Two famous American authors, Stephen King and John Irving, begged famous British author JK Rowling to not kill Harry Potter in the final installment of the wildly popular series.
"My fingers are crossed for Harry," Irving said at a joint news conference before a charity reading by the three writers at New York's Radio City Music Hall.
The author of "The World According to Garp" and a string of other bestsellers said he and King felt like "warm-up bands" for Rowling, who is working on the seventh and last book in the Harry Potter series, and who has said two characters will die.
King, who shot to fame in 1974 with "Carrie," said he had confidence that Rowling would be "fair" to her hero.
"I don't want him to go over the Reichenbach Falls," King said in a reference to Arthur Conan Doyle's effort to kill off the character of fictional detective Sherlock Holmes. Pressure from fans eventually led Conan Doyle to resurrect Holmes, who was found in a later story to have survived.
Rowling, a Briton whose books have sold 300 million copies worldwide according to her publishers, said she was well into the process of writing the final book.
"I feel quite liberated," she said.
"I can resolve the story now and it's fun in a way it wasn't before because finally I've reached my resolution, and I think some people will loathe it and some people will love it, but that's how it should be."
"We're working toward the end I always planned but a couple of characters I expected to survive have died and one character got a reprieve," she said, declining to elaborate.
Asked about the wisdom of killing off fictional characters, Rowling said she didn't enjoy killing the major character who died in book six — for the sake of those who haven't read it yet she avoided naming the victim — but she said the conventions of the genre demanded the hero go on alone.
When asked why he didn't want Rowling to kill Potter, King replied, "Because I want to do it myself. I have 7,584 pages written already just this week. Potter will wish he'd never been born."
Ok, we made that last bit up. But it's a lot funnier that way.
