable 52 years.
Ray Bradbury wrote about Elliot family not the Eliot. From the Dust Returned is kind of a cheat, really an old short story collection with some connective tissue.
Then there’s the mysterious case of Ed Hoch. The master of the mystery short story, he wrote nearly 1000 starting in the 1950s and continuing to his death in 2008. He wrote dozens of series characters and returned to them over and over. I can’t find a complete story listing online, but it’s possible that one or two of his characters span 45 years.
I’m using my privilege as the OP to revive this thread after a hiatus of nearly 11 years to report a new discovery that matches, if not exceeds, our current record holder, Lord Emsworth.
It’s another Wodehouse character I had not considered, Stanley Featherstonehaugh Ukridge.
I was reading through my collection of the complete works, and just happened to refer to the Wikipedia page linked above, which was created shortly before I posted the OP in 2004.
And answers the question I posed in the OP, with a different answer than we spent the subsequent 11 years tracking down!
If only I had looked there first! (To be fair to myself, I don’t know if the passage below was in the earliest versions of the page.)
Though Ukridge never achieved the popularity of the same author’s Bertie Wooster and Jeeves, Wodehouse retained a certain fondness for him, his last appearance in a Wodehouse story being as late as 1966. With completed new stories appearing over a span of 60 years, he is the longest-running of Wodehouse’s characters, topping Jeeves and Wooster (1915–1974, or 59 years) and the denizens of Blandings Castle (1915–1969, or 54 years).
Now this source differs slightly from the data we have gleaned about the other characters, but the long and the short of it is that Wodehouse wrote about Ukridge from 1906 to 1966, a span of 60 years, at the very least matching Emsworth.
So there you go.
John Varley deserves mention. The first appearance of Anna Louise Bach was the short story Bagatelle in 1974 and her last appearance was in the novel Irontown Blues in 2018. That’s forty-four years.
Stephen King and Peter Straub will be releasing their third book about Jack Sawyer later this year, 42 years after his first appearance in The Talisman. It will reportedly somehow involve the Dark Tower mythos; a cameo by Roland would take him to 48 years.
And Father Callahan, who first appeared in Salem’s Lot (1975), shows up again in the Dark Tower series, including the “final” book in that series, The Dark Tower (2004), a span of 29 years.
George Smiley, a character created by John le Carre first appeared in his Call for the Dead in 1961, and popped up again in many subsequent novels, including being the main character in the Karla trilogy. His final appearance by le Carre was in Legacy of Spies, published 2017, for a total original author print run of 56 years. Just pipped by Wooster.
Smiley subsequently starred in Nick Harkaway’s Karla’s Choice in 2024. Harkaway is le Carre’s son, and to some vague extent his official literary successor for that fictional universe, so maybe has a slightly different status to just being a random subsequent author.
Since 40 years seems to be a bit of a watershed point where you get an honorable mention, I’ll also offer Ian Rankin’s Edinburgh policeman John Rebus. He first appeared in 1987, in a solid continuing real-time series, so should hit the 40 year mark next year, although is getting older and creakier with each outing. Probably will soon be channelling Ironside when he has to get a scooter onto the mean cobbled streets.
Was Tom Clancy still writing Jack Ryan novels at the time of his death? Seems to me he had already begun farming out story ideas to a number of ghost writers.
I see above that comic strip characters are a different subject, but I can’t help throwing out that Garry Trudeau has been writing Doonesbury for 56 years and still does a new Sunday strip. Since Wodehouse started writing about Ukridge at 25 and Trudeau started Doonesbury at 22 he might have a chance to hit 60 and beyond.
Jack Ryan novels are still coming out today. They alternate between Jack Ryan novels and Jack Ryan Jr. novels with new ones coming out about every six months. But to answer your question, I believe there is a point in the novel line where you can tell the “Tom Clancy and So-and-So” was less Clancy, more So-and-So. After he died, they stopped pretending he had written half the book and Tom Clancy was the brand with the actual author’s name in tiny print somewhere down below. The next Jack Ryan novel is called “Rules of Engagement” and comes out on May 19th, while Jack Ryan Jr. will be back in action on Sept 1st, with the fifteenth book in his series, “Pressure Depth”.
One of the hilarious things about the post-Clancy Ryanverse is that it intentionally has a hazy continuity. Jack Ryan became POTUS in 1993 at the end of Debt of Honor (although that book may have been set as late as 1999). He’s still POTUS today, with no attempt to explain his eternal Presidency. Similarly, John Clark is still talked about as a Vietnam vet but he’s also still showing up for work (although not getting into action scenes any longer, just administration) which is pretty good for a guy who has to be north of 80 years old now. But the Ryanverse take on this is “don’t worry about it” which is a bit of a shame because I think Clancy would have done other things with these characters rather than just keeping them frozen in time forever as action heroes.
Correcting myself. I forgot that Doonesbury with all the familiar early characters started as Bull Tales in the Yale Daily News on September 30, 1968. That puts him at 57 1/2 years and with a better chance that newspapers will still exist when year 60 rolls around.
Mostly Stephen King, I assume.
That seems like a safe assumption, although Straub’s name will be on the cover.
Nowhere near the record, of course, but I feel they should be mentioned:
Matthew Scudder, by Lawrence Block, 1976-2023 – 47 years
Bernie Rhodenbarr, by Lawrence Block, 1977-2022 – 45 years
Evan Tanner, by Lawrence Block, 1966-1998 – 32 years
Luis Mendoza, by Dell Shannon (Elizabeth Linington), 1960-1987 – 27 years
Vic Varallo, by Leslie Egan (Elizabeth Linington), 1962-1986 – 24 years
Ivor Maddox, by Elizabeth Linington, 1964-1986 – 22 years
I went to manga to look for info cause many of them have been at it for a long time. The oldest I could find written by the same author was:
Golgo 13, by Takao Saito, 1968-2021 (until his death) which is roughly 53 years.
Despite the original creator’s death the story is still ongoing.