A lot of writers, maybe most of us, have characters that we love to play with. They might be heroes or villains, but we love to return to them again and again.

Mine is Butcher Crabtree, a character I created back in the early 2000s in DEATH AND TAXES, the first novel I wrote. It was the first of a series of books I wrote about Middletown, Indiana, my version of my hometown, Muncie, Indiana. That first book was about Jack Richmond, a newspaper reporter who investigates the death of the head of the local chamber of commerce and finds that the chamber chief was involved in shenanigans with some unsavory characters.

One of them was Butcher Crabtree, at the time a muscled and menacing, fire hydrant-shaped tough guy who was working as the bouncer at the Gilded Cage, the strip bar in Middletown. In his spare time, Butcher was up for committing murder on behalf of his bosses.

I’ve returned, in the past few years, to some of those characters. Reporter Jack Richmond was a novice newshound in 1984, the time period for my novel THAT OCTOBER, which was published just this past June.

Butcher is in that book, too, although in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-him cameo at a Halloween party. He’s referred to as “Uncle Butcher,” but it’s good old Butcher. Complete with his characteristic baseball bat.

(By the way, that’s not Butcher above, but it is Ernest Borgnine in the great 1973 thriller “Emperor of the North.” In that movie, Borgnine is a vindictive and murderous Depression Era-railroad guard. I didn’t have Borgnine in mind when I created Butcher, but at least in that movie, he’s a pretty good illustration of Butcher. George Kennedy is also a passable doppleganger.)

But Butcher isn’t just a tough guy. I’ve enjoyed casting him in a variety of roles, from the threatening old uncle in THAT OCTOBER to his role in my story “Rousting,” published just recently by Pistol Jim Press. In that one, Butcher is a racist sheriff’s deputy who pushes his luck too far.

Butcher also showed up in “The Devil’s Cut,” my story in HOOSIER NOIR 7. In that one, Butcher is once again a sheriff’s deputy and is again murderous.

Is Butcher ever a good guy? Well, in my book SEVEN ANGELS – winner of the 2021 Hugh Holton Award for Best Unpublished Novel from Mystery Writers of America Midwest – he’s a mentor figure for Travis King, a troubled young man trying to make sense of his violent life.

I’ve included Butcher in a couple of other stories, too, and those – like SEVEN ANGELS – might see the light of day sometime, as THAT OCTOBER has.

Butcher often meets his end in my stories. He did way back more than 20 years ago in DEATH AND TAXES and he has since.

I don’t mind that Butcher’s lives and deaths conflict and contradict and that he seems to move back and forth through time at my whim.

When you’ve got a fun character, you don’t want to let them go.