Is Thomas Harcourt Dead?

Warning: Here Be Spoilers.

No, really. Spoilers. Stop here if you haven’t read The Girl With the Make-Believe Husband.

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He’s dead. Really. At least that was my full intention when I wrote TGWTMBH. (No fun acronyms here.) He was dead when plotted the book, and he was dead when I wrote it. And if I hadn’t meant for him to stay dead I would never have named him Thomas. (I don’t repeat hero names, and I do have a soft spot for Thomas Cavendish.) But…

I hadn’t anticipated how much readers would take to him. After all, he exists only the in brief snippets of the letters he writes to his sister. Also, I wrote those snippets after the book was almost completely finished, so to me he didn’t feel quite as integral to the story as he did for everyone else. (You felt his presence throughout the entire reading experience, whereas I got to know him only at the very end of the writing experience.)

But now I’m hearing from readers who tell me they are sure he’s still alive. After all, no one found a body. (This is where I gently point out that no one looked; it was a war zone and too dangerous.) I could tell you that I know where the body is buried. Because I do; I did a ton of research on the area, and I actually grew up close by. But if you didn’t believe that he was dead in the book, I don’t think anything I say here would convince you.

So is he dead? Well, I think so. I mean, he is unless I think of a semi-plausible reason he’s not. Which I haven’t.

Yet.