Villains

I recently blogged in French about heroes and villains. Villains of all sorts, in all genres, are fascinating creatures. I don't like caricatures and ridiculous villains, it matters that they have good motivations (complex or simple, they have to be good), but in general I like them to be unambiguously evil. Like Dracula was in the original novel, or say Noah Cross in Chinatown. If they have to be believable, they need no excuse, let alone justifications, for their evil nature. Power, greed, cruelty, they should be in themselves strong enough motivations. In real life, badguys are often amoral, or have a twisted code of honour. Why should they be softer in fiction?

In horror fiction, my favourite villain is by far Dracula. When it comes to crime fiction, the choice is so wide I get lost. Maybe the original Blofeld from Bond's novels, if you consider James Bond novels as crime fiction. There is something bout his puritanism, his work ethics that just gives you the chill. As archetypes, I love to hate a good old evil mobster or wiseguy, or a femme fatale. Again, there are so many to choose from. My brothers and I created in our make believe games a handful of villains that were quite interesting. PJ had invented a sort of modernised Fantômas, named Le Squale (the Shark) and I once played Dracula (him again) one afternoon in September. And years later in Call of Cthulhu I had as a nemesis for the player characters a warlock named Nevill Byron, freely inspired by Joseph Curwen. He was more than a century old yet looked like in his forties and was making the good guy's life a misery.

But I wonder if my readers have favourite badguys and why.