Ishmael.  Woodrow Call.  John Grady Cole.  Othello.

How do writers decide on the names of their characters?  I suppose everybody has a different approach.

For minor characters, I shoot for names that are fairly simple and ordinary.  But this approach has its risks.  I once had a character in an unpublished manuscript named "Ken Jennings," only to be told by a reader that a real person by that name had become famous playing a televised game show with great success (I, of course, didn't have a clue about this).  I changed his name to Mason Porter, since the character was a mathematician and one of my son's friends (a PhD in math) was so named.  (I asked for, and received, permission first).

I often fall back on the names of people I know, not because I am modeling the character on them so much as I know the name is relatively common.  Plus, I can spell it.

The name can't be too common, though.  One of my best friends is named "Bill Smith" and I have in fact based a character on him (again, in an unpublished manuscript) but I changed name of the character to "Will Smythe."  "Bill Smith" seems too much like an assumed name, even on a real guy.

In ARMADILLOS, two characters are named after actual people whose loved ones paid for that privilege at an auction sponsored to benefit the Houston Grand Opera.  In fact, the HGO has made more money from those naming rights than I've made from the book.  (Anything for the HGO.)

Jeremiah Spur came by his name because I was looking for something strong and Texas-sounding. I hit on the last name "Spur" because there was once a President of the University of Texas at Austin named Stephen Spur (this would have been in the late sixties). That's a pretty fair name for my protag, I think.

But no character-ever- will have a better name than "Hannibal Lecter."  Just part of the genius that is Thomas Harris, eh?