Literary magazine The Believer asked forensic artist Barbara Anderson to sketch eight literary criminals, working from descriptive details offered by their creators. From the hints left by the novelists, Anderson drew sketches of such characters as Dickens’ Fagin, Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert, and Judge Holden, from Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.
Although the article is only available in the print edition, Boston Globe blog Braniac posted the sketch of Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov.
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.”
Does he look like you imagined? What criminal character would you most like to see recreated in a police sketch?
November 23rd, 2009 | 9:38 am
Looks like a young, sneering Reagan.
November 23rd, 2009 | 10:28 am
What criminal character would you most like to see recreated in a police sketch?
Count Fosco from Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White.
November 23rd, 2009 | 11:40 am
Has Barbara Anderson had a go at Hannibal Lecter? Anthony Hopkins doesn’t look like the person I imagined when reading “The Silence of the Lambs.”
November 23rd, 2009 | 2:13 pm
I don’t so much imagine characters as cast them. For Raskolnikov, I imagine a young Tom Courtenay.
November 23rd, 2009 | 2:45 pm
Looks like my janitor.
What????Oh my!
November 23rd, 2009 | 3:07 pm
[...] [...]
November 23rd, 2009 | 3:13 pm
I was going to suggest “The Unnamed” villain from Manzoni’s The Betrothed, but a sketch would ruin his anonymous menace.
November 23rd, 2009 | 4:21 pm
Erik from Phantom of the Opera.
November 23rd, 2009 | 4:22 pm
Also “Sunday” from The Man Who Was Thursday
and
Professor Moriarty. Scrooge, though not a criminal would also be interesting.
November 23rd, 2009 | 7:43 pm
The Professor in Conrad’s Secret Agent
November 23rd, 2009 | 7:59 pm
Am I the only one who thinks that sketch is NOT “exceptionally handsome”?
November 24th, 2009 | 6:50 pm
It looks like a mob enforcer, not an overwrought intellectual. So, no, I do not find this sketch convincing.
November 25th, 2009 | 9:13 am
[...] From where I sit, the description includes “handsome” the picture … not so much. [...]
November 25th, 2009 | 9:17 am
[...] From where I sit, the description includes “handsome” the picture … not so much. [...]
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