If you’re going to live a lie, you better do it well. This applies as much to your characters as they do to real life, as one inept conman found.
As I’ve said before, writing is a form of lying and as such you need to maintain the suspension of disbelief, the big lie, or else people will see through it.
This means that if you create a character, all their actions have to be believeable – from their mannerisms, reactions, actions and speech. As Allan Debenham found to his cost.