Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, it's a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that at some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right?

It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream.

Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds.

Hello, some fictional characters won't leave their creators alone.

One book just isn't enough for them. Even if

they're pushed off the Reichenbach falls, they sometimes come back. Proust had his Marcel and

Isherwood his Christopher. John Updike had his rabbit, and so did Beatrix Potter. This program

Keralds three writers who've allowed the people they've invented to live beyond the pages of a single story.

Their three Pulitzer Prize winning American novelists. I'd call them great American novelists if the phrase wasn't quite so draining.

What they all have, I think, is a quality that some of those who are often raised to that category don't actually possess a generous view of people,

an intense interest in their passions and faults, and in two out of three cases at least,

a care for the state of their souls. All three will talk about their relationships with their

characters, the ones who refuse to remain within the boundaries of a single work.

So in the course of a single work.

So in the course of the next 45 minutes, you'll hear from Marilynne Robinson,

who spent over a decade conjuring the lives of a small group of characters in the Iowa town of Gilead,

who first appeared in the book of that name.

The third of this accidental trilogy is called Lila.

And you'll hear from Richard Ford, whose alter ego Frank Baskam has been a force in American fiction since he made his debut 28 years ago in the sports writer.

Bascombe has lived his life through a series of novels by Ford, and he now appears in a group of short stories called Let Me Be Frank, set on the Jersey Shore in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy.

And we'll begin with Jane Smiley, the author of A Thousand Acres, the King Lear story, relocated to a Midwestern farm.

Her new book, Some Luck, is consciously offered to us as the first installment of something called The Last Hundred Years trilogy, a story of the modern era, beginning on a homestead in Iowa,

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