Literary criminals, caught on paper
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."
(Illustrations: Barbara Anderson)
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Leon Neyfakh is the staff writer for Ideas. Amanda Katz is the deputy Ideas editor. Stephen Heuser is the Ideas editor.
Guest blogger Simon Waxman is Managing Editor of Boston Review and has written for WBUR, Alternet, McSweeney's, Jacobin, and others.
Guest blogger Elizabeth Manus is a writer living in New York City. She has been a book review editor at the Boston Phoenix, and a columnist for The New York Observer and Metro.
Guest blogger Sarah Laskow is a freelance writer and editor in New York City. She edits Smithsonian's SmartNews blog and has contributed to Salon, Good, The American Prospect, Bloomberg News, and other publications.
Guest blogger Joshua Glenn is a Boston-based writer, publisher, and freelance semiotician. He was the original Brainiac blogger, and is currently editor of the blog HiLobrow, publisher of a series of Radium Age science fiction novels, and co-author/co-editor of several books, including the story collection "Significant Objects" and the kids' field guide to life "Unbored."
Guest blogger Ruth Graham is a freelance journalist in New Hampshire, and a frequent Ideas contributor. She is a former features editor for the New York Sun, and has written for publications including Slate and the Wall Street Journal.
Joshua Rothman is a graduate student and Teaching Fellow in the Harvard English department, and an Instructor in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. He teaches novels and political writing.
Raskolnikov is supposed to be somewhere around 24 years old.