Literary criminals, caught on paper

E-mail this article

To:

Invalid email address

Add a personal message: Your e-mail:

Invalid email address

Sending your article

Your article has been sent.

The Believer asked the "forensic artist" Barbara Anderson to sketch eight literary criminals, working from descriptive details offered by their creators. In real criminal cases, observes The Believer's Joshua Cohen, it is amazing that sketch artists like Anderson "work from so little information": a few half-remembered glimpses from one shaken witness, perhaps. Likewise, novelists can be stinting with the details: "just a hint here, a shade there."

From such hints, Anderson drew up sketches of such notorious rogues as Dickens' Fagin, Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov, and Nabokov's Humbert Humbert, and also a few lesser-known bad guys, including Judge Holden, a rapist and murderer in Cormac McCarthy's Gothic-Faulknerian Western "Blood Meridian."

Raskolnikov: "He was, by the way, exceptionally handsome, above the average in height, slim, well-built, with beautiful dark eyes and dark brown hair … his face was pale and distorted."

Cormac McCarthy's Judge Holden: "… bald as a stone and he had no trace of beard and he had no brows to his eyes nor lashes to them … His face was serene and strangely childlike."

(Illustrations: Barbara Anderson)

• Facebook
• E-mail

E-mail this article
To:
Invalid E-mail address
Add a personal message:(80 character limit) Your E-mail:
Invalid E-mail address

Sending your article
Your article has been sent.