But you wouldn't vote for them, would you? by Catriona

Who do you consider the most intelligent, diabolical or frightening criminal you’ve encountered on the page and why?

Intelligent? Probably a master of heists, a fraud ninja or a tech wizard who dismantles something big. But that’s not scary and not very diabolical either: those guys must have to keep up to date with their admin, which gets in the way of visceral terror for me.

Diabolical? Satan. That was easy

But “frightening” is a great question. I’m going to try really hard to hold it down to three and make them three very different villains. 

Jack Havoc in Margery Allingham’s masterpiece, THE TIGER IN THE SMOKE, messes with your head something chronic. He’s rotten, venal, merciless, and utterly depraved but the horror comes from the fact that he’s portrayed through the eyes of his polar opposite, the manifestly good, honourable, kindly and wise Canon Avril, whose showdown with Havoc forms the denouement of the novel.

Jack thinks he’s got it all sussed out: steal, cheat, lie and win. (Remind you of anyone in the public eye?) He thinks anyone bound by integrity, like the Canon, is a fool, missing all kinds of tricks and asking to be had.

Canon Avril’s insight into and pity for Havoc’s twisted psyche is devastating. He tells Jack that he – Jack – is hurtling down a stairway that the Canon has spent his life gladly climbing. He notes that “fewer things delight you every day” and that therefore even if Havoc cons the world of all its treasures nothing will please him. “The man you are with when you’re alone is dying,” he says, reducing Jack to the kind of miserable, defiant sobbing familiar to anyone who’s ever dealt with a tired toddler.

“What’s happening here?” Jack wails. “What is this?”

"What’s happening is that you and I are passing on the stairs,” the Canon tells him. “Somewhere near the bottom.”

Havoc frightens me, mainly, because he’s an accurate portrayal of how un-grand evil is, how small and scared, how banal, how pedestrian. And, like I said, it fries your brain that you feel so sorry for him. 

My second good baddie is very different, although he too is far from grand and far from impressive. Brady Heartsfield in Stephen King’s MR MERCREDES trilogy is (SPOILERS AHEAD) a failure as an entrepreneur and as a human being, although as a supernaturally-assisted murdering pig, he’s got a high-scoring hand.

There’s a measure of pity for his childhood – which makes Carrie White’s mother look like Olivia Walton -  but he’s an easy man to despise. And it’s not even the sadism and sociopathy with which he kills the vulnerable unemployed at their most abject moment, or plots to bomb tween girls at a music concert . . . it’s more that he’s so relentlessly unpleasant in all the small ways too. He never speaks without a racial slur, a misogynistic side-swipe, or a spot of body-shaming. He just oozes a kind of resentful displeasure at other people for existing, like he’s such a beacon. (Remind you of anyone in the public eye?)

And finally, in this least-great hit parade, there’s my old “favourite” Victor Plessey, in Joy Fielding’s KISS MOMMY GOODBYE. He’s Donna’s husband, and a more gaslighting, coercively-controlling, passive-aggressive, abusive nightmare of a husband has never driven a fictional woman crazy so . . . satisfyingly (which makes me sound like quite the ghoul).

It’s the combination of certainty and wrongness, of bullying and self-pity, of exquisite sensitivity to incoming slights and blithe disregard of outgoing cruelty. (Remind you of anyone in the public eye?) He’s a terrific creation and Donna, in the novel, ends up in a pit of believable helplessness, without ever making you – well, me – ever roll our eyes and think she’s too stupid to live. That’s the trap that’s always waiting for us writers of psychological suspense and Joy Fielding never steps within a mile of it.

I need to read that novel again. And The Tiger in the Smoke. And Carrie. So many stories, so little lack of deadlines!

Tell you what: you read them for me. You won’t regret it,

Cx