Just Desserts - McCall Smith style

Why is the writer of detective fiction put under such pressure to deal out just desserts to wrongdoers? The truth is that for many of us fiction is in some sense real and that what happens to fictional people is, in a curious way, happening in the real world.

This comes from an article by Alexander McCall Smith that was originally published in The Wall Street Journal, and then republished in the Weekend Australian. It makes very interesting reading. McCall Smith took up a suggestion by one reader that his character Isabel Dalhousie should have a relationship with one of the other characters, a male 14 years younger than her. Then rather predictably, another reader, at a book signing, told him it was a bad idea, after he had incorporated it in the next book.

I'm not sure how much notice writers normally take of their critics and readers, but certainly McCall Smith has made himself available and approachable in a number of ways. In the case of both 44 SCOTLAND STREET and CORDUROY MANSIONS, both published as serials in daily newspapers, he made a point of suggesting that readers could give him feedback and suggestions about characters and plot points.

Do you know of other authors who welcome this sort of reader participation?
I read a comment by an author recently when he said that a negative review had "scarred him for life".
Would you be game to tell an author face to face what he or she had got wrong? At a book signing?