A Paean to Mean

I am a sucker for lists and “best of” compilations, even if they can be somewhat annoying and … well, wrong. This weekend, Britain’s Daily Telegraph gang were at it again, assembling a rundown of what they think are the 50 über villains from literature. Naturally, crime-fiction bad guys feature heavily in the list.

The Telegraph remarks:

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.

Below are just a few of my own favorites from the list, with the Telegraph’s comments:

31. Tom Ripley from The Talented Mr. Ripley, by Patricia Highsmith
“So much more clever and, when he wants to be, charming than Dickie Greenleaf. Thinking he’d be much better at being rich, too, he goes on to prove it. In later books he knows about art, and bumping people off on trains.”

26. Cthulhu from The Call of Cthulhu, by H.P. Lovecraft
“Gigantic tentacular star-spawned Presence in Lovecraft’s baroque cosmogony, sleeping in a sunken, ‘non-Euclidean’ city until the time comes for it to swallow the world’s soul. Frequently evoked in barbaric, indecipherable language, although some people quite like Lovecraft’s prose. Gloriously, you can now buy a T-shirt reading: ‘What part of ‘ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn’ don’t you understand?’”

23. The Joker from Batman, by Bob Kane, Bill Finger, and Jenny Robinson
“Batman’s arch-nemesis, this pointy-chinned, green-haired loony never stays in Arkham Asylum for long. Nope. He’s soon back out there wreaking murderous, purple-suited havoc on the innocent populace of Gotham. Resistant to psychotherapy.”

22. Ernst Stavro Blofeld from the James Bond novels, by Ian Fleming
“Hijacker of nuclear missiles. Deranged overseer of a Japanese Garden of Death. 007’s arch nemesis is after not just money, but social advancement. He claims to be a count. Who could disagree? Top style tips: in the Alps, he wears green contact lenses, to lessen, he claims, the glare from the snow.”

14. Hannibal Lecter from Red Dragon, by Thomas Harris
“A veritable aristocrat of anthropophagy, Harris’s cracked psychiatrist is a cannibal stew of savagery and sophistication. He sautés the brains of the living. He pairs human liver with Amarone. He appreciates opera. But if he’d only listened to Flanders and Swann he’d know that eating people is wrong.”

11. Pinkie Brown from Brighton Rock, by Graham Greene
“A teetotal 17-year-old Catholic who roams Brighton with a razor blade and a bottle of vitriol, Pinkie is the prototype of every stab-happy teenage thug, although one with a very Greene-ish concern for his immortal soul.”

The full collection of literary baddies--which also includes Arthur Conan Doyle’s Professor James Moriarty (#46) and Count Fosco from Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White (#33)--can be found here.