Whom do you consider the most intelligent, diabolical, or frightening criminal you’ve encountered on the page, and why?
INTELLIGENT
This is a two-way tie for me. I’m not convinced many of us can agree on a definition of intelligence. We now know that there are different forms of intelligence. We know individuals who are book-smart and people-stupid; individuals, otherwise brilliant but would drown if they looked up at the sky when it rained. Then there is Intelligence as the ability to read between the lines, to think and gather thoughts before action, which implies a process and an acute awareness as opposed to impulse.
Cain, the first criminal in literature, chose to kill his brother.
My contestants are Professor Moriarty and Iago because they manipulate, and they worm their ways into the minds of others to do horrible things for them. They are masterminds. Their motivations are open to interpretation. As readers we marvel at them because it takes extraordinary talent to write intelligence.
DIABOLICAL
Patricia
Highsmith’s Ripley is possibly diabolical because he is prosaic and appears
harmless, which is exactly what makes him dangerous. His victims never see him
coming. However, I don’t think of Ripley as diabolical because, in my
mind, he is a case study of Envy. Cormac McCarthy did the opposite when he
created Judge Holden in Blood Meridan
and Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old
Men. They are physical manifestations, billboard signs of the diabolical for
the reader. Holden is seven-feet tall, an albino, and bald. Chigurh is an Angel
of Death—dig deep into
Biblical literature and you learn angels do not like human beings. Chigurh,
like God, reminds his victims they have Free Will; he always gives
them an opportunity to save themselves. Diabolical or sinister, you decide.
Behold, Pär Lagerkvist’s Piccoline in The Dwarf. While the story is an allegorical warning about the dangers of fascism, what I found profoundly disturbing about Piccoline is that he is both protected and disavowed, meaning he is tacitly accepted as a necessary evil for society and political leadership. Piccoline is truly monstrous. Also, most readers forget the court jester was untouchable. Think of The Fool in Shakespeare’s Lear. The jester speaks the truth.
Oh, and that opening line, “I am twenty-six inches tall…”
Frightening
I believe human beings have a primordial instinct to recognize danger. Evil is different, I suppose, because it is cloaked and seldom recognized until it is too late. There were those who saw Hitler for what he was, while others made excuses and then found themselves in the Lagers, or worse. History demonstrates time and time again that the most dangerous individuals are charismatic and charming. Think of some serial killers and almost all of the world’s tyrants and genocidal maniacs.
Which brings me to Hannibal Lecter, the creation of Thomas Harris in Red Dragon and Silence of the Lambs. Hannibal ‘The Cannibal’ Lecter is the worst possible adversary for law enforcement because he is an expert on human behavior and psychology. He is a psychiatrist. Readers may have forgotten that he is also surgeon. Anyone in the medical field will tell you that surgeons have distinctive personality traits: the God Complex that creates the joke that the MD stands for Medical Deity.
Hannibal is literate, cultured, and he ‘eats the rude.’ The first time Clarice Sterling meets him…((shudders)).
I have ignored many notable criminals in literature, but most of them are, to me, variations on Obsession. More horror than crime fiction. Melville’s Ahab is the granddad of obsession in Moby-Dick. Orwell’s Big Brother is obsessed with Power and maintaining it. Stoker’s Dracula is obsessed with immortality and conquest. Robert Bloch’s Norman Bates in Psycho has Mommy Issues. Stephen King’s Pennywise is Hell’s own harlequin and a deep dive into coulrophobia, our fear of clowns. Oyinkan Braithwaite’s Ayoola in My Sister the Serial Killer, Toni Morrison’s Sethe in Beloved, and Patrick Bateman in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho are sociological anatomies, of misogyny, slavery, and toxic masculinity.
Who on the page keeps you up at night and haunts your Imagination?
Let me know in the Comments.
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