He has become a dead hero called John Keel, who helped to organise the barricades, but was also a Watch captain at Cable Street. He is also concerned to prevent his own callow self as a lance-constable from getting killed, so that he may get back to the present and his child may be born. In Night Watch, Vimes finds himself - along with a peculiarly unpleasant criminal called Carcer - caught in a time-warp, back in his own early days as a Watchman, trying to change the course of a bloody revolution. He is married to Lady Sibyl Ramkin, a large lady who breeds swamp dragons, and is expecting his child. At the end of Jingo, one of the best of the novels, Vimes arrested a whole army and its blimpish commanders for disturbing the peace. But he has the sense - or innocence - to remain a simple guardsman, under Captain Samuel Vimes, who was, when we first met him, a drunken and despondent good cop, and has grown, in the Discworld series, to become commander and then Lord Vimes, keeping order with Carrot and the wily Patrician, or politician, who rules the city, Lord Vetinari. He is the lost heir to the throne of Ankh-Morpork, has the birthmark and sword to prove it, can control crowds by a kind of charisma, and turn marauding desert Dregs into football teams. Pratchett invented the City Watch of his squirming and insanitary metropolis Ankh-Morpork, he once said, so as to make heroes of the supernumerary guardsmen and extras who are present in most stories simply to be killed in droves to show how bad the bad characters are, before the hero deals out justice.Ĭorporal Carrot of the Watch is just such a hero - with a twist.

The device means that good characters can die without outrage, though I remember being shocked by the first death I encountered - that of an ordinary, brave dwarf in Men at Arms who, by normal fairy-story rights, should have survived to triumph over evil. These matter-of-fact deaths are curiously comforting - people shake themselves and stagger or stroll off in the direction of the horizon. They are met by Pratchett's personified Death - a skeleton with a scythe, an hourglass and a white horse called Binkie - who has organised himself to resemble what human beings think he is, is courteously inhuman, but has increasing bouts of oddly caring behaviour, prompted by his long association with our agitated species. When they do, they take time to realise what has happened. But unlike many creators of fantasy worlds he makes sure his readers know death is real, while at the same time finding ingenious devices to help us to accommodate that knowledge.

Like all good storytellers he writes against death, creating impossible escapes, thrilling dangers, the come-uppance of the wicked and so on.

Terry pratchett watch