Something a little different....
Our critics' choice of the 50 foulest fiends in literature Compiling a list of the 50 Greatest Villains in Literature, without too much recourse to comics and children's books, proved trickier than we'd imagined - but gosh it was fun. It's perhaps the nature of grown-up literature that it doesn't all that often have villains, in the sense of coal-black embodiments of the principle of evil. And even when it does, it's not always so easy to tell who they are. Is God the baddie, or Satan? Ahab, or the white whale?
Yet even writers as subtle as Vladimir Nabokov have spiced their work with a fiend or two. And here they are. We hope you'll furnish a few more we missed. These are the best of the worst: bloodsuckers, pederasts, cannibals, Old Etonians...the dastardliest dastards ever to have lashed damsel to track and waited for a through train. "Who's bad?" Michael Jackson asked. "They are," we can at last, with confidence, reply. SL 50 Helen Grayle/Velma Valento from Farewell, My Lovely, by Raymond Chandler Described as "a blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window", Helen Grayle is the most memorable of Raymond Chandler's femmes fatales. She leaves a trail of bloody victims in her wake as she tries to hide her past as flame-haired nightclub singer Velma Valento. SM 49 Steerpike from Titus Groan and Gormenghast, by Mervyn Peake The darkest shadow within the high gothic of Gormenghast, Steerpike advances from the castle's nightmarish kitchens to the highest social echelons, via murder. But he is also something of an anti-hero, a challenge to a calcified establishment - the original Angry Young Man? SMcK 48 Shere Khan from The Jungle Book stories, by Rudyard Kipling His name and character, if not his physical appearance or his species, are based on a Pashtun prince. And there is something refreshingly simple about his aims: to eat Mowgli. To this end he sows dissent among wolf pack (enough alone to get him down to the eighth circle of Dante's hell) and causes Mowgli all sorts of trouble. TC 47 Long John Silver from Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson The former sidekick of the pirate Captain Flint (for whom his parrot is named) may have one leg, but he is physically brave, likeable and a natural leader of men, especially after he kills one who won't join his mutiny. Switches sides whenever he can, and gets away in the end. AMcK 46 Moriarty from The Final Problem, by Arthur Conan Doyle Got a chair at one of our smaller universities after his work on the Binomial Theorem, but the criminal strain in his blood won out. The "Napoleon of Crime", motionless "like a spider at the centre of his web", until his fall in Switzerland, may be called James. Or that may be his brother. AMcK |
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